Ascher/Straus - MONICA'S CHRONICLE

Featured Work

Monica's Chronicle
Monica’s Chronicle, endless sketchbook drawn directly from life yet a model of another idea of fiction and the source of much of Ascher/Straus’s work (most obviously ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party), can be read here in installments as it’s being edited.

An excerpt from later in MONICA'S CHRONICLE that may be helpful in understanding how central it is to our lifetime of work, particularly for Sheila Ascher's life and work:

"Without knowing why — why exactly — Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself: at what point she (or it) realized that there is no story. That is: what's ordinarily meant by the word 'story' is itself a fiction. In reality, as soon as a story begins to get told a digression veers off from it. And, while the first digression from the original story is still being chronicled, another digression veers off from that. And so on. It's the natural way of the never-ending horizontal narration that Monica loves. Stories in other stories and other stories in that. Stories crossing uninvited through stories on their way to something else. Magnetic clustering of stories: 'the magnetic principle' of chronicling over panoramic duration. Events with at least one thing in common are attracted to one another in a material way, creating little clusters that Monica's always enjoyed cataloguing. What's seen and chronicled out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye. The true way stories exist, open to chance, interrupted by accident, porous, intruded on, distracted, oddly magnetic, attracted to what's ambient around them, the overheard and the-lives-of-others always leaking into what we thought was the story. What others lazily call 'realism' just another set of conventions that pays no attention to the impossibly multiple reality occurring around and through the tightly-focused groove it's trekking through. In the same way, it seems to Monica, what's celebrated as 'imagination' seems to have its gaze aimed above the infinite surface of the world.

"Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself (when? when exactly?) another question:

"Did the Chronicle take its present shape because Monica reached these conclusions? Or is the Chronicle simply the inevitable result of Monica's dedication to an impossible task/a surprising pleasure/a task and pleasure that became an addiction: the Chronicle the true narrative of her existence on Earth: what interests her, what she paid attention to in what crossed her path. At first, never without pen and paper and, later, never without her little tape recorders."

MONICA'S CHRONICLE

SOME NOTES ON MONICA'S CHRONICLE

(A SORT OF INTRODUCTION)

Technology has, thankfully, caught up with me: now there’s a way to “publish” the raw, unfiltered Monica’s Chronicle directly, without the shaping ideas of “book” or “publisher” intervening. I believe that the Chronicle is meant for this medium — and may be at least one artist’s revenge on the triumph of the democracy of chatter and commerce over what I take to be the original impulses of the “web”. Certainly not undertaken with the “web” or the “internet” in mind (I began it, in some form, in the mid ‘70’s), it needed a medium that didn’t exist.

Monica’s Chronicle is absolutely a daily activity that did not begin on purpose. I have some ideas about its roots and about some novels, notebooks, journals and so on that don’t at all resemble it yet may have set me on this path, but I’m not interested in talking about that here.

The Monica’s Chronicle that will begin here and that will be added to whenever pages of the original, single-spaced typewritten Chronicle from 1976, cramped and hard-to-read, have been reformatted so that we can edit them (lightly, to make them more intelligible and to untie some knots and tangles) will be rough and unfiltered. New pages will appear with no particular regularity (website will have to be checked to see if something fresh is there). This is the Chronicle as it was (and is still) written: rough and unfiltered in the sense that it is different from every published or gallery-displayed form derived from it, when editing was allowed to go so far as reshaping and re-organizing the Chronicle’s record of the flow of events over time for artistic purposes, but also in order to make what we believe is a necessary aesthetic argument for a radically different basis for fiction, even more so than in the sense that every work of art is an argument for itself and against everything else.

The two volumes of ABC STREET (Vol. 1, published by Green Integer in 2002, and HANK FOREST’S PARTY, forthcoming from Green Integer) are meant to explicitly raise questions about fiction and present themselves as models of something else.

The title of one of Pasternak’s early works translates as My Sister — Life and of course that could be the title of any writer’s or artist’s record of life, no matter how far away it is from ordinary journal, diary, memoir and the like.

My own lifework is, I think, more extreme and is more of an actual second life, a life lived again, a double, a twin to my life, than other records I know of.

My art has never been concerned with being artful. For me to stop on the path of chronicling to make compositions would be, of necessity, to interrupt the process that is ecstatically demanding in its own way.

I’ve never trusted memory, so I think I’ve written instead of remembering.

The two volumes of ABC STREET take place in 1977. I’ve elected to start this potentially endless process (chronicling is endless and now editing and publishing it here will be endless another time) in 1976. Obviously, some of the same “cast of characters” appear, some of the same locations, all encountered raw, before stepping onto a stage where all sorts of aesthetic and compositional issues come into play in terms of organizing what here, in its natural state, is a record that follows events as they occur, interruptions and digressions that are events in themselves, persistent returns to the interrupted event, new interruptions, returns and so on.

I love this process for itself and I wonder how many others find that the outer world is (always has been) their inner life.

For an early view of the Chronicle we’re going to put Dennis’s introduction (called “Writing with Sheila Ascher”) to what was then called “Sheila Ascher’s Chronicle/September 1976”, published in Zone #7 Spring/Summer 1981, on our website.

PARTIAL AND EXPANDABLE CAST OF CHARACTERS

(TOGETHER WITH THE PLACE OF EACH IN THE GALAXY OF ASCHER/STRAUS FICTION)

Agnes                                           (aka Gloria)

Abebi Ahwesh

Melissa Aiello

Ralph Aiello

Alan & Alana

Alexi                                              (Hank Forest’s Party)

Alyosha

André                                              (ABC Street)

Andy                                            (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party)

Anne Marie

Arlington sisters

Eunice Arlington

Wanda Baer                                    (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Bah-Wah                                         (ABC Street)

Dr. Beechnut                                    (ABC Street)

Betty                                            (Hank Forest’s Party)

Blanche                                         (Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-west)

Hap (“Happy”) Huntington Blank        (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Leonora Blume

Brad

Daisy Brennan                                (Hank Forest’s Party)

Ernie Brennan

Margaret Brennan                            (Hank Forest’s Party)

Brownie

Margo Burger

Barry Callaghan

Carla Ray Carlson                           (aka Carla Carlson, Carlita Carlson)

Cassia

Cathy Castle                                 (ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party)

Debby Castle                               (ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party)

Patrick Castle

Scarlet Castle                                 (Hank Forest’s Party)

Cecelia/Nicki (possibly the ex-wife of Alexis Ilinopoulos)

The "Clock"                                   (aka "Clockface")

Babette Coffin                                (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Dean Coffin

Greg Coffin                                     (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Johanna (“Jojo”) Coffin                   (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Joshua Coffin                                 (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Lena Coffin                                    (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Rosamond Coffin (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

John Corcoran                             (Hank Forest’s Party)

Pat Corcoran                                (Hank Forest’s Party)

Philip Corcoran                            (Hank Forest’s Party)

Timothy Corcoran                         (Hank Forest’s Party)

Cristalene                                   (Wanda Baer's French friend)

Donald Crosley                            (aka Alan Ryder)   (Hank Forest’s Party)

Donald Crosley Sr.                     (Hank Forest’s Party)

Kate Crosley                             (Hank Forest’s Party)

Polly Cryer (Frederique Furneaux's lover and former student)

Janey Czorny                             (Pat Czorny's sister)

Pat Czorny                                  (ABC Street)

Dalia

David                                           (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Dr. DaVinci                                  (ABC Street)

Phil Demise (GEGENSCHEIN VAUDEVILLE PLACENTER NYC)

Dominique (Wanda Baer's Estonian friend Imbi Kulla's lover)

Dorothy Dorm

Kevin Douglas

Janet Dumas (Kitty's elementary-and-high-school friend/David's college friend)

Dr. Dumbo

Alana Eagleton (Monica's childhood acquaintance)

Ellen Grace (Monica's childhood friend)

Elliot (Ellen Grace's ex-husband)

Aunt Em

Fabien

Fat Agnes

Father-to-the-west                      (Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-west Blanche's husband)

Andy Forest                                 (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Grete Forest                                (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Hank Forest (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Frederique Furneaux                                 (ABC Street)

Brenda Garvey

Colleen Garvey

Elizabeth Garvey

Ellen Garvey                                  (Hank Forest’s Party)

Jill Garvey

Patty (“Twiggy”) Garvey

Rebecca Geiger                             (Hank Forest’s Party)

Georgia                                        (aka Lynn) (ABC Street)

Gilbert Juanito Goodman

Graham                                        (Hank Forest’s Party)

Donald Green                              (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street)

Enos Greengrass                         (Hank Forest’s Party)

Leslie Greengrass

Sylvia Greengrass                        (Hank Forest’s Party)

Grendel                                         (ABC Street)

Lon Gurion                                   (Hank Forest’s Party)

Jerry H.

Reggy H.

Hatima/Salimah/Jean-Claude (Wanda Baer's friend Dominique's "half-Tunisian/half-French" ex-lover)

Janey Hedges (ABC Street)

Peter Hedges

Helene

Fayette Hickox

Ann Sue Hirshorn (Pa. curator of "Beyond the Page" exhibition)

Nelson Howe

Dominick Ianni

Alexis Ilinopoulos

Iris & Amy (two of Pat Corcoran's nieces)

Isaac (Ellen Grace's older sister Valerie's husband)

James (Ellen Grace's current husband)

Janine (Laurel Lenehan's "snake-in-the-grass" friend)

Nancy Jaye

Jill (ABC Street)

another Jill (Ellen Grace's annoying, sex-addicted highschool friend)

Cousin Jo Ellen

Rudi Jolley (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street)

Josie (Minna W.'s next door neighbor-to-the-north)

Dr. Kaboolian (Hank Forest’s Party)

Karla (Margaret Brennan's friend Wendy's older daughter) (Hank Forest's Party)

Kim (Double/Profile)

Kitty (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Klaus

Bill Kropotkin

Jimmy Kropotkin (aka "Jimmy X")

Imbi Kulla                                   (Wanda Baer's "Estonian friend")

Cindy Kurtz                                  (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Harriet Kurtz                                 (ABC Street)

Libby Kurtz                                  (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Oscar Kurtz                                (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Billy Leary                                  (Red Moon/Red Lake)

Erin Leary

Pam Leary                                  (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street)

Susie Leary                                  (Red Moon/Red Lake)

Ted Leary                                  (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street)

Ambrose Lenehan Jr.

Ambrose Lenehan Sr.                    (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party)

Finnley Lenehan

Laurel Lenehan

Nora Lenehan                                (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party)

Ryan Lenehan

Madeleine LePlace (Wanda Baer's "French friend")

Larry Lille

Fern Lillienthal ("not-very-important" someone introduced to Monica by Thea)

Tina (Martina) Lima (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Tony (“Lima Bean”) Lima (Hank Forest’s Party)

Audrey Liman

Minnie Liman

Riley Liman

Tommy Liman

Vicky Liman

Cousin Linda

Linda (childhood friend of Monica's childhood friend, Ellen Grace)

Linda's mother

Linette (ABC Street)

Lizzy, April, Holly and Sabrina

Lorelle

Lou the rolypoly mailman

Lowell (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Luisa                                         (singer with Greg & Andy's band)

Caroline M.

Malcolm

Norma Maloney

Matty Maple

Margo                                        (ABC Street)

Marsha                                      (ABC Street)

Matty

May

Allison Meehan                            (Hank Forest’s Party)

Melody

Mikki                                          (ABC Street)

MaryAnn “Macaroni” Monahan

Nadja                                        (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party)

Naomi (Valerie's husband Isaac's beloved older sister)

Natasha (Margaret Brennan's friend Wendy's younger daughter) (Hank Forest's Party)

Nils (Annie Rosenwasser's Danish husband)

Nina

Chesney Philmont ("the famous feminist author")

Ray Pierotti

Jordan Pike

George Plimpton

Peggy Prince

Puff

Al Quinlan

Peggy Quinlan

Sonia Raiziss

Al Regan

Becky Regan

Fionnuala Regan                           (Red Moon/Red Lake)

Joan Regan                                  (Red Moon/Red Lake)

Matthew Regan

Regan Family                                (Hank Forest’s Party)

JoAnne Renard                              (ABC Street)

Mildred Renard                              (ABC Street)

Nicole Renard                                (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Ralph Waldo Rice

Leo Romero                                   (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Lily Romero                                    (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Norma Rosenkranz

Annie Rosenwasser

Fred Rosenwasser

Naomi Rosenwasser

Warren Rosenwasser

Rae Ryan (Red Moon/Red Lake and Hank Forest’s Party)

Sabine (Wanda Baer's other French friend/Valentina's ex-lover)

Nora Salerno (ABC Street and as "Nora Woolsey" in Red Moon/Red Lake)

Sandra

Allison Savas (Hank Forest’s Party)

Jacky Savas (Hank Forest’s Party)

Amanda Schiller

Sissy (Ellen Grace's niece and friend)

The Sloths (Hank Forest’s Party)

Sonia

Nancy St. Cloud (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Sylvia (friend of Monica's childhood friend, Ellen Grace)

Al Szarka (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Ted

Thea (Monica's friend and former pupil)

Thelma & Wilma

Themis (aka Spylianos) (Letter to an Unknown Woman and Hank Forest’s Party)

Third Agnes (aka Agnes Lavin, aka Agnes Washburn)

Artie Tilden

Tristan (ABC Street)

Twins Twinning

"Ugo" (Hugues)

Valentina (Wanda Baer's Italian friend/Sabine's ex-lover)

Valerie (Ellen Grace's older sister)

Sid Van (protegé of Edgar Zacharias)

Cousin Vince

"W" the landlord

Adele W.

Edgar W.

Ellie W.

Minna W.

Billy Wall

Wally                                               (Lenehans' mutt)

Hank Wattle                                    (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Nancy Wattle                                    (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

? Wattle                                          (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Willy Wattle                                    (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Wendy (Hank Forest’s Party)

Yvonne Wilding                                (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party)

Marian Woolsey (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party)

Amy X

Chloris X

Holly X                                            (Amy X's daughter/niece of Leila, Nelly & Philida X)

Jimmy X                                          (aka "Jimmy Kropotkin")

Leila X                                             (aka Laura X, Gloria) (Double/Profile and The Menaced Assassin )

Ma X

Nelly X

Philida (“Phil”) X

Xylon

Cousin Yma (Hank Forest’s Party)

Mrs. Z.

Edgar Zacharias

Zappo (Sonia's husband)

MONICA'S CHRONICLE

JANUARY 1976

January 1, 1976: snow on the ground at 7 a.m. after a day and a night of rain and deep puddles. Snow is not thick. Sun shining on snow at 7 and sky a bluewhite snowfield. A few wisps of white linger in the blueblack ink on grey bond notepaper.

Since David’s been working on a snow narrative it’s snowed often.

Sitting outside: melting snow, red ink on grey bond, sounds of water, burning red hedges. Moisture, not colder temperatures, the key to burning.

January 2. Out at 9. Another clear, cold day, colder than yesterday. Puddles are ice closed up. Nothing is dripping, bushes burn, sky is perfect in the distance. White the beginning of blue. Sitting outside indexing the Chronicle.

Nora Lenehan and Ambrose Jr. are working in the same bar. He’s a bartender, she’s a musician. She and Ambrose Sr. were in the hospital together. Nora had polyps removed from her vocal chords. Kevin Douglas was getting beaten up outside of Sullivan’s by some twenty-year-olds, Lenehan Sr. intervened and landed in the hospital.

Kate Crosley goes up the block to Nora’s.

A series of small clouds.

Water melting into ground.

Silvery puddles, brown light, scraping of Sylvia Greengrass’s shovel as she slides water out of driveway.

Lily Romero’s hair is 1/2 brown 1/2 blonde.

Greg Coffin can’t start his car. Andy Forest tries to help, but can’t.

Brownish cast to things as the day fades.

Early morning: fresh snow on car tops and shadows of thin branches swaying.

By afternoon snow has melted off car tops.

Light still falling as day fades in the spruce tree, whose bare branches look like icicles.

Lowell’s friend Elliot had an awful asthma attack after hearing his medical board scores. Thought about what it would be like to stop breathing and the next thing he knew he was in a hospital. It seems he was unconscious for three days and now he can’t sleep more than four hours at a time. He wakes with a start and can’t breath.

A greenish cast to light falling on snow, on flower pot, on arm of Monica’s brown mouton, on moist pine needles. Mossy green edge of the flower pot is everywhere.

On Sunday January 4 these things seem related: a sickle moon, cold air and sharp wind. Notes on Sunday that on Saturday January 3 it was raining when David went down to get the mail. Envelope from the Paris Review mailed Friday, January 2, 1976. First mail of ’76. “Dear Ascher/Straus, George Plimpton and I are most intrigued with The Blue Hangar installation you did at Charlotte Moorman’s extravaganza and would like to discuss it with you with a view to a possible portfolio with photographs and some discussion of your intentions and the genesis of the work.

“I wonder if you might give a call soon (from a haywire half-hour with what purport to be operators in Queens, I have concluded that you are uncallable) so we might have lunch and talk about Blue Hangar. Best wishes, Fayette Hickox Contributing Editor. P.S. we are delighted to have Between Two Walls appear in our pages. It looks great!”

Pat Czorny is in the hospital: miscarried, lost her child.

Three months pregnant, she also hurt her back, so wont be working. Her lover Linette doesn’t live with Pat, she lives with Pat’s sister on ABC Street.

Typing the handwritten January Chronicle on the porch on June 12: “just before going downstairs bamboo curtains golden with light. Leaves of Regans' tree moving in blue light. Typing in cool breezes, leaves can’t contain their light. One of those cleansed days that follow thunderstorms.”

At around 10 p.m. on January 5 Monica is outside looking at the sickle moon. Early in the morning on January 6 she’s outside in sunlight.

Call George Plimpton: lunch at his house for a taped interview about the Space Novel.

Sherry drives by with a man.

On January 6 or 7 (date not noted) Monica is in MOMA. Traces of snow along museum’s ridges of grey marble.

Sunlight on a building around 4:30. Pink opening in grey. A spring day in winter is better than spring in spring.

Familiar figure of “the poet” standing impatiently near his favorite table, occupied by an old woman writing. He’s been watching her writing for an hour. “Poet” in green chinos and charcoal grey sweater over grey and white striped shirt. Under his left arm a large tear in the charcoal wool of the sweater.

Steely grey, thick and wavy hair. His angry stare doesn’t make the old woman look up.

Green ink on white bond as vivid as magic marker.

Raining all day. In the morning Monica, walking on Coast Boulevard, sees Lena Coffin leaving for the busstop to get Johanna. At noon Nelly (one of the vague X family women) and son Jimmy walk north on ABC Street from boardwalk toward Boulevard.

Later David goes down to write in Monica’s father Alyosha’s car, borrowed and parked on ABC Street. As he opens the car door Monica (from porch or window) sees David wave to Nelly X who’s leaving Lena’s. A car stops in front of Lena’s house and lets children off. Monica begins to think about all the little events that may connect to Johanna’s birthday.

On January 7 blue ink looks like magic marker.

At 8:30 in the morning Monica is awake and chronicling an Arlington sister (the one who works). Arlingtons' door is ajar: too cold to stand outside, though sun is on their side of their street. Working Arlington sister stays outside for no more than ten seconds, then can be seen in the door opening, looking out.

Monica notes that she hasn’t seen (recorded) any of the Arlington sisters since the working Arlington sister appeared in the October Chronicle (typed two days ago).

Sound of human voices belongs to Twins Twinning (pair of men of undetermined age, like wooden nutcrackers in someone’s discarded brown or grey suits) Monica’s been chronicling for years, never one alone, always two together, one always more raspingly loud and audible than the other and always in the middle of an endless, bitter conversation.

I felt better the time I was in the hospital than I do now when I’m supposed to be healthy.

Lying around here?

Bums!

That’s what they are.

They don’t work!

Bums?

Carrion!

Human carrion. . . .

Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding are in good spirits.

Pat and blonde-blonde little Timothy Corcoran come out the front porch door of their groundfloor apartment and leave.

Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle comes out with little waggle-headed Hank and brother Willy: must be a school trip.

Working Arlington sister closes her door: her lift has arrived.

Green ink, jetties white with frost.

On Sunday January 4 Wanda Baer picks up Monica and David in Monica’s brother Lowell’s car and they drive into Manhattan in falling snow to see Bunuel’s Daughter of Deception in MOMA.

Spend the afternoon looking at Rothkos before the film. Monumental red, brown and black canvases seem meant to inspire awe and it’s hard to get around that one sensation. There are smaller, numbered Rothko canvases and the numbers imply a sequence and the sequence implies relationships between what precedes and what follows that Monica finds interesting.

Tries to go outside, but day is bitter. Back into MOMA with no desire to look at another painting after Rothko yet wandering the galleries.

Discovers a Cezanne painting neither she nor David had seen before, “Melting Snow — Fontainebleau”. David, who’s been working on a snow narrative, stays in front of it for a long time and is affected by it profoundly. (As long as he’s been working on the snow narrative, days have been filled with snow.)

At 7 p.m., after the film, there’s very little snow left. Drive down to Oh Ho So in the rain. Waiting for a table with Wanda and David, Monica has a chance to think (not for the first time) about how the nothing-to-do of waiting is an opportunity. Window looks out on the street and cold rain; large mirror behind the bar provides another sort of opportunity; red brick wall; brilliant blue of jukebox; young women in boots, furs, bright-colored South American sweater-coats.

Monica, David and Wanda Baer dine on stuffed crab shells, roast plum duckling, stuffed hot and sweet peppers with garlic sauce.

The drive back home is stressful for Wanda: driving through snow (laid down earlier on road or has it picked up again?) is difficult for her and awakens her sense of incompetence.

That night (Monica notes later) Wanda’s sleep is violent: “a violent night’s sleep” is how she puts it: covers on the floor, sheets tangled, almost knotted. Never happened to her before.

Typing her January notes in June it isn’t always clear to Monica what the order of days is. For example: notes seem to say that at 10:30 on the morning of January 10 Nelly X calls and says she’d like to come by later and chat: Jimmy is gone for the day on a school trip (same one as or different one from the one the Wattle boys went on?) and she’s free.

And later: on January 10 Monica is sitting outside: an icy day, but with less wind than yesterday.

Barely possible to write; pen is cold, paper brittle.

Scratching the surface; white paper is icy, ink black.

Later, Monica walks to the beach: all exposed surfaces have a thick layer of ice that could also be snow. Ink-black jetties are white. Snow on black bark of trees and roofs, dazzling white or silver-grey. Green of the ocean is peculiar: easier to say what it’s not than what it is: not icy, warm, vibrant, electric, forest or leaf: surprisingly hot sunlight is cutting the waves at an angle, filling the green undersides with yellow light that makes green un-namable.

Days later Monica still finds herself thinking about the numbered series of small Rothko paintings. One painting was all about yellow, invaded by green at the edges, green invaded by yellow from the center. Yellow swims out of the middle of the green, surrounds it, heightens it, makes it greener. Thinking about Rothko leads to thinking about warm yellow and wondering whether there’s a green that always exudes yellow warmth. Leads also of course to thinking again about the green undersides of waves with yellow in them: yellow is fragile (have to catch it quickly), soon becomes ashgreen, loses its glowing warmth.

Ten degrees on January 10.

Red barge on the horizon.

White-on-black jetties.

Days spent under the spell of Cezanne’s melting snow and Rothko’s yellow canvas.

Discovery of tea: since snow began to fall (and since David started to work on a narrative about snow) Monica has been sipping tea: tea’s lightness and fragrance (the same thing?) like smoking a solitary cigarette.

Red sun burning through violet clouds (at what hour of what day?).

Timothy Corcoran crosses the street, slipping and sliding, holding a small plastic bag. He’s coming from Nancy Wattle’s with three aspirins for his mother. Says that she’s sick, but doesn’t seem to have a cold. His father has a bad cold; his mother’s illness is more indefinable. Monica remembers Pat telling her that she finds the time after Christmas dreary. Cold weather and nothing to look forward to. She loves summer. Makes Monica realize that she's been enjoying winter.

Rothko again or still with her: the importance of grey; painting out of its frame; every inch of canvas is used around the sides. Room frames the canvas. Therefore, what surrounds the canvas. . . ?

Timothy Corcoran walks to the busstop with his friend. Mother is sick again.

Monica hears Lena tell David that she’s going to be in a play January 13: same repertory group as in the summer: Thursday through Sunday, First Congregationalist Church, 2.50 admission.

Is it now Monica hears sounds of snow melting?

On the way to the dentist (by way of the boardwalk?) Monica runs into Nora Salerno and Megan Leary. (Notes to herself that the last time she ran into Nora Salerno she was also on her way to the dentist.) Nora Salerno has stories to tell: Nancy St. Cloud bought a pinball machine (25¢ to play). Knows this from Peggy Prince who goes to the flea market and sometimes picks up things for Nancy. Pam Leary is working for a few days, that’s why she (Nora) is taking care of Megan. Hasn’t seen Nancy since December 23. Nancy called to invite her and Peggy Prince to Christmas dinner.

How does Monica find out (is it from Nora Salerno on the boardwalk?) that Susie Leary (Ted Leary’s kid sister) knows Themis, tenant in the house where Monica lives on ABC Street and handsome Athenian short-order cook in the Cornucopia Diner. Could also know it from the tenant named Artie, who doesn’t get along with Themis (don’t like each other’s music). May be Artie who tells Monica that he sees Susie Leary in the Cornucopia Diner a lot.

On Saturday night, around ten, Monica returns home and opens the front door: a fashionable young woman with long blonde hair and a little too much makeup coming out is surprised to run into Monica and gives her a big hello. Don’t you know me? Don’t you know your cousin! Monica hasn’t seen Jo Ellen in a long time and doesn't recognize her. Thought she lived in another borough. . . . Story is that she met Themis on Christmas morning (4:30 a.m.) and somehow ended up in the 24 hour Cornucopia Diner. Her Italian boyfriend had disappointed her, she was lonely and depressed. . . so went bar hopping with a friend. Has stayed at Themis’ a few times. Tonight her parents are entertaining relatives, so . . . here she is. Says she really doesn’t know this neighborhood too well. . . . Themis comes downstairs and is dismayed to discover that Jo Ellen is Monica’s cousin. . . . Shakes his head at the unlikeliness of it . . . .

Jo Ellen is going to drive Themis to the diner, where she’ll hang out while he cooks.

Is it at night that Sylvia Greengrass, in chocolate brown coat and white wool hat with a pompom, is shoveling and scraping ice from the driveway of her little brick fortress across the way? Sound of her scraping shovel travels how far.

Joshua Coffin, looking as thin and sallow as his mother Lena (lost at least ten pounds), passes with Tommy Liman.

After a night (Wednesday) of rain and wind strong enough to shake Monica’s attic apartment, she’s working outside on a surprisingly warm January 14: wind isn’t fierce and is itself the clean smell it seems to bring.

Themis’ keys are in the mailbox, left there by Monica’s cousin Jo Ellen.

If a bird sings as if it were March, does that mean that a bit of March has actually flown here?

Sherry and an unknown man drive by in a red truck with blurred black letters painted over red side panels: “JONES DECORATING”.

Monica and David have a breakfast of croissants from Colette’s, orange marmalade (what brand?), brie cheese, David’s strong coffee and brewed tea for Monica.

In the morning another note about Wanda Baer: Wanda Baer looked awful last night and had a “splitting headache” after her session with Dr. DaVinci. Leaves Wanda drained of color and radiance.

Phone call from Caroline M: hasn’t given birth, but has gained fifty pounds.

Monica notes that her brother Lowell is now delivering babies.

A windy, beautifully sparkling day yesterday when leaving for the dentist.

Around four: puddles on brown earth and sidewalks. Dried red leaves are droplets in the smoky brown hedges, glittering like red berries.

The color red predominates, but there’s no way to know that at any given moment.

It was invisible before this year, even though it was dominant through 1975-76.

There are layers of visibility.

That is, what was invisible in 1975 is visible now only because of chronicling.

Chronicling creates visibility (converts invisibility) through day by day recording.

It was there, but without chronicling was it visible? Would it be visible now?

Why is it noted here that in February ’73 Monica paid attention to a particular February green and also a particular February white?

And in 1974-75 a winter’s rust: brown November, green November and also yellow: two distinct entities in November.

The last few nights the sound of the ocean has been peculiarly loud at one a.m. (That is, at one a.m. Monica became aware of the sound of the ocean.)

Moisture of yesterday is gone.

Day of wind, sharp shadows, sharp outlines. Cold and clear, dry and sparkling.

Cousin Linda will be getting chemotherapy, a side-effect of which is hair loss. Loss of her hair is particularly painful to Linda. Has always obsessed about her hair and washes it every day. Wears a baseball cap now to flatten it. Wants to take away every curl.

Page 8 (the next page) of January 1976 is missing. Chronicle will resume abruptly wherever page 9 begins.

Continues, not abruptly with page nine, but with page eight, lost for years and inexplicably found (“now”) in a basement storage room, in a torn cardboard carton with other cartons on top of an old dresser.

“I like Subida Al Cielo very much. I love the moment where nothing happens, like when the man says, ‘Give me a match.’ I’m very interested in that sort of thing. I’m fascinated by ‘Give me a match’ or ‘Do you want to eat?’ or ‘What’s the time?’ I was thinking of that sort of thing when I made Subida Al Cielo. . . .”

Luis Bunuel in an interview in “Cahier de Cinema,” #36, June 1954 (quoted in MOMA 8 1/2” x 11” sheets accompanying Bunuel films in January ’76).

Also quoted in the same MOMA 8 1/2” x 11” sheets: “The plot hinges on an outward and a return journey in a bus. When the film opens we are in a village which has no church (a happy village therefore) and where the inhabitants make a living from coconut palms. (‘A coconut palm,’ we are informed by the commentary, ‘is as profitable as a cow’. )”

After the film Monica and David walk from 53rd Street toward 8th and 46th and there’s no doubt that the hot Mexican sun and the hot busride through it have something to do with the iciness of midtown January winds. The tiny storefront Mexican restaurant (El Tenampa) restores some of the film’s warmth. They have a meal of nachos (crisp wafers topped with refried beans, covered with melting cheese, slivers of hot chile pepper on top). Three salsas, one green, one red, both spicy, red far hotter. Two bowls of gazpacho. Enchiladas Chapultapec (stuffed with chicken, covered with a spicy and creamy sauce that has red pepper in it, fried beans, rice and shredded cabbage on the side). Chiles Nogada (stuffed chile peppers): outside as sauce and/or inside as stuffing: vegetables pureed with cream sauce (sour cream?), cheese, ground walnuts, green sauce of chiles or green tomato. Pollo Mole Poblano (chicken with spicy unsweetened chocolate-chile sauce), fried beans and sliced onion. Drinks are the cool drinks of summer and the flavors are interesting and unfamiliar: an unusual kind of lemonade and then a creamy white drink (horchata) that may or may not be made of coconut milk (creamy, with a vanilla flavor and a lemon flavor and also the strong aroma and flavor of the nutmeg and cinnamon ground on top). Served icy to balance the spicy food and all of it fragrant and delicious. Monica’s notes say that the restaurant is decorated with coconut palms.

At 5:15 in Manhattan black winter light is beginning. Colder than what? Colder than ice blue and cold enough for rims of roofs to be red. There was cold sunlight, but not now.

Visit to Nicole Renard’s Washington Square apartment on what day? Nicole is thin, has lost her roundness, but complains of having gained six pounds. Dressed in denim jumper and (what color?) turtleneck. Lots of dirty teacups on the table. Ashtrays with cigarette butts. Nicole’s (or roommate Sandra’s) friends Nina, Brad and Ted are there, but Sandra is a few blocks away, taking care of a friend whose boyfriend has left her. Out of cigarettes.

At 10:30 Brad and Nina begin to rush around — trying to get to The Ballroom at eleven for the Chad Mitchell Trio. Brad gets busy ironing a soft, grey wool turtleneck sweater to go with his navy blue slacks. Uses a big throw-pillow as an ironing-board. Nina is wearing an ankle length skirt and a Spanish cape with big red roses. Who is Nina? Someone who studies dance with Nicole at the Martha Graham studio. She’ll be in town another two-and-a-half weeks, then back to San Francisco. Brad is from a small town five hundred miles north of Chicago (right now lives in Ottawa). Monica knows none of these people. Called Nicole Renard pretty much on the spur of the moment and was greeted with enthusiasm. “When did you get back? Come right over! Nina is here with Brad and a neighbor who lives a few blocks away!” At first (when Monica walked in) everyone looked alike: Nicole (all honey and caramel as always) and a group of look-alike blond/blonde people. Blond young man having his hair cut in the center of what might be the diningroom, hair falling on newspaper spread on the floor around him. Hair cutting continues in Nicole’s bedroom. Sandra’s room/bedroom is half the large diningroom/livingroom. Lots of plants, big floor and couch pillows (one of the ones used by Brad as an ironing-board), many more decorative objects than Nicole used to have when she lived with the Coffins. Says that she’s quitting her job in two weeks. Wants a job as a waitress two days a week. Dancing every night is exhausting. Sandra’s friend was involved with the Italian guy for four years and they never did anything but sleep together. That’s all they did, nothing else. So what is there to be so upset about? Thinks the truth is that Sandra is lonely and is making use of the situation with her friend to fill up space. Not as close to Sandra as she was. Tired of living with her, ready for her own apartment. Doesn’t like Sandra’s friends, for one thing. So much so that when they’re around she goes into her bedroom and closes the door. Also thinks that, because Sandra doesn’t have a boyfriend, her (Nicole’s) relationship with Ted makes Sandra uncomfortable. Ted is not like Sandra’s friends. Like her (Nicole), he’s serious about himself and has ambitions: studying day and night for his psych comprehensives at NYU where he’s a Ph.D. candidate.

Nicole and Ted were talking about death. Talking about death always makes her think of Jerry H. Monica may or may not know that she and Jerry H. were close: she knew herself and later found out for sure from Jerry’s grandmother that Jerry liked her a lot. She wasn’t with Jerry the night he died, but Billy was. Whole group was there, she thinks. Thinks Melody was there (Jerry and Melody were going to be married) and it may be because so many friends were there that there are so many versions of what happened. Someone said that Jerry tried to get out of the way of some people who were passing, leaned toward a parked car and immediately the aerial pierced his eye. (Supposedly they don’t make aerials that way any more.) What’s definitely true is that Billy Wall cracked up and went through hell, but she always felt that that version left a lot out. She’s also heard, for example: on the way to the hospital Billy Wall cradled Jerry on his legs. Not sure if it was the head, upper part of the body or what. And afterward someone told Billy Wall that Jerry should have been held differently. If he’d been held differently his lungs wouldn’t have become congested, pneumonia wouldn’t have developed and Jerry might have lived. He would have been a vegetable because his brain was already pierced by the aerial that went through the eye, but he might have survived. So that may be why Billy Wall cracked up. Mother was the closest to Jerry so she was the hardest hit. Father never got along with Jerry: he’s in an old age home now, but even then he had a heart condition — was twenty years older than the mother and had had a heart condition for years. So Jerry pretty much had to take over for his father at a young age and had a very hard life carrying that load. Younger brother Reggy was strange and doesn’t seem to play a role in anything.

From the story of Jerry H.’s death to the story of her relationship with Ted. Met Ted through her sister’s boyfriend. Ted is from Tennessee. Family was once wealthy, but no longer. What exactly happened is not told or not recorded, but Ted’s father thought of himself as a failure, always struggling to get back to some point where he remembers once having been. Ted still remembers a conversation he had with his father when he was twelve. Father said he didn’t marry until he was forty-four and was a virgin when he married. At the age of twelve Ted of course was wrestling with his own difficult and important issues, so he remembers asking: what about masturbation? And his father answered what’s that? Father also said that he didn’t remember anything that happened in his childhood. You mean, he remembers saying to his father, I’m going to forget all this? Forget everything that’s happening to me now? Remembers also that his older sister used to be very bright and that he was considered to be less bright. Now she’s twenty-seven and still living with their parents in Tennessee. When she visits him in New York she seems to get younger every day she’s here.

What else about Ted? Needs to move out: his roommate is crazy, passive and jealous. Resents the fact that he goes to Nicole’s to study. His goal: to go back home, live in Nashville, teach at Vanderbilt.

On January 19 Monica is sitting at the ocean in bright sunlight on one of the coldest days of the year. Five degrees on the beach, beautiful summer in Subida Al Cielo, sunlit and icy in the streets of Manhattan, twenty-five below in Montreal, forty-three degrees below on Saranac Lake (passed it not long ago and may pass it again in a week or two, giving an unfamiliar landscape a feeling of familiarity).

Cold pen is scratching on cold paper, making it hard to write. Boardwalk is empty, waves are super-audible, ocean shining to the degree that Monica can’t look in that direction. Writing in cold sunshine is pleasurable but not contemplative.

Man passes wrapped in red snorkel coat, walking dog in red sweater.

Finding page eight clarifies some things (restores absent detail), but puts the order of events in question. For example: did Monica visit Larry Lille once or twice in 1975-76? And, while other notes seem to suggest that the visit in January takes place on the afternoon or the evening Monica visits Nicole Renard in her Washington Square apartment, on page eight Monica and David are being driven by Wanda Baer to New Jersey to visit Larry Lille and afterwards have dinner together in Lin’s Garden in Chinatown. But how could she have been in Chinatown with David and Wanda Baer when she and David stayed late at Nicole’s. . . ? Unless (not noted anywhere) Wanda Baer dropped them off at Nicole’s, went somewhere with friends and later picked Monica and David up for a late meal in Lin’s Garden. . . .

On the same day as her visit to Nicole Renard or on another day Monica and David (Wanda Bear driving) visit Larry Lille in his university office in New Jersey (what town?). Drive along parkways and streets that for the most part have water in view: freighters, tankers, barges that Monica sees from a distance on the beach are oddly close up here. Cold air is blue and casts bluish overtones on every object; and cold and blue of air leaves grass dried out below.

Wanda Baer (no idea why) thought Larry Lille’s office was in the basement, but it’s not: it’s on the ninth floor with a wide, far-away view of the harbor, freighters restored to their distance. Larry (one of the editors of a journal of formally innovative writing Monica and David have published in regularly) is dressed in tan slacks and tan sweater over a long-sleeved shirt (color not noted) and has a big desk and swiveling office chair. Monica doesn’t know why she should be surprised, but she is, that Larry Lille seems involved in the New York art scene. Says he is and he isn’t. His involvement is complicated. For example: he doesn’t like to live anywhere too long. Has remained in New Jersey longer than he planned to and longer than he’s stayed anywhere else. Has lived in Maine, in Philadelphia, Chapel Hill, San Francisco, etc., and in all those places he performed and exhibited and became part of the scene, but there were also practical reasons for that. Has a talent for designing things for other artists and can make money from that. His own sculpture, what he cares about most, makes no money. Dropped out of the “performance art” scene: not the sort of pressure he likes (to produce and be ready by a certain date, to maintain contacts, etc.) Talk about artists, writers, editors they have in common and about Monica’s trip to Canada for an exhibit of experimental writing organized by a Canadian gallery and by Larry Lille’s more famous colleague, Edgar Zacharias, author of dozens of books, editor of a zillion anthologies and periodicals, etc. Larry is surprised by what Monica has to tell him about the behavior of the poet Marcel Ashbee in Canada (not his real name, renamed himself to link his writing method to art that influenced him). Larry had always thought of Marcel as a sort of guru. At parties he behaved like an Indian mystic: aloof, serene, severe, wrapped in a serape. . . . Not, as Monica says, nervous before his performance and obsessed with money. Edgar Zacharias on the other hand spent his time in a fury at the Canadian organizer for taking over the exhibit: dominated by Canadian artists, Edgar’s Americans made to play second fiddle. Larry Lille counters Monica’s surprising information with the fact that Edgar Zacharias (who he’s known forever) never has to worry about money. May sometimes act concerned about money, but has no need to be. Aside from the income from his dozens of books, particularly his Xenakis and Joseph Albers volumes, his lectures, performances and so on, there’s substantial wealth in his family. Edgar’s father is an important neurosurgeon who was once Barry Goldwater’s private physician. And then there’s the family’s heavy investment in imported beer. In a pinch, Edgar can use his father’s Gramercy Park brownstone or, if it gets too hot in Manhattan, he can always escape to the family compound in Montauk.

Larry Lille’s story couldn’t be more different. Father was a crane operator, mother an office worker. He left home before he was 16, never finished high school and has always been in debt (in debt for six grand now). A professor at this unimportant college in Jersey, but actually doesn’t teach. He’s in debt, but his eight-year-old daughter is rich. Wealth comes from her grandfather (Larry’s father-in-law). Disapproved of the marriage, but loves his granddaughter — so money will go straight to her.

At about one a.m. Monica, David and Wanda Baer are in Chinatown, in Lin’s Garden, eating snails in black bean sauce, Suey Kow soup, chow fun Yung Sing style and what else? At two a.m. Lin’s Garden is crowded. A man sits next to them, orders soup, refuses to pay for it, fights with the waiter. Says “this soup is alive!” and attacks it with his fork as if defending himself, then calms down enough to tell Monica his story: his name is Gilbert Juanito Goodman and he’s a short order cook (a dishwasher at the moment) from New Hampshire. He hates New York, but had to get away from New Hampshire. He’s sure Monica understands: family problems, as usual. Says he comes from a town of “twelve thousand letters”, but it’s all being torn down. Everything he remembers about that town is disappearing. They say that Gus’s Café is still there, but he doesn’t remember it as a “café”, he remembers a bar. Of course he never should have smoked what he smoked. They said it would make him crazy and it did.

When does Monica hurry to get a few lines down about Gilbert Juanito Goodman? That night when she gets home? Or the next morning. And when does she write: it’s so cold that the pen is laboring to write. Cold ink doesn’t want to flow onto brittle page. Can hear the scratch of its laboring. Also writes: when ink is flowing her blood is flowing. If the streets are an icy blue-white is that because when cold turns blue, blue turns white?

The hedges are startlingly sparse, spaces in them are wide, yet houses across other backyards are hidden by leaves. Smaller and larger white squares and sky as thick as snow. (Last night the moon was visible through venetian blinds.)

Sitting at the rear groundfloor bedroom window, overlooking the Salem Avenue backyard: bare January except for snow covering the ground and traces of green that show through the low hedges that separate Blanche’s backyard from the backyard of the Salem Avenue house where Monica sometimes house-sits. Green November light that pours through the tall hedges is gone in January. Fifteen degrees on what day?

Small pine in Blanche’s backyard carries a light that’s silvery and moist under blue sky, white clouds that are deceptively warm to the eye only (meant for a warmer day). Fragile branches of the little pine move in wind that’s the same as light.

Sun on white shingle = snow.

Snow covering green garage roof.

In early morning light Monica observes shadows of branches on snow, while branches themselves are no more than silver threads of light.

On what day does Monica make final arrangements to have lunch at George Plimpton’s upper Eastside duplex to discuss publication of THE BLUE HANGAR as an art portfolio? Date noted for lunch is Friday the 13th.

More about Monica’s visit to Nicole Renard.

Andy Forest gave Greg Coffin darts and dartboard for Christmas. Nicole gave Greg and Lena a beautiful ceramic salad bowl that Lena uses for bread instead of salad. And Lena gave Nicole a nonsensical 69¢ child’s toy. She’d rather have gotten a useful package of ponytail holders!

Lena called Nicole to tell her that she’s playing Donna Ana in a neighborhood production of Don Juan in Hell, but forgot to tell her that (because Nicole’s car is still registered out there) she (Lena) had gotten an important letter related to the accident Nicole’s car had been in. . . .

What else? Nicole visited her mother Mildred in New Mexico over Christmas, but for some reason Grete still hasn’t visited Nicole since she moved to Manhattan. Babette comes all the time and even JoAnne visits, but Grete and Andy will be in Manhattan to get one of Andy’s guitar strings fixed and then they run right back home. Think she doesn’t notice, but she does.

What else? Says that Sandra lacks discrimination: in choosing friends, for example, and in the endlessness of her conversations on the phone, the kind of endless conversations you had when you were twelve. Needs to get away from her. . . .

Free-floating bit of conversation with Mikki that arrives in January ’76 from where? Mikki says that, as Monica knows, Frederique can only talk about “issues”, not ever about herself. Well, now that she’s been invited to join the editorial staff of “Downtown Woman” they’ll have something to talk about again. She (Mikki) is not as close to Margo as she used to be and wonders if that has anything to do with the strength of her (Mikki’s) obsession with Marsha.

Monday, January 26, not a bit of snow left in the Salem Avenue backyard. Frozen snow has given way to puddles of silvery brown earth. Continue to work on an extended snow narrative, the one in which she and David are working out a formal way for the narrative to accumulate in units, as if on a horizontal plane, side by side, without progressing.

On Monday the 26th (or on the next day) even the silvery brown puddles are melting. No snow left to melt so what’s already melted is melting again. And the melting of everything is a reminder to Monica of last week’s (Thursday’s and Friday’s) bitter temperatures: cold wind made zero to five degrees feel like forty-five below and even in her warmest coat Monica couldn’t work outside as she loves to.

Bunuel’s El (seen in MOMA on what day in January) opens with a priest washing a young boy’s bare feet, then kissing them. A second man (a pillar of the church) is watching the priest washing and kissing the boy’s feet. Man’s gaze travels from boy’s feet to a woman’s shoes. Something in the shot (not noted here) makes it clear that the man is transfixed by the woman’s shoes, or her feet in them. Bunuel says that “The hero of El is a type that interests me as a beetle or a disease carrying fly does. I had no explicit intention of imitating Sade in my choice of elements, but it is quite possible that I did so unconsciously. It’s natural for me to tend to imagine and work out a situation from a Sadist or Sade-like point of view, rather than from, say a neo-realist or mystical one. I said to myself: what should the character use? A revolver? A knife? A chair? I ended up choosing the most disturbing objects. It’s as simple as that.” “It (El) is one of my favorites. . . I like it particularly because it is a true documentary on a pathological case. But all the minute documented exposition of the psychopathic progress of the character is improbable in the eyes of the ordinary public, who generally laugh during the screening of the film. This confirms my feeling that the traditional commercial cinema has cultivated a great fondness in the public for the conventional, the superficial, the false commonplaces of sentiment. I would have liked to suppress the melodramatic part which precedes the marriage of the hero and which is no more than an amorous intrigue between the girl he is to marry, her fiancé and the paranoiac himself. . . . The film’s final intention is humorous rather than anti-clerical. The character is certainly pathetic. I am touched by this man possessed by such jealousy, such solitude and interior anguish, such exterior violence. I studied him like an insect. . . .”

Snows on January 28 then clears. Days of rain, then snow, open for the first time into cold, exhilarating sunlight. Air is charged with this clearing. Monica, at home on ABC Street and working outside, feels it this way: if it were only a little bit warmer she would be up above in the charged air with the birds who’ve arrived without her noting it.

Pat Corcoran comes out on the front porch where Monica’s working to complain that her lights went off. Knows that they went off next door (at Lena’s?) also — only stayed off for a few minutes — but she saw Monica and wanted to complain to her anyway.

On January 30 Monica is working in the Salem Avenue backyard in pale sunlight. Return of winter light. Grey at the margins and pale in the center. Bah-Wah is with her and arguing with twin German Shepherds in another yard. Earth of lawns has dried to black. While in the Salem Avenue backyard Monica is reviewing her notes (or taking notes for the first time) on her visit to her young cousin Linda, home from the hospital for eight weeks. Found Linda terribly bloated, top-heavy and broken-out. Her mother wants her to drink nothing but real fruit juice, but Linda thirsts only for diet sodas and artificial fruit-flavored drinks.

Month ends with a copy of Monica’s El Tenampa receipt:

1 gambas $2.75
1 sopa $1.00
1 poblano $5.25
2 chapultapec $8.50
1 pipian $5.50
2 horchata 50¢
4 chocolate $2.00

FEBRUARY 1976

Missing pages one and two of February ’76 inexplicably found in cardboard carton in basement storage room with page eight of January, so re-discovered pages have to be edited into already-edited beginning of February.

Let’s see: On February 1 it’s forty-five degrees and raining. Later a bit of snow on moist earth (gone almost as it lands). Reflecting back on February 1 (how many days later?) Monica makes a couple of additions to the El Tenampa check or menu: “Pipian” (chicken in a green sauce made of, among other things, ground pumpkin seeds and chiles) and one flan (with a burnt sugar sauce exactly the same as the sauce on Monica’s favorite French crème caramel). Also added: a line drawn between sunlight on Mexican streets (Subida al Cielo), whiteness of coconut drink in El Tenampa and terrible coldness in Manhattan. Also: a note about the crowded sidewalks of the Theater District (busloads of out-of-towners leaving theaters). In front of a theater where a play that has something to do with Bessie Smith (Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith or something else?) is running a man is calling for a “Mrs. Bernard”. Calling and calling, with some urgency, “Mrs. Bernard!” But Mrs. Bernard, a very large black woman in a turban, is already seated in the very last seat in the darkness of the waiting bus. Monica is struck by the fact that she doesn’t answer the man who’s looking for her with some desperation. Lost in the mood of what she just experienced? (And how does Monica know that the woman in the bus is “Mrs. Bernard”?)

Rediscovered February page one tells Monica that she also saw Bunuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and La Fievre Monte a El Pao, subtitled “Los Ambiciosos” and apparently also known as “Republic of Sin” (with Gerard Philippe, Maria Felix and Jean Servais). MOMA’S 8 1/2” x 11” sheets quote Bunuel at length about Surrealism, but only some of it is of interest to Monica: “Surrealism was the great discovery of my youth. It remains the essence of what I do. It is all here (Bunuel taps his head). . . . I have not changed, the world has. . . . Only crypto-fascists pretend that they are ideologically free. . . . Man is never free but fights for what can never be. . . . I always followed my Surrealist principle: ‘the necessity of eating never excuses the prostitution of art’. . . .” Goes on to paraphrase Octavio Paz in this way: “if the white eyelid of the screen could reflect the light it possesses, the whole universe would jump. . . .”

Earlier (than what?) on February 1 sunlight through only the narrowest slits in drawn venetian blinds was so bright — so impossibly bright — it made both Monica’s head and eyes ache. (But only for an instant.)

Bunuel paraphrases Andre Breton: “The most admirable thing about the fantastic is that the fantastic does not exist. Everything is real.” Of course Bunuel’s paraphrase of Breton makes Monica think at once of what Dostoevsky said at least half-a-century earlier. Not exactly, but something like “The fantastic is the real”. No matter what Dostoevsky’s exact words or tone, Monica had always taken the statement seriously as a witty way of compressing his view of the relationship between life and art. What others may have taken as fantastic or extreme in Dostoevsky he undoubtedly saw as another kind of realism: realism in regard to aspects of reality simply not seen by others. And, Monica believes, wouldn’t any “realism” in art taken literally and carried to its logical extreme yield results that would be labeled “experimental”, even unrealistic?

February starts out softly and sweetly: moist backyard, soft earth. At about six a.m. Monica hears a loud thump and goes to investigate: it’s Bah-Wah pushing open the kitchen door (moving into the interior, away from violent rain and wind). Raining hard and blowing all night, but here on Salem Avenue Monica needs to get an early warning from Bah-Wah about what in her attic apartment on ABC Street she couldn’t help knowing about immediately. (Nothing there that even feels like an “interior” to retreat to: dormer windows, each half with six little panes in an old wood frame, right up against the world.)

Bah-Wah wakes Monica up to a blizzard. Looks out to see rain turn to snow. At ten a.m. Bah-Wah doesn’t want to go out but has to be walked. Wind so strong that the wood-frame-and-small-pane-of-glass cubicle (for some reason known as “the areaway”) that shields the front door is filling up with snow. Snow is also built up against the back door and filling the grid of the screen: blows straight into the pantry when Monica pulls the door open. Bah-Wah doesn’t want to venture out either way. Monica has to push and drag her and soon they’re out together between snow drifts changing shape and blowing from one street to the other, reforming in the air. Clouds are purple-black and thick, yet there’s a strange Arctic sunlight, snow crunching underfoot. This is a severe beauty impossible to stay in: the fairy tale that may be a nightmare and the other way around.

After reading over the “snow” narrative together last night there’s no way not to be conscious of the relationship between writing about snow — looking for a fresh way to tell a peculiarly snow-structured story — and maybe at the same time suggest a fresh approach to the structure of story-telling — a story built of units of equal weight with no necessary order except accumulation and their obligation to in some way relate to snow (or any other unifying idea or event) — which Monica and David have come to think of as a horizontal narration — and snow that’s been falling in January and February.

Hours after reading over the snow narrative (which will probably be called “Snow”) a blizzard sets in. Monica can’t help thinking also about all the snow that’s been accumulating in the Chronicle:

Let’s see:

Real snow of winter ’74

Chronicled snow of winter ’74

Real snow of winter ’75

Chronicled snow of winter ’75

David’s notes taken with the snow narrative in mind.

Individual and separate snows (that is, fresh snowfalls separated by periods of something other than snow and even by something that erases snow) that accumulate in the Chronicle as something connected. Another way: recorded at different points as separate and individual snows, yet in the panorama of the Chronicle they can be seen to intersect.

Also, different kinds of snow that have fallen now in the winter of ’75-76: first snow of the season on December 1, 1975 was soft (in the MOMA sculpture garden?); heavier snow driving to Kennedy Airport; snow that cancelled dentist’s appointment; and today’s blizzard (first school closings of the year?).

Out the back window the blizzard seems confined to the backyard: snow in neighbor’s small pine makes Monica think how thick with snow the tall Rhinebeck pine on her ABC Street front lawn must be! And snow in the low hedges bordering backyards to west and south.

Snow comes from snow, writing from writing.

Walking half-a-block today was painful. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds make ten degrees feel like thirty below and tonight Northwest winds are predicted to gust far higher (“high wind warning” and “travelers warning”: zero degrees and another fifty-miles-an-hour higher?).

Monica, David and Wanda Baer are having a late breakfast of David’s baked pancake, strawberry jam, brewed tea and strong coffee while watching Edmund Goulding’s That Certain Woman: Bette Davis married a gangster when she was fifteen-and-a-half (when and how we learn this not noted). Gangster is killed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, so Davis has to get a job. Before or after the gangster’s death (when and how also not noted) Davis falls in love with a rich young man (Henry Fonda) and they become engaged, but his father objects. Do they marry? Notes say the father (Donald Crisp) “interrupts the honeymoon”. Fonda fails to stand up to his father and Davis leaves, hoping he’ll come after her, but he doesn’t: he continues to knuckle under and (marriage apparently having been annulled) marries someone named “Flip”. Davis has gone back to work. Her boss, a married lawyer who’s in love with her (therefore encouraged her to marry Fonda) is the only one who knows she’s had a child (with Fonda but unknown to Fonda). Davis learns that Fonda and Flip are honeymooning in the south of France (what she does not noted). Their car crashes near Lyon. They survive, lie unconscious (how long?) in a hospital in France. Life continues. Lawyer becomes ill. Visits Davis in a delirium and warns her that Flip has hired a detective and she and the detective both know where she is and know about the child. Soon the newspapers publish stories about a “mystery child”. Is that how Fonda finds out about the child (or is it from Flip?). Fonda arrives, wanting to marry Davis (now that he knows that they have a child), and Fonda’s father arrives (Fonda first or father first?) with a court order for custody of the child. This time Fonda stands up to his father and sends him away. Lawyer (who was ill and delirious) dies and leaves Davis five hundred thousand dollars. Now Flip, in a wheelchair, pays Davis a secret visit: she’s only “half a wife”, loves Fonda too much to hold onto him. Wants him to marry Davis. Davis (not to be outdone) is so moved by Flip that she makes the ultimate sacrifice: gives her son to Fonda and Flip and vanishes.

Monica glances up from the small screen: frigid day in February is coating the windows with a burning yellow light and sheets of ice that have lacy starbursts built up out of crystals or hammered and exploded. Hard to see frozen yellow light also coating neighbor-to-the-west’s small pine or the starburst pattern in the snow covering the backyard’s cement walk.

Film resumes or continues or Monica re-enters it just by changing where she’s looking.

A reporter who’d become Bette Davis’ friend, looking for her for months, traveling “half the world”, finds her in Monte Carlo: sitting, dressed elegantly in frock and fancy hat, at a table overlooking a garden, wistfully regarding children playing outside. Ball bounces through window just before friendly reporter arrives and says “Flip is dead!” Fonda is on a transatlantic flight! She rushes to the phone. “You’re coming over?” are her (the film’s) last words. Absurd yet somehow touching.

On February 3 Monica and David are beginning to read over the narrative now called “Snow” in the Salem Avenue backyard.

While listening to Monica read David wants to know if Monica saw the shadows of the birds-in-branches. Yes, Monica says, (even while reading) she saw the shadows of birds in the shadows of branches in the blue snow.

A day of sunlight, yet snow is not melting. (Here and there a little patch that’s moist.)

Overnight there’s a thirty-six degree drop in temperature: rain turns to snow, blizzard conditions before dawn, airports closed.

On February 4 Monica steps out and sees a frozen street of light crossing Salem Avenue, snow on the ground everywhere. On the very same day Monica finds the air exhilarating: spring in the spaces that open: not everywhere, but in those spaces an exhilarating feeling “as if it were June”. An old man, walking very slowly in the snow with his cane, has no idea where he is. Monica borrows a car, drives him to where she assumes he lives (an old age home a few blocks away). Lost because of the way snow has re-drawn space?

A fat green bird in her neighbor’s hedges. Hedges have asparagus-shaped buds, dark at the core.

As the day wears on snow is disappearing, earth of the yard becomes moist and visible to Monica looking down at a shallow angle from the back window. From here, buds appear furry.

It’s reported that January ’76 was one of the coldest Januarys on record: the fourth coldest in the past fifty years, average temperature 27.5 degrees, 4.8 below normal. Also: the usual January thaw was shorter than normal (lasted only two days). On the 26th, when the temperature reached fifty-four, and on the 27th when it reached fifty-six, there was a record rainfall of 1.84 inches.

Pat Czorny has a pregnant friend staying with her in the attic apartment in the Salem Avenue house. Friend is eighteen but looks thirty or more. Born on welfare and still getting welfare, she’s applying for herself and the expected baby. All her sisters had children by the time they were sixteen. She waited until she was eighteen (a conscious decision because of her sisters?) to get pregnant. Pregnant girl’s mother worked all the time she was on welfare. Now Pat Czorny too is applying for welfare (for the first time?): links her miscarriage to a back injury in the hospital. So now she’s disabled, can’t work and owes two months rent. Pregnant friend is staying with Pat because she was paying thirty-five dollars a week for a tiny two room apartment with a shared bathroom and didn’t like living alone. (Helping pay Pat Czorny’s rent?) What else? Pat’s sister Janey is no longer living on ABC Street. Had to move because she was paying a hundred-and-seventy-five-a-month to live in a garage that was always flooded! Pat’s old girlfriend Linette’s boyfriend who used to work in the bank lost his job. Left his wife for Linette, but Linette is not well: might be liver trouble or might be kidney trouble, Pat’s not sure which — “never can be too sure with Linette, ‘cause she knows how to play the invalid game!”

Monica finds a correspondence between snow and shadow: rapidly melting, still visible only where there are shadows. Eye takes in the landscape, and Monica has to stop and think to see that in all cases shadow comes to snow’s aid. Bah-Wah plays with her ball in snow as in sand: digs a hole, drops the ball in, digs deeper to get the ball out, drops the ball in again; uses both powerful front paws to throw snow or sand backward and so on, until she gets bored.

On Thursday February 5 a card from Nelson Richardson of Coda: “Dear Monica and David, Cheri showed me your ideas about readings employing visual-verbal work and I wonder if I could see a photo of your Space Novel event or one realization of it, or something else you’ve done, for use in an article on visual poetry for Coda? Sincerely, Nelson Richardson.”

Seems logical to Monica to call Mikki to ask for Space Novel photographs (THE BLUE HANGAR, AS IT RETURNS and 12 SIMULTANEOUS SUNDAYS) because it’s her memory that Mikki had taken photographs at all three events. Others had taken photographs, but Mikki had taken several proof-sheets-worth and hers were bound to be the most professional. Also seems logical to Monica that getting credit in Coda would be pleasing to Mikki and might be useful in her effort to become a professional photographer, but, instead of welcoming the idea, it makes Mikki angry. Resents the implied criticism. What implied criticism? Says she hasn’t been in the darkroom for ages. She’s aware herself, without anyone reminding her, that she should have gone in, but she hasn’t. Has been busy working on her relationship with Marsha. But, Monica says, Mikki has made it clear that Marsha is young — a young twenty-one — with many dark problems. . . and that Mikki’s obsession with her also has a darkness to it. . . . Conversation ends in an argument.

A letter to Monica from Betty in Florida. Seems Betty had only been in Florida for a week when Kitty called to say she met someone. She’s been dating someone and it’s serious!

Monica also hears from Wanda Baer who bumped into Kitty on a Manhattan street: nothing about the new, serious person she’s dating, only that Kitty was wearing exactly the same hideous blue ski jacket that she (Wanda) used to wear!

Monica, in the black leather and molded plywood swivel chair (the “Eames” chair now found everywhere?) in the Salem Avenue house, is watching snow fall through the front windows. New snow. Snow without wind. Snow that gathers before Monday’s blizzard-like snow has had a chance to completely dissolve. Snow that’s thick on the ground by two p.m. Veil of snow. White snow that falls from grey skies. Continues to fall into the night (fog horn sounds through it and is also slow, thick and muted). Snows from one end of winter to the other.

On Friday February 6 in daylight, the lilac bush is thick with snow and it seems to Monica that the lilac buds, vivid against snow falling into continuous plane of snow, are the first green of the year.

Snow stays on the ground for days (four inches or so). Kept from melting by the cold. Winter Olympics on tv: sun shining on snow in the Austrian alps. (Before Monica was a chronicler she and David spent a summer in Innsbruck and Vienna.) Later in the day snow grows hard with cold yet sometimes a clump of it falls with a thud from the roof; while inside Monica enjoys a hot and spicy bowl — a beautiful silvery white but not snow-like — of Hot and Sour Fish Broth (from what Chinatown restaurant not noted).

On February 9, working in the Salem Avenue backyard, snow is melting but still thick in spots. Monica observes (hearing or seeing?) increased bird activity. (That is, enough activity for birds to be noticed.) Brown hedges dried to red all along their tops made visible by sunlight.

Card from Nelson Howe addressed to The Ascher/Straus Collective. “Elections, Xerox grant and other biz at the PPF meeting, ‘The Brook’ 40-42 West 17 (8th floor) at 7:30 p.m. Wed. February 11.”

Is it also on February 9 that buds are growing fatter, hedges golden and dripping?

On Saturday (February 7, out of order?) two Bunuel films, Nazarin and Death in the Garden, are in MOMA. Monica only notes that Nazarin has something in common with Viridiana. Doesn’t spell out what, only that Nazarin ends with the ironic image of a pineapple: fruit that wears a crown of thorns and that’s difficult to eat. The Christ-like title character and the woman who’s been traveling with him like a disciple are back where they started. Nazarin’s realization is: that he’s accomplished nothing.

At 5:40 on February 10 Fayette Hickox of The Paris Review telephones to postpone lunch scheduled for the thirteenth: “George is leaving for California sooner than expected, then on to New Zealand”. When Fayette called Monica and David had just started looking over THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL (with The Paris Review interview and portfolio in mind), sitting in chairs surrounded by snow in the Salem Avenue backyard. Sun on snow at noon gives Monica a piercing headache: a headache that enters through the eye.

It seems to Monica that February 11 is in itself, taken as a whole, an opening in winter, but why? Will cataloguing what she sees be the same as figuring it out?

Winter light on and reflected off snow in the Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-west’s backyard reflected through criss-cross beams of neighbor’s fence makes a criss-cross shadow-fence on snow of the Salem Avenue backyard.

Melting snow in hedges yields pearly light.

Beads of light in hedges yield drops of water.

Sun (from snow?) burns through wooden slats of venetians.

Shadows are complex: shadows of wooden fence-beams are thick and these thick, crossing shadows cross the dark shadows of hedges probably built up out of the long or fine shadows of branches, twigs, pine needles.

Is it in the sharp lines of the open spaces in these dark shadows that Monica finds the opening in winter (or in winter light)?

Melting snow continues to fall in clumps from rooftops.

More than one conversation (also on February 11?).

Aunt Em (vacationing in Florida) calls to say that she’s worried about Cousin Vince, in Guatemala when the earthquake struck, thirteen thousand dead at last count! Vince saw terrible things and he’s shaken up. Aunt Em is never quite sure why Vince goes to South America as often as he does, what exactly it has to do with business, but he was in the thick of it and saw terrible things. . . .

Margo calls to tell Monica that she got into medical school. (Tone is uncommonly bright and perky.) A little surprised that Margo thought of calling her with the news, Monica asks who else Margo’s called. Idea seems not to have occurred to Margo and she has no answer. Did she call Kitty, for example? (Kitty, Monica’s sister, is Margo’s therapist at this moment and both Margo and Kitty are patients of Dr. DaVinci’s: on different orbits, but within the same galaxy.) No! she didn’t call Kitty! Why should she? Kitty wouldn’t care. Kitty is cold! And so on. Margo sounds like Margo, as always.

Mikki calls: seems she also knows someone in the thick of the Guatemalan earthquake, a woman named Trina who’s still there (reason not given or not noted).

Not astounded that Kitty is getting married in May, but is astounded by who she seems to be marrying. From what she knows about the guy he’s no different than a hundred guys Kitty could have married when she was twenty! Why wait all these years to marry someone like that?! And, if she’s not wrong, Kitty did date — did almost marry — someone exactly like that way back when it might have made some kind of sense! She should have gotten it over with then and saved herself the trouble. . . . What else? She had an odd experience. Once in a while — actually pretty often — she gets a craving for the food at the Pink Teacup. Loves their hot chocolate, bacon and tomato sandwiches, etc, and the food is good enough to make you ignore the fact that place is a disgusting steambath of smells. Sitting at the counter recently eating a bowl of soup (what kind?), her favorite bacon and tomato sandwich plus a hot chocolate when she noticed that the man sitting next to her looked familiar. Knew it was someone she knew but didn’t know. Someone she’d met a long time ago, not really someone from her own life, someone she knew through someone else. . . . Paid attention to him. He was eating something not too many people order — a plate of kidneys. (Other stuff on the plate, no idea what.) What about that would make it dawn on her that she was sitting next to Graham, David’s older brother, who, as far as she knows, no longer lived in New York? And what does it mean that back to back, the very next day, she ran into Wanda Baer at the same counter! Surprising because she didn’t know Wanda ate at the Pink Teacup. Would be found eating at a smelly dump like the Pink Teacup. But, beyond that, it seems to Mikki that there’s a meaning to the fact that she ran into both Graham and Wanda there. Thinks it means that despite having no resemblance or anything obvious in common, there must be something shared by Wanda and Graham that relates to eating at the Pink Teacup. Something, but what is it? Could name a few things, but Graham is so much older than Wanda that it doesn’t seem fair to assume that what’s true for him will be true for her. Tendency to drift from one thing to another, to talk without what you’re talking about ever amounting to anything. Can’t say that for sure about Wanda yet.

This also: Mikki knows that Monica’s mother Betty paid a visit to Mikki’s mother Beatrice in Florida and that she stopped to look at photographs of Mikki when she was married to Alan and things looked normal (photographs of the two of them together with the girls). Betty, of course, was curious and asked a lot of questions. Heard (what she must have already heard a dozen times) about how successful Alan was (and still is) as a soybean executive and that made Betty wonder even more about the official story she was being told. If all that her mother (Beatrice) was saying was true — about Alan being so successful and so nice, etc., and the pictures looking so normal — why did she (Mikki) leave all that? Why would anyone walk away from all that without a good reason? Mikki could tell from the way her mother told the story that she knew that Monica’s mother found Mikki’s mother’s version of Mikki’s story unbelievable and had managed to make her mother uncomfortable.

Kitty calls to talk about her future husband Hap (“Happy”) Huntington Blank. When Hap first heard her voice on the phone he knew she was the one for him. Called Betty in Florida, in fact, and announced to her and to assorted relatives who happened to be there: “I want you to know that as soon as I heard Kitty’s voice I said to myself ‘This is the one for me!’ ” (Kitty laughs uncomfortably — is flattered by it, but finds it a bit nutty — and also probably reflects what must have been Betty’s attitude: may have laughed, but already beginning to wonder and to think of questions that make you squirm.)

Another story: Kitty ran into her old friend Norma. Old friend from radical, political days. Hadn’t seen one another in a while. Took a look at each other, didn’t like what they saw and said so: what happened to you? you lost weight, your hair used to be wild and curly, now it’s short and straight, you look thin and conventional — what happened to the radical woman I used to know? Etc. Norma was even worse: hair in a permanent! But then Kitty had to tell her about her engagement to Hap. . . .

On approximately February 11: snow in Blanche’s (neighbor-to-the-west’s) backyard is melting. Four inches melt in one day and soak into the earth. Despite melting snow and a heavy rainfall there are still white patches: snow in deepest shadow? Sodden earth of Blanche’s yard can’t absorb further melting.

Lilac buds and forsythia buds are ripening on the Salem Avenue house’s front lawn and buds in Blanche’s yard that are nothing but fuzz now will bloom into outsize pink flowers (magnolia?).

Rain on the windshield as Monica parks Alyosha’s car and just a little later silvery light on the ocean, aroma of suspended moisture in the air. Monica sits on the boardwalk breathing in soft breezes that may even be springlike while Bah-Wah plays with a shell, digging with demented joy in sand as in snow.

Nelly X passes on her way to pick up Jimmy (from what and for what?). Nelly X has stories to tell (though, as always, they’re a bit vague and have to be pinned down). Leila X (eldest of the three X sisters and the one Monica and David know best and have always been closest to) is in town. Why? Because Ma is ill. Ill in what way? She fainted and immediately decided to go up to Columbia Presbyterian (where the whole X family goes when ill) and headed for the subway station on AAF Street. Nelly wanted to stop at Ma’s apartment at the corner of ABC Street and the boardwalk to pack pajamas in case the hospital decided to keep her overnight, but Ma refused. Refused because? Nelly laughs (in her vague yet whinnying way) and thinks and says, well, Ma refused because she refused. Because she’s stubborn. Said no and then got stubborn about it. And besides, Ma said she didn’t have a clean pair of pajamas to pack!

Nelly continues on along the boardwalk while Monica heads down ABC Street, past the ancient yellow brick apartment building where the X family has always had a large corner apartment on a low floor. Hears Leila X’s voice calling her through an open side window. Has more to tell Monica about Ma and much more clearly, with more detail than Nelly did. They kept Ma in the hospital longer than overnight. She’s there now and has been for days: diagnosed her as anemic and suffering from diverticulosis, exactly the way Ma had diagnosed herself. (Laughs — enough like Nelly that you’d know she’s her sister, but with an extra dose of something wilder yet more syrupy, further inward, deep in head and throat — over the fact that Ma diagnosed herself correctly, after fainting and while hurrying toward the subway.) Doctors say that she only has half her red blood cells. It’s hard for Leila to talk: Ma told her not to visit because there are all sorts of things you can catch in the hospital (it’s a big hive of disease, after all) but she wanted to go and sure enough she has a bad sore throat.

Sipping hot coffee in sunlight (shadows of branches on yellow earth on February 11). A sparrow lands in a shadow and Monica notes that the sparrow’s grey-that’s-brown and brown-that’s-grey is the color of the shadows and also of the branches. Blue snow-shadows are gone, and now there are only sparrow-colored branch-shadows in dry winter grass.

Note from Larry Lille:

“Dear Monica and Davey,

“Sorry it took so long but this is the first letter I’ve written in the past six months and now my pen is running out of ink. I did enjoy your visit though, if you get the chance drop by again.

Larry.”

Charcoal grey bird lands on darkest shadow on grey cement near old outdoor shower stalls or more to the side (west) by the clotheslines strung between plumbers’ pipe sunk into paving blocks. Monica notes that bare spaces in the hedges are becoming more filled with bird-life. Also: red. Red buds on branches are swinging in sunlight against a blue sky and at about four the moon is the color and texture of soft clouds.

Where is it that cold breezes are blowing through a circle of hot sunlight?

Late in the afternoon of the eleventh Wanda Baer calls but what she has to tell Monica never gets told (or never gets recorded) because Monica is in a bit of a hurry to get to Manhattan for a PPF (Participation Project Foundation) meeting at The Brook.

Ray Pierotti (who, Monica notes, lives at the intersection of Grand and Green) is already at The Brook with Nelson Howe and it seems to Monica that what they’re wearing is oddly similar. Isn’t the same but is. Both in corduroy pants, shirt with vest, leather jacket. But different in a number of ways: Nelson’s corduroy pants are purple, Ray’s are tan; Nelson’s jacket is long black smooth leather, Ray’s even longer suede (color not noted); no description of shirts or vests. So: purple and smooth black leather for Nelson, tan and (what color?) suede for Ray, but with an over-all effect of similarity on greeting them.

Nelson Howe has a story to tell: he’s finally stopped teaching. Working something out so he’ll be collecting unemployment. But that’s not what’s important: he and Linda (last name not noted) and another woman have gotten an act together using karate and other martial arts and his manager is confident and optimistic about the salability of the show. Says that (according to his manager) even if it doesn’t work out theatrically there’s a demand for such performances in universities and they can travel around the country to one university after another and get a thousand dollars a show. Describes one of the highlights: Linda lies prone on broken glass, two hundred pounds of cinder blocks are piled on her stomach, he smashes them with a sledge hammer and she jumps up unmarked. Of course things do happen. Had a little setback just this morning in rehearsal: smashing the cinder blocks, chips flew off, grazed Linda’s forehead (cut it, actually), just missed her eyes — but did fly across a whole row of teeth. Destroyed one of the front teeth, so they’ll have to deal with that before they can get started. . . .

After the PPF meeting Monica and David pay another visit to Nicole Renard in her Washington Square apartment and this time find her in her nightgown, on the phone, making plans to spend the weekend in D.C. visiting her roommate Sandra’s cousin (no name).

Monica thinks something could be said about the vagueness or maybe it’s the ambiguity of Nicole’s love life (at least as Nicole has ever spoken of it to Monica). Not that she doesn’t have a very real and active romantic and/or sexual life (the boyfriend Ted, for example), but it seems to Monica that she’s noted over the years a number of categories of ambiguity (that is, lacking in immediacy or definition): relationships a) that are long distance; b) in which she’s “the other woman”; c) in which she denies sexual or even romantic involvement. There’s something else that Monica’s noted over the years that makes some, not all, of Nicole’s relationships with men hard to define — always in a light, even absurd way, never in a dark way — but Monica can’t name it.

Off the phone, Nicole says that she’s liked (does she say “been involved with”?) Sandra’s cousin (name not recorded) for a long time. They’ve always liked each other, but that’s all. The cousin had been living with someone, but now she’s left — and that’s why she’s going to D.C. (For a second Monica waits for more, but there is no more because it isn’t in Nicole’s nature to inspect her reasons for going to D.C. any more closely.)

Nicole Renard has a surprising number of stories to tell about the Coffins and Forests. Her closest relationship among all the Coffins and Forests — the whole galaxy of Babette, Greg, Grete, Andy, Lena, Tina (Martina) Lima (Grete’s daughter from her first marriage to Tony Lima) and little Hank Forest — is with Tina: they have “total communication”. Monica can’t help wondering if that means that Martina (Tina) Lima is the source of some of Nicole’s amazingly detailed inside information about the Coffins and Forests. Greg Coffin is involved with another woman and it seems serious. There’s no doubt about it, yet Lena doesn’t have a clue. Greg was bored with Lena and Grete is bored with Andy. Bored with Andy because Andy is boring. Gets on her nerves because he’s stupider than she is and also immature. Nicole thinks they’re living off two things: memories of the original sexual energy (which was great) and the fact that Andy is not at all bored with Grete. Thinks that Grete is still a goddess to Andy while Andy is obviously no god to Grete. Grete’s main involvement right now is with little Hank and maybe that’s what always happens to the energy between people when they have children.

Grete and Babette are not getting along. They love each other, but the way house is divided — Babette alone in the big apartment upstairs and Grete, Andy, Tina and Hank in the little apartment downstairs — is an impossible situation. The truth is that Grete has never moved out of her mother’s house. When she married her first husband, Tony (“Lima Bean”) Lima, she was living with Babette in Forrest Hills and then Tony moved in. Grete always threatens to move out of her mother’s house but never has.

What else? Nicole is bubbling over and Monica is trying to pay close attention (remembering while listening). Babette is involved with a married man. That’s positive, but other changes she sees in Babette are not. Aging? Nicole doesn’t like that explanation. Doesn’t think aging has to be that way. A stagnant, provincial life is more to the point. She (Nicole) is only twenty-one, but with “a thirty-year-old head”, and feels comfortable giving fifty-six-year-old Babette advice. Babette and Grete lead a provincial life and it’s even more disappointing in Grete. There’s no reason Grete couldn’t spend time in Manhattan, stay at her place, start to experience new things. . . and then in ten years, who knows? But she doesn’t do it. Stays at the beach with boring Andy: younger than her, and even younger than that because he’s immature, content to practice with Greg and the band, build something every-once-in-a-while, go fishing, smoke pot. . . . He’s happy that way but Grete is not. She knows for a fact that Grete would be open to a freer relationship (she and Andy allowed to explore other relationships), but there’s no way Andy could handle even the thought of Grete with another guy. Laid back as he is, who knows how nuts he might go.

Nicole herself has observed Andy’s non-stop pot smoking and Grete complains about it (how docile and dull it makes him). So Tina tells her things, Grete tells her things, Babette tells her things and Greg talks to her just as freely as Grete and Babette do. . . .

Later, when Sandra, her brother Gary and two or three other friends arrive, Monica again has the feeling (occurs to her only now that she had this feeling, but less so, when she visited Nicole and boyfriend Ted and all her blond/blonde friends were there) of being a somewhat invisible guest at a pre-teen pajama party. Good-looking young men and women together in an apartment, yet a noticeable absence of sexual tension. A little like a scene in Little Women, where all the girls are sisters and pals and all the boys are beloved, next-door-neighbor Jaimies. And at the center of it all beautiful caramel-and-honey Nicole Renard in her nightgown, more of a Little Women cotton night-dress than anything hinting at bed or bedroom, but still . . . .

Nicole’s relationship with Sandra’s brother Gary is ambiguous (or at least puzzling or confusing to Monica). Seems to Monica that Nicole implied, late in her last visit, that there was some sort of ambiguous “involvement” between herself and Gary, but tonight she goes out of her way to make it clear that there isn’t. One reason for the ambiguity: Sandra works at The New School and Gary is a student at NYU, so it’s not unusual (right now, for example) for him to sleep-over at Sandra’s. Sometimes stays for days. Takes classes at night, sleeps in by day and can’t sleep in Sandra’s “bedroom” which of course is also the apartment’s livingroom — particularly because Sandra’s friends/girlfriends are often sleeping there — so he ends up sleeping in Nicole’s room. Seems to Monica an unavoidable conclusion that one way or another he sometimes “sleeps with” Nicole, but the actual nature of what happens is left deliberately ambiguous.

Monica’s last image of the evening in Nicole Renard’s apartment is of Nicole at her breakfast table, wavy hair (exact shade of chestnut or honey at that moment not recorded) loose, arms bare and tan in conservative cotton nightgown, sipping brewed tea, smoking a cigarette and answering a call from a guy in New Jersey who’s interested in her and who she thinks she sort of likes.

On the way home Monica and David stop at Lin’s Garden to take out Suey Kow soup and soy sauce chicken.

If on Friday February 13 Monica, working in the Salem Avenue backyard, notes that sun is shining, air warmed to fifty degrees, yet earth is still black and sodden, and on February 16 it’s sixty degrees and she’s in MOMA again to see Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, what day is it (date not noted) when she finds it too hot to work in direct sunlight in the Salem Avenue backyard, while bare hedges welcome sun’s heat and soak it up? In order to work outdoors she has to move into the shadow of the hedges with a view into neighbor-to-the-west-Blanche’s yard where, two weeks ago, a blizzard smashed a fence to splinters.

Is it the same day or another that red buds on branches are swinging in sunlight against the wooly blue of the sky? Softness and wooliness of blue impedes their swinging? At about four on that afternoon (date not noted) moon is again the color and texture of soft clouds.

Snow has stopped but snow narrative is continuing.

On the same day or another Monica is indoors doing something with the tv on. Snow is falling there, on tv, in the Alps. Bright colors of the clothing of Olympic skiers.

Seems to Monica that it’s on another day altogether that Mikki tells her about getting together with Wanda Baer and Marsha or when Monica’s actually in the presence of Mikki, Wanda and Marsha sitting around a table (where?). Mikki is using tiny bits of information to analyze or compare-and-contrast a number of friends and/or lovers: Dee (someone Monica hardly knows) is defined by her love of power; Marsha (Mikki’s lover and Mikki’s current obsession), who went to a small college in Louisiana, combines (according to Mikki) Mikki’s “openness” and Frederique’s “containment”. Marsha may seem shy (laughs too much) but “moves into the fire” and melts there while she (Mikki) and Frederique are not melters (move away from the fire). Monica knows, even at the very moment of listening, that Mikki’s analysis may not survive a week or even a day, depending on what Marsha does tomorrow.

On an undated day in mid-February wind springs up around 11 a.m. in the Salem Avenue backyard. Wind moves along the face of the hedges, rustling golden light from dry twigs. Earth still moist and dark yet, at the very tops of the hedges, Monica makes out (but can’t explain) the thinnest possible tissue of white. Rules out budding. Light and moisture form a layer that holds together but has no substance. Transparent as glass, thin as tissue without the substance of glass or tissue. (Something finely web-like suspending a transparent sheet of moisture?)

Observes the Salem Avenue backyard only because, after walking down ABC Street (where red buds are popping up in every front yard and garden), Monica decides to cancel a dental appointment and heads for Salem Avenue to do a good day’s work and read her mail (delivered early on ABC Street by Lou, the rolypoly mailman). Only mail of interest: a note and chapbook from Ralph Waldo Rice, another editor (with Larry Lille, Edgar Zacharias and others), of the alternative literary journal where Monica and David have sometimes published. Haven’t heard from Ralph Waldo Rice for a very long time or it’s possible they’ve never heard from Ralph Waldo Rice — until now, after having visited Larry Lille once or twice.

Is it on the same undated day (while walking down ABC Street) that Wanda Baer tells Monica that she stopped Greg Coffin to ask why she hasn’t seen the beautiful and large African singer, Mirembe? Greg’s answer surprised her. He hasn’t seen Mirembe because he hasn’t been performing with her. “She decided to take a break,” is how Greg put it, but Wanda Baer didn’t think Greg was being honest. Not performing at all right now, with the band or solo. He’s working as a dispatcher for a car service. Wanda of course doesn’t really care whether Greg Coffin is playing the piano or working for a car service. She only knows this: she’s disappointed because she was attracted to Mirembe — to her body and her voice — and now there’s no way she’ll be seeing her again. And (also on the same day?) Lena (who seems to like to confide little tidbits of absurd information to David) tells David (while brooming the driveway?) that she’s trying to get Johanna into tv commercials and has been taking her to auditions.

On a different undated day in February wind from the ocean is so sudden and strong in the Salem Avenue backyard that the beach chairs and snack tables where Monica, David and Bah-Wah had just been having their usual slow and pleasurable breakfast (in this case Boursin cheese with salt sticks and other rolls from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street, granulated-sugar-coated and raspberry-jelly-filled donuts, fresh and warm from Peninsula’s ovens, David’s strong coffee and heated cream), get blown over. David goes inside, but Monica continues to drink hot coffee in strong wind.

Fog at 4 a.m. (moon visible through venetians). And, on the morning of Thursday the 19th, cold rain leads to a spring day and another outdoor breakfast. Monica steps outside early — way before David is awake — to the sunlight, unearthly breezes, buds sprouting everywhere of spring-before-spring. Later, David bakes two large pancakes in cast iron skillets for himself, Monica, Monica’s brother Lowell and Bah-Wah and they have an outdoor spring breakfast of David’s baked pancake, wild blueberry jam, strong coffee and cream.

On the same spring-in-February day Monica mails Volume Two of Green Inventory to Dick Higgins for a review in Margins.

On the morning of a day in February that may be the 19th or 20th Monica walks from the Salem Avenue house to her apartment on ABC Street. Of many possible routes between one place and another she often finds herself choosing ABA Street because there are so many trees and front gardens planted there: what were hundreds of red buds a few days ago and then slivers of white in the red buds and then only yesterday a cloudburst of white here and there today becomes nothing but a universal blossoming of white flowers, red still there, but forced into the background.

Back on ABC Street the first thing Monica notices is a bank of long chrome-yellow forsythia wands on the front lawn. Later in the day what will strike her more is the rattling of the ancient dormer windows from ocean winds blowing at that third-floor altitude (sound not heard while housesitting on Salem Avenue). And in the morning Al Szarka’s loud radio wakes David up (at what hour?). David raps on Al’s door to complain and Al (always angry, always about to bark) lowers the sound while cursing David and complaining about the noise David’s always making — promising to rap on David’s door next time — every time! — David plays his music, etc.

Working on the wide front grey board porch (first full day back on ABC Street) the flow of ABC Street life doesn’t hesitate to resume its streaming through whatever it is Monica’s working on. Lou, the rolypoly mailman, has mail and news to deliver. Thinks he knows before she does that Monica’s sister Kitty (who’s been living in the ancient yellow brick apartment building at the ocean end of the street where the X family has lived forever) is moving. But Monica had already heard, not from Kitty, but from her mother Betty in Florida (laughing because she found it ridiculous) that Kitty was moving back to Manhattan and somehow had gotten both Hap (her new boyfriend) and her old college boyfriend Malcolm to help her move! And another fact that Betty finds odd or ridiculous: Kitty says that Hap is afraid to meet her!

Greg Coffin’s band is practicing next door in the massive white-stucco-and-orange-brick multiple dwelling Greg and Lena live in with their children Johanna (Jojo), Joshua and Rosamond and 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 or 6 tenants and own with Babette, Grete and Andy. Unusual for the band to practice next door instead of in the open garage of Babette and Grete’s “mother and daughter” at the ocean end of the street. Someone told Monica that they’ve put together a wonderful new band, but sounds to her exactly the same as the old band.

From her position on the wide flight of grey board steps or from a porch rocker behind the tall Rhinebeck pine or from another chair behind the dense holly bush Monica hears the rasping (or croaking) voice (and corresponding silent voice?), booming as if amplified, of the Twins Twinning as they pass.

“They get hurt.

“They could hurt you.

“They wait.

“Stand around there?

“They wait for you.”

Eight blank seconds pass while their voices are absorbed by the dense branches of the Rhinebeck pine as they pass behind it.

“Think I give a shit?!

“He’s no good! Spoke to ‘m this morning.

“He’s like moss!

“Don’t we know this house?

“Don’t we know the people in this house?

“I know the people in this house a million years!”

On Tuesday February 24 Pat Corcoran looks terrible: she’s gained weight when she was supposed to be losing it, face is broken out and chin and neck have an awful flabbiness. According to Pat it’s all because of Pepsi. They tell her not to drink so much Pepsi but she can’t stop and does it anyway. Not only the Pepsi she drinks now, but the Pepsi she’s drunk all her life. What else? Pepsi-drinking, bad back and a runaway dog. Last Monday Puff was in the backyard. She looked out, saw him (not sure how he got out there), called him to come in but instead of coming in he dashed around the side of the house, down the driveway to the front and down the block. Wanted to go after him, but couldn’t. She was ill (bad back dates from the time nineteen years ago when Philip was born and they gave her a spinal; word “spinal” sends Pat off on a digression about John who had some work-related problems a few years ago: she warned him not to get the spinal they wanted to give him, but of course he didn’t listen, got the spinal and went blind for a few weeks), she was home alone, so she stood on the porch calling Puff, but just had to let him go. They haven’t seen him since, Tim is heartbroken and she thinks that and her Pepsi-drinking have made her flabby, bloated and broken out. . . .

Tales of misery on a breezy spring day in February.

Pat goes in (door to the right of the porch is one of the two entrances to the Corcorans’ always deeply shaded groundfloor apartment) and Monica goes back to writing about the bush at the intersection of ABA Street and Salem Avenue that seems to flower before all others: now that its furry buds have opened it should be more beautiful but it isn’t. Made the mistake of crossing the street? What had been only slivers of white from a distance (had to spend time contemplating them to see them and to enjoy the subtlety of their early near-blossoming against a blue sky) up close are something else altogether. Accidental beauty clotted up or fell apart as she approached. . . .

And then later, typing upstairs, rose petals fall onto Monica’s desk as the typewriter carriage moves and jostles the vase (notes don’t say what it looks like or is made of) holding roses. Bright pink of rose petals against dark green of avocado leaves. Is the bright pink of rose petals against dark cucumber-peel green of avocado leaves “electric” or is there a better word for what should be a soft and mild color but isn’t? Word that describes the color-energy that vibrates aggressively in the eye?

Types for a while, then reads the mail delivered by Lou, the rolypoly mailman.

“I’m still acting as the go-between for my guest editors doing the anon issue. Brian Swann, who accepted your Double/Profile for #36 with much pleasure, suggested I ask you if you’d care to add a piece on your system of collaboration. I agree with him that it would make a very lively and provocative article on the moods and mechanics of two writers working in tandem: the genesis of ideas, the problems involved, the techniques, etc., etc. Neither of us can recall seeing something on this order. And if it has been done, there’s still room for expatiation on this intriguing topic, and/or an original approach — not necessarily the cut and dried interview mannerisms of asking and responding. But, but . . . well, I’m groping.

“Whatever your way is, it should make an interesting human and word-workers expression of how you feel about it and manage the feat. Please let me know what you think of the idea.

“Best wishes, Sonia,

Sonia Raiziss, ed.

“P.S. read your long elegant story in the #64 Paris Review: fine work.”

Sixty-two degrees on Wednesday and birds (suddenly more audible) sound different. Monica looks out her window, down into the needles of the Rhinebeck pine (a peculiar green that greets her every morning on ABC Street — dark pine green of course, but also a harder-to-name lighter green she thinks of as “ash green”) to locate the source of an unfamiliar bird song and sees a grey bird with a red head and red stripe down its back.

Where is Monica when she sees kites along the horizon, blue, white and glossy? Is it then that she runs into Janey Hedges, who used to live on ABC Street but now lives on ACE Street (though still friendly with Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding): pregnant, in her eighth month, once pretty, says she’s been ill and looks ill now, skin both pale and blotchy.

A little later on the same day Monica meets Nora Salerno on AAF Street (local commercial street that runs from Salem Avenue to the boardwalk) returning from a “luncheon” with Peggy Quinlan, Peggy’s ninety-two-year-old mother May, Ellen Garvey and her mother. (Wiry and strong as any pioneer woman, with thinning red-in-black or black-in-red hair, Ellen Garvey raised five daughters (without much help from the always-absent, handsome firechief husband) in a neat, always-freshly-painted three story frame house across from (maybe one or two houses south of) the white frame attached house where Peggy Quinlan lives. Peggy Quinlan is a handsome woman with an erect bearing and pale gold or white hair who keeps to herself, smiles a warm hello to Monica when Monica passes her sitting against the white front wall of her house with her elderly mother under a green awning, somewhere in the background a husband Monica can never picture.

Ellen Garvey and Peggy Quinlan have stories to tell and Monica isn’t perfectly clear in her notes whether each one tells her own story or if they help tell each other’s story.

a)       Ellen Garvey’s mother and Peggy Quinlan’s mother come from the same part of Ireland (which part not told to Monica or not noted).

b)       Elizabeth, Ellen Garvey’s next-to-oldest daughter, is getting married in May. Someone comments that Ellen’s daughters have been getting married one by one, in correct, descending order! And someone else tries to count off how long it should be until Patty, the youngest and the fattest, nicknamed Twiggy, gets married. Someone else says that she knows for a fact that Twiggy lost weight and is thin, but somehow Twiggy still looks fat to her!

c)       Peggy Quinlan’s mother, May, is ninety-two, but there were other mothers at the luncheon who are only eighty-four.

d)       Ellen Garvey knew Peggy Quinlan before they rediscovered each other here. Ellen, Peggy and Peggy’s sister Cassia grew up together in the same neighborhood in the Bronx.

Nora Salerno doesn’t have as many stories to tell as usual. She’d been feeling fine in spite of all the miserable, snowy weather, but now, the last few days, with the weather turning pleasant, she’s been feeling ill. What else? For some reason (purely geographic, because they live in the neighboring house to Peggy Quinlan’s?) Margaret and Daisy Brennan come to Nora Salerno’s mind and she talks about them instead of herself, her daughter Nancy St. Cloud or anyone else connected to her directly. Wants to know if Monica knows that little Daisy Brennan has chronic rheumatoid arthritis and wonders if that’s something Daisy will outgrow — or if it will flare up dangerously all her life. Wonders also if Monica knows that Daisy’s mother Margaret Brennan has a hole in her heart that could kill her.

Mikki calls to say that she’s worried about Frederique. Winter classes at City College have been cut back to next-to-nothing (cut out altogether?) so she’s teaching only one course at The New School, will have to sublet her Chelsea apartment and go live and teach in some godforsaken town out on Long Island. Anxious about money, worried and fatalistic as usual and smoking heavily again. Killing herself slowly — enjoying killing herself slowly — and there’s nothing Mikki can do about it.

At 6:30 a.m. on Thursday February 26 Monica can feel the day through closed windows: compelled to open them and, as soon as they’re open, feels on her skin what she was already experiencing mentally. Sensation on skin of course is different from what she already knew in her mind. Unseasonable softness and aroma can only be felt exactly at the instant the window opens and bright light opens inward with it.

Monica puts her head out into the fragrant breeze pulsing south to north, breathes in the extraordinary day. Looks toward the ocean to the south (source of all sensation?). Voices of children from beach and boardwalk. Turns head to right (north), toward Coast Boulevard: Margaret Brennan’s landlord Alexi’s handsome oldest son, Matty, is leaning over the porch railing of his father’s house, cursing his younger brother because he did something to Matty's car.

This is where Monica is on February 26 (at what hour exactly?): on ABC Street, working outdoors on the wide grey planks of the groundfloor porch of the big cocoa-shingle-multiple-dwelling. Alive, breathing in the extraordinary day, taking in the day with eyes, skin, hearing and wanting her writing to make her even more alive in the day, consciously not wanting the ordinary head-and-shoulders gesture of writing to bend away from the day. Not inward, not toward anything other than the day, can her writing make her breathe, see, hear, sniff breezes even more? She wants pen or typewriter, carried outdoors, to be instructed in how much she wants to be alive in the day (February 26).

All sensations on ABC Street are different from all sensations one-and-a-half blocks north on Salem Avenue. Here by the ocean air feels different on skin, smells different and so on, but there’s more to it than that and these other differences are hard to name. Why (for example), Monica wonders, should there be an odd sort of melancholy in the exhilaration of the day. (Because of the exhilaration of the day?)

Sitting outdoors with pen and typewriter will the simple act of listing her sensations be the same as figuring out where they’re coming from?

Let’s see: the fact that she’s sitting on the porch on ABC Street on a splendid day in February ’76 in itself has layers of experience in it: memory or exterior memory in the fact of living here, with this precise aroma of sea air on a spring or spring-like day. Sudden, sharpened consciousness of bird-sounds seems new: a real arrival of birds suddenly migrating into consciousness? Seasonal layers in the air: this year’s moment of being alive brings to life another year’s moment of being alive. Therefore to be in the thick of it, to breathe the day deeply, is to be moved by the living memory of having breathed air in this place at this time of year before. Is that it? Events that happened one or four years earlier are being breathed again?

Monica continues with her list that explains everything or nothing.

Let’s see: at about 11 a.m. Monica, writing on the porch, saw a mourning dove. David, who’d also been writing outside (somewhere screened off from Monica’s view by shrubbery or an angle of the house), went inside for a glass of orange juice. Seconds after he left Monica spotted — in a pine (really more of an overgrown evergreen shrub) not far down the block (toward ocean or boulevard not noted) — a large (pigeon-size?) lavender-grey or rose-grey, subtly shaded bird. Certain it was a mourning dove, but doesn’t note whether her certainty was based on having heard a mourning dove’s unmistakable sound, so deep and quiet in the throat it stays in the woods, but just a little more daylit, a little closer to wherever you are, than the sound of an owl.

Is it the sight or the sound of the mourning dove that moved her and continues to move her? Is that what’s melancholy in the exhilaration of the day? She knows that she feels the desire to keep experience in the present: mourning dove in neighbor’s overgrown evergreen shrub, not a lingering sound-memory of a day in Spring ’73 when she was acutely conscious of the sound of mourning doves just before and/or just after she and David learned that Monica’s friend, David’s friend and even-more-so Kitty’s friend, Janet Dumas, had committed suicide while studying for her Ph.D. at Princeton. It happened when Kitty lived in Manhattan (one of the reasons Kitty moved from Manhattan to ABC Street) and while Monica and David were writing Green Inventory (their earliest attempt to convert the Chronicle into something other than itself: in this case, novel-length volume trying to use visual/concrete language design, but to take a step beyond design toward something systematic: where on the page (in what quadrant of the page) something is written also assigning significance. Tried this idea in Green Inventory and in some other “chamber” fictions, then tired of it, as usual).

David comes back outside. He’s skeptical and Monica finds his skepticism irritating. He thinks it’s unlikely to see a mourning dove in February. Thinks they return with other birds in March. Monica doesn’t think they leave at all. Doesn’t think they migrate. It’s the other birds, the ones that are flocking back in exaggerated numbers, who migrate and usually return in March but are appearing today. David starts off down the block toward Coast Boulevard (therefore it was toward Coast Boulevard (north) where Monica spotted the bird earlier?) to find the bird and settle the argument. After a little while Monica hears David calling her name from what seems like a long distance: there he is, near the corner of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard, looking up at a bird a little too big for its perch on a telephone line and rocking a bit.

“It is a mourning dove. . . !”

Voice travels clearly on spring breezes, aloft on thermals.

Lou the rolypoly mailman turns the corner and Monica joins David and Lou looking up at the wire. “What’s up?” Lou wants to know, hoping for a more interesting story than debating the identity of a bird. Clearly disappointed by what interests them. What difference does it make if it is a “mourning dove”? Might as well be a pigeon as far as he’s concerned is Lou’s good-natured shrug at the world.

Monica notes that Artie Tilden (one of the second floor tenants) spotted her on the ABC Street front porch yesterday (date not noted) and started complaining. Stood there slackly, looking terrible. Longish red ponytail always makes his already too-small head look smaller and short nose adds to a somewhat compressed, cut-off or shrunken look. But yesterday he looked worse: eyes pouchy with an irritable brand of tiredness. Says that he’s twenty-four years old but looks in the mirror and sees someone much older. Is that what doing what you hate does to you? Only ranked “a five” in the post office, but could be — should be — an “eight” and doing exactly what he likes (working on post office machinery); but he overslept the day of the exam. “Overslept” is one way to put it. Truth is he came home stoned the night before the exam — forgot to set the alarm — or maybe he did set it — set it then shut it off again. Or not. No way to know. How is it ever possible to be clear about stuff like that? Could be one way or another. Tell ourselves we remember, but do we? Do we really? Really, really? “Lost in the fog.” Monica says that — without wanting to get psychological about it, without wanting to dig too deeply — does he think that — considering how important the job was to him — it was at all destructive to be lost in a fog that day? Artie Tilden seems to take offense. “Destructive?” No, not at all. No way. Says he’s a little amazed she’d ask that. That she’d use a word like that. That really surprises him. He’s not one of those types who sabotages himself. That’s way off. It’s just what happened is all. Life goes that way sometimes and we look for explanations and there are no explanations and there’s not much you can do about it.

Monica has already registered (on what day?) the sudden, exaggerated arrival of birds this year. And today, February 26, at about 3 p.m., the chilly air is filled with them. (Not noted whether all one variety, several varieties or a wild mixture, and, if a mixture, which ones.) Is it the feeling of the air or the exaggerated chirping that pierces Monica with a seasonal sensation that may also be an emotion or a memory: a chilliness that smells like spring and an atmospheric energy that, if it were a human emotion, would be excitement. One sniff of this new air is like the apple corer that makes a twisting plunge through the core of time and through the self. “Life is changing. . . .” And what exactly is it that’s moving?

On the strength of this sensation Monica relaxes back from her typewriter.

It’s February ‘76 that’s being typed, but it’s being typed at eleven a.m., Wednesday June 23 on the ABC Street front porch. Monica’s carried her typewriter downstairs from attic to porch and is typing outside for the first time this year. Typing in the open air of summer is itself odd and wonderful, but there’s more to Monica’s sensation in the open air than the open air itself. . . as if every time she experiences a beginning (beginning of anything) the excitement of something absurdly cosmic is there.

While typing on the porch and enjoying that to a degree she would find it hard to explain to another person (but which is essential to her pleasure in living and writing) she’s carrying with her another immense pleasure that might not be pleasurable to someone else: front room (that is, room fronting ABC Street) has just been freshly painted green (somewhere between mint and lime) and, because it was being painted, the room (largest of the three attic rooms linked by a long hallway) had to be emptied. Empty room, painted an unusual, vivid shade of green (a little like the impossible-to-describe living green blood of azalea leaves Monica and David have both always loved), old, irregular pine floorboards, sanded and stained, nothing but an enormous (cast-off from where?) oak table-that-will-become-her-desk carried in.

Emptiness and freshness of green studio give her an absurdly cosmic excitement while typing on the front porch.

Table/desk set under the dormer windows facing ABC Street: already sees herself there with papers spread out.

Sitting on the narrow grey-painted bench in June ’76, typing February ’76. David brings her a tall glass of creamy iced coffee and a wedge of strawberry-rhubarb pie from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop. Little Rebecca Geiger appears from the Corcorans’ apartment, plops down next to Monica on the bench.

“I know how to type!”

Challenges Monica to get angry at her. Being thrown off the bench, or even off the porch, would suit her best.

Tries to get her fingers on the keys to type random letters over the February Chronicle. Prevented, she says, “Ugh! Black ink is the ugliest ink! It’s no color and it’s an ugly color!” Shows Monica a four-color pen and begins to scribble wildly on a blank sheet of Monica’s paper. These are the colors she likes. . . !

Blond-blond Timothy Corcoran follows Rebecca out, angry that she’s using his four-color pen. Loves his four-color pen, uses it sparingly, doesn’t want to use up the little tubes of ink — and here’s stupid Rebecca Geiger grabbing it from his room and scribbling nonsense with it. . . ! His anger excites Rebecca Geiger. (Monica can see it in her flushed face.) Timothy sees it also (does he know that he sees it?), gets his skateboard and skates away down ABC Street toward the boardwalk.

Nicole Renard slides up to the curb in her little green Saab, waves to Monica (who knew in advance that Nicole would be on ABC Street today) and parks next door, where Babette and Lena are conducting a “porch sale” on the small orange-stone-and-rusted-iron-guardrail first floor porch of Greg and Lena’s massive orange brick and white stucco multiple dwelling. Even before Monica came downstairs to work she saw Grete Forest on the next-door porch early in the morning helping Lena set up for the sale — and now they’re all there — Lena, Grete, Babette and even Nicole, though Monica has the impression that Nicole isn’t there to help with the sale: she’s carried a few items of her own from car to porch and is setting them out for Lena to sell. . . .

Pat Corcoran spies Monica working on the porch (through open front door (June) or anytime of year from dark interior, through slats of wooden venetians, on the other side of one of three tall porch windows) and joins Monica uninvited on the bench. She has a breathless story to tell. Does Monica remember how, in January and February (face and voice just about pierce through the February Chronicle Monica is typing in June), Puff kept running off and then they’d find him? Lost him, found him, lost him, found him. . . ? Well, listen to this! Now, after all this time, they found him — Philip found him — but he’s absolutely lost and gone forever. This is how it went: as Monica knows, in June — or for the summer, actually — both Philip and Allison Meehan work over at Boggiano’s near the Funland Amusement Park. Philip took a break from opening clams and oysters — he was in the mood for an ice cream cone — so he walked the three long blocks from Boggiano’s on Coast Boulevard to the boardwalk and he was strolling along the boardwalk licking his cone when he ran right into some guy walking Puff! Knew it was Puff, not some other Lahso Apso, from his markings. And of course Puff recognized Philip and was yapping and jumping. There was a huge argument, but what could Philip do? Seems this guy was the son of one of the so-called gypsy fortune tellers on the boardwalk — and then the fortune teller came out and then the whole family and they all swore the dog is theirs, it’s always been theirs, it’s their family dog, Philip’s some nineteen-year-old kid trying to steal the dog that’s been in the family forever, the children all love this dog, blah-blah-blah. Patrol car came along. Philip had hold of the leash and wouldn’t let go and he’s hoarse from screaming and practically in tears. It was a mess. So Philip found the dog because he was in the mood for an ice cream cone and now because they know where Puff is they have to accept the fact that Puff is really gone for good and Philip feels like a failure and he’s depressed. So they figured the only thing to do was to go out and get Timmy another dog. Drove out to the Island and got him a huge dog, part Shepherd and part Elkhound — only three, four months old — so he’s a giant, but he’ll get bigger. . . .

Anxious Lena Coffin and vague Nelly X come up the block from the ocean end of the street with Johanna (Jojo) Coffin and a girl (unknown to Monica) in a long, white dress. As always, Monica finds it hard to understand with certainty what Nelly X is saying, whether to someone else as she’s passing or even directly to her (Monica). Says something (to Lena?) about her son Jimmy helping “set things up”. That makes her laugh in her odd way, a throat sound that always borders on desperation, yet is so loose and shapeless it’s hard to tie it to any reason for laughing. Seems to be laughing about little Jimmy: “it’s his sixth birthday today!” Is it his own birthday party he was helping “set up”? Lena’s only reply is to ask Jojo if corn and liverwurst are ok for lunch.

Summer sun: walking on Coast Boulevard in summer sunlight in February. Later Monica may again be typing the events of February ’76 in June ’76 (on the narrow porch bench), but no one in June calls out through February, no one puts her or his head through February’s window, walks through February’s door, presses fingers on February’s typewriter keys, typing over some of its sentences. . . . Not pulled into June (moment where she’s physically typing) Monica’s able to type herself back inside February and to be fully alive there.

On the beach (on an undated day in February) in breezes that feel like spring on her skin: blow with strength across skin, through wavy hair, yet leave green ocean smooth and unruffled. (Human body stands up into it; ocean lies down under it?) Runs into Nicole Renard and Grete Forest (little, solid Hank Forest a heavy weight on Grete’s back). Nicole says to Grete that Monica already knows how unhappy she is with her roommate, Sandra. And to both Grete and Monica Nicole says: before she wanted to move — now she needs to move. So she’s looking hard for an apartment. . . . Words “looking for an apartment” remind Grete that her mother — Babette — noticed (upstairs apartment of their house pretty much overlooks the yellow brick apartment building’s back entrance and driveway) Monica’s sister Kitty packing up her car — being helped load up her belongings by two men — as if she were moving out. . . .

Grete has a story, or a story made up of many stories, to tell. Where to begin? Grete is not talking to Babette right now. And Tina, who doesn’t always agree, agrees with Grete that she doesn’t like the way her (Tina’s) grandmother is acting right now. Unlike Nelly X, who Monica would have to ask: what is it about the way Babette is acting that Tina and Grete don’t like?: Grete has a clear idea what she wants to say and seems to need to say it, as if her story has been cooking for who-can-say-how-long and is more than ready (overcooked?) to be dished out on the table.

Grete doesn’t like — has never liked — the way her mother deals with her ex-husband (Grete and Greg’s father), Dean, a somewhat shadowy, seldom-seen figure. She doesn’t know all of the Dean-and-Babette story (hard to get the truth), but what she does know is this: when Dean came back to the States after WW II (a G.I. who hung around Europe after the war making money or thinking he could make money as a black market profiteer and who may have even been AWOL during the war) he didn’t look for work but put his young French wife (Babette) to work right away. Put an ad in the paper and hired her out as a domestic, even though she spoke no English.

Nobody really likes Dean. Her mother doesn’t like Dean (but still has trouble standing up to him), she doesn’t like Dean (but she’s cool enough to keep him from knowing it), Greg doesn’t like Dean (not at all cool, he can’t help showing his hostility), Tina doesn’t like Dean (and doesn’t like the way Babette acts with Dean), etc. There’s a tangled story about money that’s more tangled than it has to be because she’s never been allowed to see more than a few threads of it. Some time (not clear how much) after Babette divorced Dean he set his sights on a wealthy older woman. (A wealthy old woman?) Or maybe not “wealthy”, just a lot better off than him. And after a while she accused him of cheating her out of a lot of money: twenty, thirty, fifty thousand dollars or more, Grete never knew exactly how much. It went to court and for whatever reason Dean won. She thinks there was a settlement and out of however much he was given he gave ten thousand to be shared between herself and Greg. It was made very clear that it was a gift, not a loan, but he must have gone through his money, because he’s hounding them to give it back. “I want my ten thousand!” “I need that ten thousand!” Over and over and over, with a zillion sickening variations. Worse and worse every month. And — because they won’t give it back (why should they? it’s theirs!) — can’t give it back (they don’t have it) — he’s after them every chance he gets to “work harder”. Not just her, not just Greg, but Andy and even Lena, who has nothing to do with his money and who’s raising three kids on very little income. “What do you do all day. . . ?! Get to work! Work harder! Get more jobs. Do whatever you have to, but pay me back my money!” And of course after a while Greg can’t control himself and shows his hatred.

Grete wonders if Dean’s constant nagging has had an effect on all of them. For example: she hates to work in summer (has never outgrown her love of summer at the beach and everything that comes with it) but this summer she plans to work at her friend’s fish-fry place in Sheepshead Bay. She’d only do it a couple of days a week, but still. . . . It would be great if Andy worked full time, but the band has made that impossible. She thinks the band sounds better with the new singer. It’s a good band and she wants Andy to stay in it: she believes in the band, she believes in Greg and Andy, and, if you look at it objectively, the band is really all Andy and Greg know, it’s all they want to do and it’s all they can do, so if it fails. . . . Still, with the pressure of Dean’s constant nagging, Andy is auditioning Monday for a club in Brooklyn where he’d have a long-term gig. Greg has no intention of doing anything. Does play solo sometimes and occasionally gets hired to be the accompanist for someone famous and goes on tour and makes some money, but that hasn’t happened lately and things aren’t good for any of them. Her ex, Tony Lima, Tina’s father, gives next to nothing. Tries to provide a little support for Tina, but he’s re-married, has children and can’t afford much. Thinks Monica knows (did Monica know?) that they’re on welfare. On welfare, but get very little, not even enough to pay the rent, and have had to lie to get anything (they don’t know that she’s re-married). Lena was caught in a stupid lie. Claimed she was living with her mother-in-law, Babette, but obviously she isn’t. Wasn’t hard for them to find out that she and Greg own a house (even if it is a multiple dwelling that needs a ton of work, costs a fortune to run and hardly brings in anything), so now they’ve taken them off food stamps. . . . Andy needed to go to the dentist but couldn’t afford it, so he tried to apply separately for food stamps and medicaid — and was denied because he earns too much! Have to earn less than two hundred!

It’s in the middle of all this that Dean keeps calling and saying “get a job! get more jobs! work harder! pay me my money!!” — and then there’s her mother, echoing Dean and reproaching her in front of Tina. You’d think language like Dean’s would never come out of her mouth, but it does. She desperately needs to move out — to get herself and Tina away from Babette — but she can’t. She tries to make it clear to her mother that their apartment is too small for so many people, but it doesn’t sink in. . . . She heard Tina telling Babette the other day that Hank wakes her up in the middle of the night. And it’s true that poor little Hank doesn’t sleep very well. He wakes up most nights and sometimes he cries or he’s had a bad dream and he’s angry or just making noise — and even though it only lasts fifteen minutes it seems a lot longer to Tina and it’s just not fair to her. She has her own room, of course, but still. . . the apartment is small and cramped and she probably hears every sound that’s made. How can that be healthy? And of course her mother pays lip service to it. Acts like she gets it. But there they still are, stuck downstairs, and there’s Babette, alone in that gigantic upstairs apartment. It’s hard for anyone — looking at it from the outside — to know how bad things really are.

Lena drives up. She’s in a fury. Where’s Joshua? She wants to strangle him. Where is he? Her eyes are large. Her always tense voice is strung to the breaking point on its pegs. Just drove all the way to his stupid school (does he think she has time to waste? does he really think she has nothing better to do? that her life isn’t already squeezed enough?) — all the way to the stupid school and back because he told her — made her mark it on the kitchen calendar! — that there was a “special assembly” today and he was on the program — he was performing or giving a speech and he wanted her there — so she made time for it and she went — and he was wrong! He got it wrong! The special assembly is next week! A week from today! No reason to go there today! And now her day is ruined! So where is her idiot son so she can strangle him and get it over with. . . !

Goes off.

Grete Forest says that Lena acting so nuts only confirms what she’s been telling everyone for months: they all (every one of them without exception) need to get back into “Mind Control”. It’s been three years since she was last in it and she definitely needs it again. Only six months since Babette’s been in, but she’s slipped back completely: very resistant, very stubborn and set in her ways: so as far as Grete’s concerned Babette’s back to where she was before (if not further) and probably needs Mind Control more than anyone. Even Andy, who’s so clear-headed and easygoing and uncomplicated and even has a good relationship with his parents, could use a little help under the circumstances. So he should go. Greg has no interest in it, but needs it and of course can’t afford it. She offered to send him there as a present — a couple of years ago when she had some money — but he said no and now when things are so bad that he might see the need for it she has no money and neither does he. So they all need it, but nobody’s going.

On an undated day in late February Monica is driving Lowell’s car and parks it on ABC Street, between the Liman and Lenehan houses toward the ocean end of the street (ancient yellow brick apartment house, Coffin/Forest mother-and-daughter, Limans’, Lenehans’, sliding horizontally south to north from beach and boardwalk toward Greg and Lena’s orange-brick-and-white-stucco multiple dwelling and the cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her attic apartment and on toward Coast Boulevard) and runs into little, apple-faced Finnley Lenehan who has stories to tell and questions to ask. He wants to know if Monica knows that her sister Kitty moved to Manhattan: out of the ugly old apartment house to a brand new apartment house with a swimming pool. How does little Finnley know that Kitty’s new building has a swimming pool? Kitty invited him to visit and take a swim there! What else? Knows that his mother is upset about the envelope of her mother’s letters from Ireland that she can’t find and thinks she gave to Monica for her Chronicle. Finnley never even heard of his grandmother’s letters, but now, after Kitty moved without telling his mother where she was going, his mother remembered the letters and can’t stop talking about them. Finnley met Kitty’s new boyfriend, Hap: he sings Irish folk songs (sang them with his mother) and drives a Peugeot. Knows that he helped Kitty move (thinks an old boyfriend of Kitty’s helped her too) and these two or three things are just about all he knows about Hap or “Happy” so far.

On the same or a different undated late February day Wanda Baer climbs the stairs to Monica’s attic apartment with a cellophane bag of French roast coffee beans (bought a big bag, decided to share it with Monica and David). Dark, profound and delicious fragrance (to Monica, not only the fragrance of the coffee-drinking moment and the rituals surrounding coffee making and drinking she observes in David, who’s addicted to coffee bean, coffee grinder, coffee cups (how many?) coffee aroma and taste, etc. (his favorite: a blend of Columbian Excelso and Ethiopian Djima he read about in one of the cookbooks he reads like novels, Roy Andries de Groot’s Feasts for All Seasons) to the point of worship, but also the aroma of New York warehouse regions where the fragrance of roasting coffee beans is in the air and in the stones as a dizzying, mouth-watering kind of soot) of darkly roasted coffee beans (bag opened to take a sniff?) in breezy sunlight in Monica’s green front studio.

David’s not there, so no one to make coffee or breakfast and besides, Wanda Baer says, she’s in the mood for griddlecakes in the Cornucopia Diner! Truth is it’s not just the griddlecakes, Wanda has a story to tell or, more than that, a couple of difficult and confusing things have happened to her and she really needs Monica to help figure them out.

Over griddlecakes, coffee, bacon and sausage in the diner, with it’s panoramic views — at the intersections of AAF Street, Salem Avenue and Bay Drive — of the bay and of oil-stained and expansive gas station plazas, Wanda says that she’s worried about her friend Dalia. One night Dalia woke up and realized she was alone in her apartment. Felt how alone she was. Why this time and not a zillion other times she couldn’t say, but her apartment didn’t feel like home. She thought: alone in this apartment and no one to hold. “ ‘I had to hold someone,' " Dalia told Wanda, " 'but I was alone — so I went into the kitchen and grabbed a plate. I wasn’t crazy, I knew that the plate wasn’t “someone”, but the need to hold someone (to be held by someone?) was so unbearable I had to do something (couldn’t do nothing). I held the plate tight enough to break it but it didn’t break.’ ” That story scared Wanda so much that she decided to spend a couple of nights at Dalia’s. While she was there Lowell called. Naturally, Dalia answered the phone. (Had Wanda Baer told Lowell she’d be staying at Dalia’s? Therefore Lowell obviously calling to speak to Wanda Baer? Or — what would puzzle Monica — does Lowell know Dalia? Know her well enough to be calling her? Monica doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions and is unhappy with herself for not thinking to get things clear with Wanda over griddlecakes in the Cornucopia Diner.) Dalia immediately started acting weird on the phone with Lowell. Laughing uncomfortably — nuttily — in the way that’s always a dead giveaway of all the miserable stuff you want to hide. Dalia’s clumsiness and discomfort surprised her. Afterwards Dalia’s explanation was that she just wasn’t ready to speak to someone like Lowell. Didn’t expect it and wasn’t prepared. Would need time to prepare for someone like that. Lowell is smart, asks a lot of questions, his questions are probing and he doesn’t accept bullshit as an answer.

Wanda doesn’t get it. Wants to know a) if Monica thinks that Dalia told her the story about the plate just to get her to stay over; b) what “probing questions” Lowell could possibly have asked Dalia that would make her so uncomfortable; c) what was Lowell’s actual reason for calling; d) what’s wrong with Dalia; e) should she have been able to do more for Dalia than just stay there; was she just a little bit better than a plate? And, more than anything, she wishes Monica could help her figure out her confusing relationship with Lowell. What are they to each other? What are they to each other exactly? Neither one of them ever tries to define it and is she better off just leaving it that way?

What else? The next morning Dalia woke up in a panic because she didn’t recognize her apartment.

On February 26 Monica and David are having breakfast (bacon, eggs (whether scrambled or fried not noted and, if fried, not noted if sunnyside up or over easy), buttered toast done David’s way, sliced tomato and David’s strong coffee (David’s dark but not black, in his favorite Chinese rice bowl, Monica’s light and creamy in an unusually tall white ironstone cup she loves) at Monica’s big oak desk that’s now a table.

Having breakfast in the ordinary range of breakfast hours or, more likely, late in the afternoon, after already having worked outside on the front porch.

David remarks on the fact that Monica is the one who first drew his attention to the enormous white light of February. And here it is now, falling on the huge oak breakfast table that will spend most of its life as an enormous desk. Enormous white light of February falls on white hotel china plates of food, on coffee cups and bowls, on Monica’s papers already in enormous stacks and on her green typewriter with a sheet in the roller that so far only says THE MACOMBER AFFAIR. While they’re sharing a breakfast of bacon, eggs and tomato at the oak table they’re watching Gregory Peck and Joan Bennett sharing breakfast in a tremendous tent with a roof of leafy branches, walls of mosquito netting: the “dining tent” somewhere on the plains outside Nairobi.

Monica and David don’t scribble down dialogue or sketch scenes while watching, but both watch and memorize in order to write immediately after: memory-on-purpose in order to remember = writing-before-writing.

a) The Macomber Affair was directed by Zoltan Korda in 1947. Gregory Peck is Robert Wilson, the “white hunter” shepherding the bitterly unhappy safari couple, Francis Macomber (Robert Preston) and Margaret (Margo) Macomber (Joan Bennett).

b) What is Gregory Peck’s flavor as an actor? So ideally handsome he might be carved out of walnut or maple. Does that make him a “wooden” actor? Monica thinks it’s more complicated than that. His deep and beautiful chest-and-head voice may convey the shades of unhappiness, the gravity of a beautiful wooden carving compelled to experience (and to express) human emotions, ethical conflict, to feel the burden of being Robert Wilson, for example, falling in love with acerbic Joan Bennett, married to the interestingly miserable big game hunter, Francis Macomber.

c) Joan Bennett, Robert Preston and Gregory Peck (Margo Macomber, Francis Macomber and Robert Wilson) are having lunch in the dining tent. Peck says to Margo Macomber (trying to test her?): “that’s eland they’re serving you.” “You mean,” she says, taking another look at the steaming meat on her plate, “the large cow-ey things that jump like hares?” Wilson nods. “They’re not dangerous, are they?” “Only if one falls on you.”

d) Also in the same scene, at lunch in the dining tent? “You do kill anything, don’t you?” Bennett asks Wilson in a different, harder-to-read tone of voice. “Oh yes,” he answers as if amused, “anything. Simply anything.” (Does she shoot him a look?)

e) Eating breakfast in the enormous dining tent, listening to a lion roar about one mile upstream, Margo Macomber can see that Francis Macomber is having trouble eating and that he’s anxious, so she says as dryly as possible: “you’re not afraid, are you, Francis my sweet?” “No, it’s just that awful roaring.” “Rather impressive, I think,” she says in the same dry, unimpressed tone. “It went on all night,” he says irritably. “Oh really, darling? Why didn’t you wake me?” “Impressive, but I have to kill the beast!” “Well, dearest, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

While the Macombers are still eating Peck is already smoking a cigarette. Margo Macomber says: “I feel wonderful! So excited. . . !”

A prodigious amount of useless activity with knife and fork.

“Why don’t you tell Mr. Wilson about that enormous shark you caught, darling?”

“Shark?” Preston to no one in particular and then to Wilson, “Don’t pay any attention to her.”

“No?”

“Well — my wife doesn’t always say exactly what she means.”

“You shoot a lion, Francis,” she says sweetly, “and I’ll take your picture. ‘Francis Macomber with His Foot on A Lion’s Head.’ ”

“The only thing that matters is us,” Macomber says to Margo Macomber with stupid urgency.

“Yes,” she says, her “yesssss” drawn out to an impossible length inside the enormous, netting-walled tent.

f) Margo Macomber, Francis Macomber and Robert Wilson are together again (whether inside the tent, at breakfast or dinner, outside in the jeep or on foot, hunting on the plains not far from Nairobi, not noted or remembered).

“You don’t know what it does, Wilson,” Preston says ruefully (bragging?) "for a man to be constantly reminded that he’s married to a beautiful woman. . . .”

“What it usually does to you, Francis, my sweet,” Bennett interjects with poisoned tenderness, “is what air does to a balloon.” And she starts to add: “Francis my pet, why?”, but the rest of the line is missing.

g) Scribbled down just after the film — by Monica or David (not noted) — but not made clear who’s talking or in what setting, with what background, outside or inside, animal sounds or insect sounds by day or night, etc. Seems to be an unusually intimate, naked conversation between Francis and Margo Macomber, but no way to be certain.

One of them says: “In many ways I think I’ve allowed you to live for me. Maybe I’ve compelled you to live for me. And then of course I’ve lived through you — by watching you, listening to you and so on. Sometimes it was even possible to imagine that I was speaking while you were speaking. Or that I was experiencing an emotion because you were experiencing an emotion. Have I been pretending to be alive, to be breathing. . . ?”

The other (Joan Bennett?) answers with weariness. “Honesty. So-called honesty. Solves nothing. Why is it that what we call honesty always crops up at the end of things? Never, it seems, at the beginning. Maybe even less so in the middle — when it might do some good.”

h) Joan Bennett is in her bathrobe, dabbing perfume behind her ears in the large, dark tent on the plains of Kenya. Takes off her bathrobe, walks across the expanse of the dark tent in her thin nightgown. (How do we know that Margo Macomber’s nightgown is “thin”? Does Korda backlight the scene just enough to give us a sense of Joan Bennett’s body moving inside the nightgown? Wants us to feel just a little of the acute consciousness Peck and Preston have of Bennett’s beautiful body when they’re in scenes with her?) Margo Macomber gets into bed and falls asleep. She doesn’t seem to notice that (distance between beds not noted) her husband Francis is sleeping fitfully. A night of anxious dreams: he manages to fall asleep, dreams of a charging lion, stays awake for a while in a state of anxiety, drifts off again and finds the lion waiting. Lion charges, roaring or soundless, without quite arriving. Wakes up again and again in a state of terror. How long has Margo’s bed been empty? Goes to the tent opening and listens for a while. Might be the sound of an enormous bird crying in agony. Cries out two, three, five, how many times? Or is it actually an unguarded and ecstatic human sound? He isn’t sure. Terror or something else.

Joan Bennett returns, calm and relaxed.

“Where were you?” Tries to sound stern, but his anxiety hasn’t left him.

“Out for a breath of air, darling.”

“Don’t give me that!”

“Isn’t that what you want me to say, dearest?”

“I won’t be spoken to that way!" (Too desperate to sound stern.) "I want to know where you were!” (Weaker.)

“Out for a breath of air, darling.”

“You think I’ll take anything, don’t you.” Meant to be bitter and challenging, but has no bite.

“Yes, sweet, I do.”

i) Light (or is it “first light”) of dawn on the gauzy surface of the enormous tent under a second roof of broad tree branches on the plains of Kenya.

j) “Wasn’t that the damnedest ride?! It felt great!”

Francis Macomber, flushed and confident after a successful hunting excursion (what he killed, what happened, not noted), to a subdued Margo Macomber during the jeep ride back to camp or already back at camp.

“I hate you, Francis Macomber,” Bennett says quietly.

“I know you do.”

“For years — yes, for years — I tried. . . . ”

“Yes, I tried too.”

“For years I’ve hated you. . . ”

“You wanted me to be a mouse, but things are going to be different now.”

“So this is the sinister side of Francis Macomber.”

They ride in silence or Preston’s reply is not recorded. The next words scribbled down by Monica or David are Joan Bennett’s.

“I know just exactly how things are going to be different, Francis. For years I hoped something like this would happen to you. But, now that it has, I hate you more this way than the way you were before.”

Monica and David aren’t certain, despite taking notes immediately after watching The Macomber Affair, one of them at the oak desk under the windows fronting (looking down on) ABC Street (west) and one on the front porch — or both downstairs but not together, always with a deliberately established circle of private space around her/around him) — whether k) or l), l) or k) needs to be first or second. Seems to them either order might work in different ways, though, on the other hand, re-viewing the film would probably restore a sense of inevitability to the flow of the narrative towards its conclusion.

k) Robert Wilson is having a drink in one of those tropical bars that films of the forties (thirties and fifties too?) taught us to dream about as ideals of what exactly?

Light (rest of line missing).

Peck says to the attractive, wavy-haired young woman bartending: “a little of the same.”

“A little of the same?”

“A little of the same.”

“A little of the same — what?”

“Just a little of the same!”

“Oh (as if just comprehending), your drink — your gimlet.”

Monica’s notes say there were shots of the African plains here, but they don’t seem to belong.

“Did you have a good hunt?”

“Yes, very good.” (Unusually grumpy.)

“Did you get all you wanted?” (Tone is suggestive.)

“Maybe.”

“And Mr. Macomber?”

“Mr. Macomber?”

“Last time he was in here with you he was drinking a lot. . . .”

“I left him cold sober. . . !”

“And Mrs. Macomber? Did she get a full bag?”

“Look here! What are you driving at?”

“She killed her husband! And you’re in love with her!”

“It never entered my mind.” Seems to genuinely mean it.

“It doesn’t have to enter your mind.”

Peck’s expression not noted. Also not noted what shot the scene ends with.

l) Wilson and Bennett are together (where?). Notes (not perfectly clear) seem to say that Wilson says: “he found out what it’s like to be a man.”

“ ‘The short, happy life of Francis Macomber’,” is her reply.

“Tell me: did you ever love him?”

“Yes. In the beginning. We were married in 1937. He tried to hide his weakness with his brutality — the way he treated little people. I couldn’t change him: he changed me. I saw the buffalo in my sights and I saw Francis in my sights too. It was Francis I wanted dead. It was Francis I hated. So, maybe I killed him. If there’s such a thing as murder in the heart — you could say I killed him.”

Another note about Kitty’s friend (and also David’s friend and a little less so Monica’s friend) Janet Dumas, triggered by seeing (or only hearing?) mourning doves, adrift in the oceanic space of the Chronicle. That is, notes about the same event in time (something that happened on February 26 1976, for example) are not all necessarily recorded at the same time and can therefore be separated by many pages. Other events (a film, for example) intervene or simple forgetfulness submerges observation: keep it down until it pops up elsewhere.

Monica makes an effort to record Janet Dumas' method of suicide: attached a vacuum-cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her car, ran it through one of the windows, rolled the window up against it (no further details told to her or recorded). Janet Dumas' suicide shook Kitty deeply. Inconsolable because she loved her (had been close friends since junior high school) and because she can’t be talked out of the feeling that she was insensitive to Janet's true condition. Can’t forget that she yelled at Janet not long before her suicide. Not because she was angry at her, but because she thought she could shock Janet out of her despair, breathe life into her. . . . But now Kitty is despondent herself. Feels she let Janet Dumas down: obviously (Kitty says) whatever she gave Janet was exactly what Janet didn’t need. . . .

On Sunday February 29 (leap year) Monica makes a plan with Wanda Baer: Monica has something to return to Wanda Baer (what it is not noted) and Wanda Baer is supposed to wait for Monica on the front porch. Supposed to be on the front porch, but isn’t. Space opens up for observation the way it always does when someone doesn’t show up, when we’re forced to wait for someone to arrive, etc. Monica might not have looked across the street, but does now: looks like an engagement party (name and location hand-written and illegible). Celebratory crowd of people in clusters. Throngs on lawn and porch — and there’s the halo of curly brown hair and large, pale and super-smooth face-oval of Wanda Baer’s head in the middle of it! Relaxed, laughing heartily, talking to a woman on crutches. Monica narrows her attention to a tight focus and can see that the woman on crutches is her cousin Linda, out of the hospital, out of bed and looking a little better, celebrating in warm sunshine.

David joins Monica on the porch so they can begin to think of how they want to answer a letter from Chicago Review.

“26 February 1976

“. . . . We liked IN DOUBT a lot, and plan to publish it. We expect to get it into the next issue (perhaps also with excerpts from Robbe-Grillet’s new novel; we’re still shifting space around and time for the next few issues). . . .

“Do you have any preferences as to what should be in your contributor's note? If you want to provide your own short text we would probably run it verbatim. . . . It would be nice for it to be something other than a list of publications. For that matter — no, it probably wouldn’t work in a contributor’s note, but it is something we’ve been wondering — how do serious writers work in collaboration? Draft and revision? Alternate sections? Nothing so well-defined as that? By the way, if you have no strong objections, we’ve set up your names in full with an ‘and’, though I notice you have sometimes used surnames-with-a-slash.

“We will be closing the next issue very soon, so please if you can give us a quick reply. . . . we like your work and wish you good luck.

Best,

Mitchell Marks.”

Also on February 29? Monica and David travel to Manhattan to see Michael Snow’s film ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen in MOMA. At home, the night of the film or the next day, Monica notes down the sequence that struck her most: dark surface covered with objects that are being shifted by left hand or right hand. Movements of left hand and right hand are narrated as we watch them and voice-over narration at first is perfectly synchronized with visual narration. After a while hand movements lag behind narration of movement: word and image are de-synchronized, creating a different kind of score — one that demands close attention and gives an odd sort of pleasure. After Rameau’s Nephew Monica and David share one of their favorite dinners (name of restaurant not noted, but the nature of the meal tells Monica that it might be Larré’s: moules remoulades, rillettes (an uncommon and delicious pork terrine with a coarse, shredded texture and an underlying smoothness), ris de veau (prepared how?) and vanilla-or-coffee-ice-cream-filled profiterolles in bittersweet chocolate sauce.

On what day does David answer a phone call from Kitty intended for Monica? Kitty is in an agitated and angry mood. She’s confused about her feelings towards Monica! she says and wants — needs — Monica to come to a therapy session with her on Tuesday! David takes it on himself to say no, Monica won’t be able to do that. Not noted whether David and Kitty argue or whether Monica later objects to David’s intervention or welcomes it.

A chill in the air in bright sunlight (therefore the chill becomes a property of the bright sunlight?).

Passing cousin Jo Ellen’s parents’ house on ABA Street Monica sees Themis’s car parked in the driveway.

Afternoon breezes after a morning’s stillness.

MARCH 1976

On March 1 Monica wonders if winter is over for good: sun provides mild warmth for days and this mildness for the first time has a feeling of permanence (cold has lost the sharp point it would need to puncture through it).

Grete Forest is next door, helping Lena Coffin measure windows. Two women working side by side to fix up a house: an appealing image or something else? Nicole Renard jumps at the chance to walk Monica and David to the post office 1 1/3 side streets and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 long avenue blocks north and east of ABC Street: a) because she has stories or fragments of stories to tell that can’t be told so close to Grete and Lena and b) because she can’t wait to get away from Grete and Lena and their arguing. Even though Grete is helping Lena today, Nicole says, they’ve been having the same quiet, bitter argument today and every day about how little help Lena feels she gets. Feels she has to do everything in that stupid house. Endless amount to do and no one lifts a finger — not Grete, not Andy, Babette, no one! — even though you’d think it would matter to them, considering that they own it with Greg. . . . She’s worn out by all her chores and responsibilities. . . . Etc., etc. Grete has answers for everything, but Nicole finds it all repetitious and dumb and can’t remember them.

Let’s see: what else? Just back from D.C. (visiting her roommate Sandra’s cousin). Had a great time, feels great (looks great too: waves of hair against smooth skin, honey in caramel and caramel in chestnut), dressed in denim skirt (long, flowered skirts that sail in breezes her uniform, denim a little opaque and motionless for her) and high boots, but there’s a new guy in her life (when and how they met not told or not recorded) and it’s complicated, as usual. Story is this: he’s a Madison Avenue advertising man, not her usual type: dresses a little too elegantly, lavishes praise on her too much, talks about his love for her too much, insists a little too much that she’s going to fall in love with him, even though she’s made it clear that while she likes him and finds him interesting, she certainly doesn’t love him and isn’t even attracted to him!

Greg has stopped playing the piano completely: no band, no solo jobs, no practicing. Right now he’s nothing but a full-time dispatcher for a car service! She’d like Monica’s and David’s opinions: what does it mean exactly — is it because he’s not playing? — that Lena has stopped making Greg breakfast.

Returning home along ABC Street, approaching the house where Monica has her attic apartment and then Greg-and-Lena’s massive multiple dwelling right after that, Monica, David and Nicole Renard see Lena, Babette and little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond going down ABC Street toward the ocean and Nicole remembers that there’s another problem brewing between Grete and Babette. Is it accurate to say that Grete resents the closeness of the relationship between Babette and Tina? Nicole thinks that Grete is bothered by something subtler and harder to name. She thinks that Grete thinks it isn't natural or innocent that Babette always takes Tina’s side. Tina knows she can always go to Babette and that Babette will say that Grete is wrong and Tina is right. That’s an obvious problem for her as Tina’s mother. This is where it gets complicated and where she needs their (Monica’s and David’s) advice. Grete thinks (or she thinks that Grete thinks) that Babette is creating an unhealthy sense of obligation in Tina, binding her to her in a way that makes it impossible for Tina to disagree with her in a normal way. Feels obligated to return Babette’s unconditional support. . . . Does that make sense? Is she misinterpreting what Grete’s thinking? Is it all just simple jealousy and resentment. . . ?

Little Riley Liman (Tommy Liman’s younger brother), passing with a large, realistic rubber worm and a briefcase boldly lettered LIMAN, stops to sit on the front porch bench next to Monica and show her how he’s able to add long columns of numbers on a folded sheet of lavender scrap paper she’s given him. And while Riley Liman is adding — going at it with the kind of concentration that can build to ecstasy — Monica is remembering (writing down) a forgotten detail of David’s conversation with Kitty: when he took it on himself to refuse to call Monica to the phone because her request struck him as a trap baited with emotions (can’t quite name them) that Kitty may have but Monica doesn’t, all she said was: “you mean you’re not even going to ask her?!” Kitty couldn’t know how difficult the decision was for David and David wondered if all he’d done was give Kitty a better reason to be angry.

Between March 1 and March 5 nothing but fog and drizzle.

On March 5 Monica and David are doing a number of things: a) experimenting to see if the text of AS IT RETURNS SPACE NOVEL will work independently as a more traditional reading experience, as something read while being held in the hands, resting in a lap, etc. — without what’s gained and lost (ruptured and expanded) in the idea of reading a book when grids of writing (on the faces of return manuscript envelopes) are installed on facing gallery walls; b) reading and answering correspondence: 1) reading an announcement/invitation from Fletcher Copp, 110 Bowery, to send something to “The Last Correspondence Show, Art Dept April 7-30 California State University, Sacramento 6000 ‘J’ St. 95819” (would be an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white-on-red paper folded in three to fit in a letter-size envelope if the bottom margin weren’t clipped to a point); 2) preparing to mail to Nelson Richardson at Coda a large photograph of a figure (Monica’s brother Lowell?) crossing an abandoned landing strip, taken at Floyd Bennet Airfield during the publication/performance of THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL, together with a fragment of related text from the THE BLUE HANGAR and a general account of Space Novel ideas; 3) writing a note to Larry Lille about his exhibition of toy-like wood sculptures.

Also on March 5? Pat Corcoran spots Monica writing on the front porch and comes out to complain. Complaints come out fast, slippery and tangled, but Monica straightens them out and slows them down as she listens (writing-before-writing). Let’s see: she’s tired. Only slept one hour last night and, in fact, has hardly slept the last few nights. (Reason why not told or not recorded.) Maybe her tiredness has a little to do with the school cutbacks: because of the stupid cutbacks she has to be sure to remember to pick Timmy up at 2:15 instead of 3 on Monday and Friday! So that may be on her mind and keeping her from sleeping. Wants Monica to solve this puzzle if she can: why has she gained so much weight since moving to ABC Street? Why is she so puffy? Eliminated all of her favorite junk food for Lent — even cut down on her Pepsi! — so she should be losing weight but she’s gaining.

The life of ABC Street is at all times walking, driving, bicycling, running by, in all cases horizontal, in all cases the horizontal narration of the day, headed south toward boardwalk, beach and an ocean horizon that settles down toward the distant righthand edge of its arc into an ambiguous spit of land, indistinctly lit at night; headed north toward Coast Boulevard, Salem Avenue, Bay Drive, and a dark little skyline model of one borough sprouting through another.

Andy and Nadja (last names not known), tobacco-blond-bearded, Christ-look-alike lifeguard and his tall, tanned and beautiful, smooth as syrup poured from a syrup jug (Hungarian or Romanian?) girlfriend who rent (but only during spring and summer) Lena-and-Greg’s second floor rear studio apartment with its rundown little back porch in the treetops, pull into the paved but weedy driveway indistinctly divided between Greg-and-Lena’s house and the house where Monica has her attic apartment. Andy’s ancient Volvo (its finish time-and-weather-faded to a dull, hard-to-name pale green) has a recognizable, rough sound in its engine’s throat.

Andy-and-Nadja’s car pulls up to the left (south) and immediately afterward Ellie, the younger daughter of two squat daughters and one squat son of Monica’s squat landlord who lives in the neighboring, new and ugly two family house to the north (right), pulls up with her fiancé and tries to gingerly ease her dazzlingly new and bright blue-and-white Plymouth Volaré down the steep driveway that leads into a garage under the house.

Finnley Lenehan passes with a big supermarket bag of cabbage and potatoes for Friday’s corned beef dinner. Stops, sweet and apple-faced as always, to chat with Monica. He has stories to tell, also as always. He’s met a girl — he’s dating a girl (Monica marvels a little mentally while Finnley is talking that Finnley is already old enough to be “dating”) — whose first name is Eileen but whose last name is the same as his mother’s family name (O’Hara) and who was born on exactly the same day as him! What else? He’s traveling to Ireland in August with his mother and his sister Laurel.

On a March day whose date is not noted Monica, David and Lowell are in MOMA to see Godard’s Numero Deux, a film that’s divided structurally and visually but unified intellectually and politically. It begins with Godard in front of the camera, projectors visibly whirring, talking about film-making: the machinery, politics and economics of it: and yet it’s personal because there Godard’s face is, intelligent and unhappy, narrating himself into the narration that is starting to be acted out on television monitors. Screen is split, an unusual amount of space between the images: video, film, television, all within the screen space and the central image tv-screen-size. Whatever else the title may mean, it certainly has to do with what the “factory” of the body produces and that brings into play the human ass: what comes out and what’s forced in as an act of oppression. To say that the film is concerned with the structure of work, family life, sex, film-making and presents powerful metaphors that link all politically is to say the obvious. A housewife’s daily drudgery, a husband’s factory work, the oppressive structure of family life become the “story” (the characters from the tv monitors). Sex is related to work. When the husband's day at the factory doesn’t go well sex is withheld; when he desires it the wife must accommodate him. When she sleeps with another man the husband wants to rape her: her ass becomes the focus of pleasure, pain, humiliation and punishment: the daughter hears the mother’s cry of agony (or anguish) from the parents’ bedroom. The politics of the narrative are never far away, yet Monica takes the film (whatever else it obviously is) as a personal document of despair. Unhappiness and disgust, possibly illness, speak through this film, relieved only by Godard’s love of the physical world, as always: film as a way of really being alive in a material world that otherwise is the invisible background of a lazy, worn-out human gaze. Monica also notes that in the wealth of human contact in Numero Deux there are moments of tenderness only between mother and child.

She wonders (during or afterward?) if what’s most interesting to her are Godard’s restless search for fresh ways to narrate experience, to narrate ideas along with experience, and also the way he quickly establishes a relationship between direct, personal narration (however laden with ideas) and fiction (narrative story telling), however laden with ideas.

Out of order, Monica notes that, before the film, she went for a walk in Central Park and then up and down Fifth Avenue with David and Lowell: hedges green, trees sprouting (or: trees green, hedges sprouting) much earlier than they will at the beach.

After the film they walk to 76th and Second Avenue to have dinner in Il Monello, a restaurant she doesn’t go to often: mussels in marinara sauce; baked clams; pollo a la Tuscana (with eggplant and cheese, kind of cheese not noted); chicken livers alla moda di la colle (writing unclear); artichoke with wine and mushrooms; green and white fettuccini Il Monello (preparation not noted); strong yet smooth-textured cappuccino, its darkness made lighter without losing coffee’s dark taste, its smoothness made softer by a float of whipped cream melting on the hot surface. The only conversation recorded is Lowell’s expression of surprise that he’s enjoying the oncology rotation. Thought the oncology rotation would make him hate going to work, but he actually finds himself looking forward to it.

Sunday March 7 is a wintry day at the beach. Monica, spending the day catching up with chronicling at the big oak desk, is joined by David, carrying traces of the cold beach indoors: a windy crispness. (Monica wonders later: David is not someone to take a solitary walk on the beach, so what would have drawn him there?) Reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that instead of the usual seagulls at the shore (their pencil-chalk-and-charcoal colors blended and smudged) there were the more angular terns with sharply marked-off zones of black, grey, white. And winter and spring seemed to be frothing up one through the other as a near-freezing ale of green-in-blue. A good draught of that could make the brain turn cold, crystal and foamy.

David’s come over to help Monica and her brother Lowell hang Monica’s new roll-up bamboo shades. The harsh light of March demands them: naked light without snow’s complex modulations. As soon as the shades are hung and lowered the room softens and becomes more intimate (is able to retain the inward light of its lamps). Another thing: one day in March (date not noted) Monica woke up to find that Lowell had been there and left a three foot high avocado plant outside her door. Couldn’t figure out where to put it (did she have her own desk yet?) so plunked it down in a corner of the worn plank floor between closet and low eaves door. It’s clear at once to Monica that the plant is unhappy there: knows that it will be disturbed often because Monica or David have to go into the storage space below the eaves (long, dark and dusty attic-like hollow of sloping roof beams and unvarnished planks between inner wall of room and outer shell of house) or into the closet; in shadow more than light; reaching toward the ceiling from the floor the slender stalks seem to feel the weight of their height, hunched and drooping like someone trying not to be tall. Straightens up as soon as they hoist it onto the desk, against the shades. Stops its weak and droopy sagging and inclines toward the bright light it senses on the other side of the shaded windows.

On the same wintry March day or another chrome yellow forsythia wands are blooming on the cold front lawn and Monica is outside wrapped in a velvety brown mouton handed down from mother or aunt. Cousin Jo Ellen passes (whether or not in the neighborhood because of handsome Themis, the Cornucopia Diner cook, not noted), then Wanda Baer passes, looking awful (stops to explain that she has a horrible cold she just can’t shake), then Nicole Renard’s little green Saab passes and at noon or so Monica meets Nicole Renard and Grete Forest on the boardwalk. Grete has a story to tell and questions to ask. Says that she knows someone who knows Monica and David, but probably knows Monica’s sister Kitty better. Knows him for a while, but only from a distance (to wave to on the beach) or from the telephone (to make arrangements for the children or when they chat casually before he hands the phone to Patricia, the woman he lives with — the one Grete actually knows — in a house they just bought about a mile west along the shore). She’ll tell Monica everything she knows about Jordan Pike just from waving to him and talking to him briefly on the phone, some of it correct, some of it wrong or assumed and made up as just one more story in the assumed-and-made-up stories about everything and everyone we almost-know or just see in passing, the fiction-of-everything that equals life in this neighborhood, some already corrected, some still unsolved and ambiguous. . . .

a) Grete has regarded Jordan Pike in a favorable way since a casual telephone conversation years ago: for some reason she mentioned Tina’s asthma and Jordan Pike said that he suffered from asthma too and made two or three suggestions that sounded odd but later turned out to work (what the suggestions were: not remembered by Grete or recorded by Monica). It’s so rare, Grete says, for anyone’s advice to actually be practical and useful — that that made her start to revise her mental narrative about him.

b) What was her mental narrative about Jordan Pike? Let’s see: Every time she saw Jordan Pike he was on the beach with pen and notebook or home (when she stopped at Jordan-and-Patricia’s house to drop off or pick up a child) at a table or desk with a typewriter and a beach view in a picture window behind him. Seemed to be working-but-not-working, like some stupid idea of a writer in a movie. So she thought he was someone attractive and happily lazy, striking a pose as a writer, supported by Patricia (who she knows works hard as a real estate agent). Sometimes wondered if he made money from the silly songs and jingles his daughter Amanda sang and then Tina would start singing (like “Mother of Pearl, I’m in love with your girl!”) until it got stuck in your head and drove you nuts. Could that be what Jordan Pike actually is — a jingle writer?

Monica starts to answer that she knows this much about Jordan Pike: he does write advertising jingles for a living and, she thinks, also has written some mass market paperback thrillers under an assumed name, but she’s cut off by Nicole Renard who’s inspired to talk about her boyfriend of the moment, also in advertising (as Monica and Grete know) but definitely not a jingle writer: works on serious ad campaigns, makes a lot of money, goes to an office every day (doesn’t lounge on the beach posing as a writer!) and also, just to amuse himself, writes for Kojak. . . .

Monica can hear in Nicole Renard’s breathless narrative, which has a little surprising aggression to it, that Nicole felt the need — because of the apparent similarity? — to separate herself and her life in Manhattan from Grete and her stupid life at the beach by separating her boyfriend (a real advertising man and a real writer) from Jordan Pike, an absurd, provincial parody only a hopeless provincial like Grete could find attractive. . . . Or did she get it wrong? In any case it’s lost on Grete, who goes back to her Jordan Pike story without a blink.

c) Neither of Jordan Pike’s children — Amanda or Jonah — are his biological children: if she has it right Amanda is Patricia’s child (Patricia and Jordan have been together about six years) and Jonah (who only visits on weekends) is the child of the woman he lived with before he met Patricia. Tina has a little bit of a crush on Jonah and maybe the other way around as well — because they’re always visiting back and forth — and that reminds her of the real point of all her stories and questions about Jordan Pike! Just the other day, when he came by to pick up Amanda, he looked at the yellow brick apartment house and commented that she (Grete) lives — or lived — next door to one of his oldest and closest friends who, he thinks, is also a friend or at least an acquaintance of hers (Grete’s). Her name is Kitty. . . . But now of course she isn’t Grete’s neighbor, because Kitty just moved back to Manhattan. . . .

“Yes, I know,” Grete says she said. “I actually saw her move because I was looking out my mother’s window, but I was never friendly with Kitty. Kitty was not my friend. I’m friendly with Kitty’s sister, Monica. . . .”

She remembers being struck by the look in his eyes when she mentioned Monica’s name. It was intense. Unusual blue eyes capable of looking at you with an odd and striking intensity. And — even though she hasn’t been face-to-face with Kitty all that many times — she was struck by the similarity in the intensity of their gazes. . . . His eyes are not the same color as Kitty’s eyes and the source of his intensity doesn’t seem to be aggression (as it does with her). His intensity is a little harder to read, but still. . . does Monica find it crazy that in some way she saw Kitty in Jordan Pike?

Because her notes say that she’s typing outside on a hot and sunny morning (9:30 a.m.) Monica rereads them closely and sees that, while she’s still writing about March 1976, she’s taken a step back and away from March in the sense that her notes were intruded on by the reality of when and where she was typing them. On June 28, 1976 she’s on her front porch in the heat, typing up (editing?) handwritten notes taken in March ’76. The intrusion of one reality in another or the fact of writing in two realities at once doesn’t confuse her. On the contrary, she enjoys it and even believes it’s a natural, universal fact of writing that’s ignored for no good reason, but realizes it could be confusing for the reader without some effort to separate realities.

On the hot morning of June 28, while sitting outside and typing notes from March, the crying and head-waggling of one of the two lightbulb-headed Wattle boys (whether Hank or Willy not noted) on the wide, brown-painted stone steps of the big brown and ochre hacienda-style multiple dwelling where the Wattle family lives directly across the way is like the shadow of a cloud passing across the handwritten or typed page Monica is working on.

At the same time that Hank or Willy Wattle is sitting on his steps, crying and wagging his head, Wanda Baer is passing with a friend. (Who the friend is not noted.) Monica can see, now that they’re subtracted, that under winter’s cover of grandmother’s mouton (and other layers) Wanda had been growing strangely massive: below the halo of curly brown hair and the smooth white oval of the face-mask her shoulders, arms and the rest of her body have become as burly as a Russian discus thrower’s. (Not noted: is this Monica’s first view of Wanda Baer since winter?)

This beefy version of Wanda Baer crosses paths with Grete Forest (already tanned, happy and summery, long-armed and long-legged in (what color?) shorts and short- sleeved lavender blouse wide open at the neck, like a pretty child grown up yet still playing on the beach) just about in front of the porch where Monica is working, screened off by the Rhinebeck pine and holly bushes. She finds this odd: Wanda Baer and Grete Forest pass each other with no greeting. Wanda Baer and her friend hurry by Grete Forest and Grete Forest glides by them with at least as little friction. It’s only after Wanda is well past her that Grete stops, turns and stares after her, as if puzzled. Starts off down the block again (which one is headed north toward Coast Boulevard, which south toward home or beach not noted) and stops, looks back and stares again. And then again still one more time. Turns and stares at Wanda Baer’s bulky, retreating back three times but doesn’t stop to say hello. Not sure if this beefed-up version of Wanda Bear is Wanda Baer? But still, that wouldn’t explain why Wanda didn’t say hello to Grete Forest. . . . Beefed-up version of Wanda Baer not sure she’s Wanda Baer? Doesn’t know the ABC Street cast of characters the trimmer version knows?

What else?

While Leo Romero (Andy-Forest-and-Greg-Coffin’s band’s wiry, nervous drummer) is parking the car Lily Romero gets out, spots Monica through the pine boughs and says hello. An extraordinarily pale, beautiful girl leading an everyday life, seen by next to no one. Her extreme, naked pallor needs no makeup, but she has no idea how she looks and is wearing so much blue eye shadow everything else about her is invisible. Her invisibility to herself makes it possible for someone with her extreme form of beauty to be with nervous Leo Romero. Just an invisible, ordinary girl with too much blue eye shadow. . . .

What else?

“See that that you got an early start!”

Old Rae Ryan across the way (what articles of royal blue clothing Rae Ryan is wearing not noted), leaning over the porch railing of the Regans’ house where she has a small, groundfloor back studio, chatting with a summer tenant who’s just pulled into the driveway under the tremendous elm after grocery shopping.

“See that you got an early start” is enough to launch a pleasant conversation, a pleasant way for old Rae Ryan to pass ten minutes or half an hour, talking about this and that the way a cloud pulls apart and loses its human or animal shape while crossing the sky, even more so because Monica doesn’t tune her antenna that way and lets their conversation go.

On the night of June 28 (or the evening before) David is cooking “Moroccan Chicken” while the sun is setting in Monica’s new, golden bamboo blinds and a documentary about hyenas is on tv. Monica’s notes don’t say where David got the recipe for “Moroccan Chicken” (he doesn’t own many cookbooks: can’t afford them? no place to keep them?), but he’s friends with the local librarian and has renewed half-a-dozen or a dozen favorite cookbooks so many times he feels as if he owns them: his fingerprints, his cooking stains, his pencil marks are on them for all time. Her notes talk about the perfect summer light surrounding David while he cooks in old, hand-me-down pans at the ancient black and white gas stove: darkest dark green of avocado leaves only adds electricity to the odd not-quite-lime of the freshly-painted walls of the front studio and darkest dark green and electric green together frame the bamboo blinds and the golden light that travels through them into the old sauté pans. Monica writes about the room’s green and golden harmony of summer light: simmering again around sautéing chicken in a sauce of lemon, lemon peel, parsley, butter, olive oil, oregano and scallion.

David thinks it’s likely that he clipped the “Moroccan Chicken” recipe out of the NY Times and added it to his collection of clipped-out, cooking-stained recipes stored in returned-manuscript envelopes a friend later threw out in an idiotic seizure of uninvited “cleaning up”. Later still (now?) he accidentally re-found the recipe in Craig Claiborne’s NY Times Menu Cookbook, 1966, pages 281-282, under the title “Moroccan-Style Chicken”.

            MOROCCAN-STYLE CHICKEN                 4 servings
1 lemon 2 tablespoons olive oil
1 frying chicken (3 pounds), cut 2 shallots or scallions, finely chopped
    into serving pieces 1/2 teaspoon finely minced garlic
Salt and freshly ground black 3/4 cup Chicken Stock (page 475)
    pepper 1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup butter 1 teaspoon dried oregano

1. With a swivel-bladed paring knife pare away half of the lemon rind and cut it into very thin strips. Reserve. Squeeze the lemon and reserve the juice.

2. Sprinkle the chicken parts with salt and pepper. Heat half of the butter and the oil in a skillet. Brown the chicken pieces in it on all sides and transfer them to a warm plate.

3. Add the shallots and garlic to the skillet in which the chicken was browned. Cook, stirring, until golden. Add one-quarter cup of the stock and stir to dissolve all brown particles clinging to the bottom and sides of the skillet. Cook until the liquid is almost evaporated. Reduce the remaining stock to one-third cup.

4. Return the chicken to the skillet and sprinkle with the parsley, oregano, lemon rind, lemon juice and the reduced stock. Cover and cook slowly for about thirty minutes, until the chicken is tender. Stir the remaining butter into the sauce and serve immediately.

David’s adjustments to Craig Claiborne’s recipe not noted, but David and Monica prefer the look and flavor of scallions to shallots, David unquestionably multiplied the quantity of garlic 20-30-40-fold, probably cut down on the oregano and may have increased the amount of lemon. Also: no recommendation to do so by Claiborne, but David made a quantity of simple chicken-stock-sautéed-onion-and-possibly-garlic-flavored risotto to be eaten with it as an integral part of the dish.

After sun has faded from dark avocado leaves, from golden bamboo, from the odd, living green of the walls the sky is still stubbornly rosy (refuses to fade though the eye can barely discern it).

At about midnight (of what June or July day?) Lena Coffin and two younger women (Lily Romero and a pregnant woman unknown to Monica) return on bicycles from the boardwalk to Greg-and-Lena’s massive, cracked white stucco and orange brick multiple dwelling. If there’s any conversation Monica doesn’t hear it.

Putting herself on the side of the reader (forced by the Chronicle to put herself on the side of the reader?): there are times (now, for example?) when Monica can see that her method (a method that isn’t a method or doesn’t want to be a method, dislikes the idea of a method yet is a method in the sense that, though it may be an organic expression of her nature, her way of life, her love of writing outdoors, for example, bringing naturally in its wake the intrusion of the passing event which she feels compelled to not let evaporate, the record of passing events gradually does become methodical and pleasurable in equal measure, intrusion into and digression from events by other events emerging as her true subject, her true interest in life and writing, telling the stories of the stories that tell themselves — while (not as easy as it may seem) following her instinct to ignore or discard most of what happens or is said in a day) can seem complicated (now, for example, with one season blowing through another like air and light through bamboo blinds).

Sitting outside again, typing March ‘76 in June or July ‘76, it isn’t always absolutely clear (when weather doesn’t make it clear) in which season an event is occurring. To be difficult is not her intention and she does her best to sort it out, but there are times when she isn’t sure she’s right.

Typing her March ‘76 Chronicle outdoors (on the front porch bench) in June ‘76 Monica hears the rough bell of the cutlery grinder’s truck while typing dreary March tales told to Alyosha by a woman (who she is not noted) sweeping her sidewalk on Salem Avenue: a) the woman’s daughter, who used to visit with her husband, can’t visit because she broke her leg (story of how the leg got broken either not told to Alyosha or by Alyosha); b) because of the broken leg the daughter not only couldn’t visit her mother (the woman sweeping her Salem Avenue sidewalk while telling Alyosha her unhappy tale), but was confined to her house and couldn’t do much of anything; c) after a while the sweeping woman’s daughter didn’t feel right: teeth and gums began to bother her so much that she had to make the effort of leaving the house to go to the local dentist, dentist couldn’t solve it so she went to other dentists (notes say “many” but not how many) before she found someone who recognized that she had cancer. d) Monica debates with herself after typing a line or two whether to keep transcribing into typewriter the second unhappy tale told to her by Alyosha (a tale that clearly makes Alyosha as unhappy while he’s telling it as when he heard it) on a cold, dark and windy day in March, written down quickly that same day in hard-to-read script on long folded sheets of lavender scrap paper (given to her in reams by a friend with a job at a commercial printer’s), being typed out-of-doors in flowering June. Too many unhappy March tales in June? And it’s a long story — much longer than the first — about people Monica used to know, a whole family that owned the three story house facing the three story house (in another neighborhood in another borough) where Monica spent part of her later childhood. Parents of Monica’s friend owned the house, different sections or angles of their family or families (only mother’s family, only father’s family or tangle of both?) occupied various floors or angles and sections of floors of the house.

Monica’s high school friend, her twin brother and their parents occupied the main or “ground” floor, though it was actually up one short flight of steps. Monica knows this much in 1976: her friend Alana’s parents are still occupying the main/ground floor apartment; Alana is married to a lawyer and has two children; her twin brother Alan is married and a professor, also with two children. Two elderly aunts (Thelma and Wilma) on the second floor. Thumbnail story of Wilma’s life goes like this: she was married for exactly one hour before her husband left to die in World War II and the rest of her life hung from that peg. Thelma seems to have always had a heart condition of some kind and that was the peg her life hung from. Wilma (the healthier one who’d been married for an hour) became ill (nature of illness not noted) and died in early winter of ’76, Thelma is left alone and Alyosha wonders (feeling the insoluble melancholy of it) how Thelma will get along without the sister who was her companion all her life.

A brother (mother’s or father’s?) whose wife died of cancer so many years ago it seems as if he’s always been alone on the third floor.

There’s one other person (another daughter, again not clear whether father’s or mother’s, therefore also a sister to someone?) who looks exactly like Monica’s friend Alana. Alyosha has never been able to tell this young woman — who comes and goes and doesn’t seem to have one fixed location on one of the floors of the house as everyone else does — from Monica’s friend. He says that he always got them mixed up and sometimes even said hello to one when he thought he was saying hello to the other. Monica is no help either. Now, how many years later, in ‘76, listening to Alyosha unburden himself of the unhappiness he absorbed letting others tell their unhappy tales to him (and whose point is not at all to talk about this mysterious other daughter and sister), Monica finds it odd and irritating that (so unlike herself!) she never bothered to find out exactly who this young woman is: where she fits into the family’s and the house’s layers, sections and angles.

Let’s see: what else passing in June forces its way into March being typed outdoors in June?

a) A brand new, clean and shiny basketball (so new it seems more bright and orange than it should) comes rolling quickly south to north (boardwalk —› Boulevard) along the sidewalk. Blond and solid Tommy Liman runs after it, scoops it up in front of the porch where Monica’s working and comes up just long enough to explain to Monica that this basketball is new because his old basketball was chewed up by their new sheepdog, Sally. Doesn’t say that their new sheepdog Sally is meant to replace their old sheepdog Sally killed last year when Tommy’s mother Audrey backed out of the driveway too fast and ran him over.

b) Two young women are visiting Pat Corcoran. Pat, spotting Monica working on the porch (and possibly giving herself the excuse that Monica already allowed herself to be interrupted by Tommy Liman and his basketball), decides that it’s a good time to come out and introduce her nieces who’ve taken the day (Monday?) off to visit. They’re sisters and they work in the same office. No, one of them corrects Pat Corcoran, not only in the same office, just one desk apart! Monica isn’t sure if that means that they sit next to each another or if there’s a desk between them and wonders a little why the location of their desks is more interesting to her than facts that should be more interesting.

The two sisters are happy to be visiting Pat, but they’re even happier to be subtracting days from their work-week. Took today off, they’ll work Tuesday and Wednesday, and then they they’ll come out again on Thursday: take Thursday off and then take Friday off too and make a holiday of it! The week will slip into the Fourth of July weekend that way, the other one says. . . . Yes, and then Monday is the fifth and summer will be under way. . . .

No names are given or recorded, only their complete happiness laying out their plan for the week to come. (The happiness of not doing something equal to the happiness of doing something.)

c) Little, planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin pays a short, unexpected visit: runs up the stairs, says Hi!, runs back and forth across the porch once or twice and leaves.

d) One day in June (date not noted), while sitting on the porch and typing handwritten March notes, Monica’s attention is drawn to the beautiful movements of a lightweight summer fabric in the right-hand window of two side-by-side windows of an apartment next door (in Greg-and-Lena’s massive multiple dwelling). Light fabric breathes in the beautiful breezes of June. And the next day (date also not noted) the lightweight fabric (a summer curtain?) has moved to the left-hand of the two side-by-side windows while a large, overly-bright green bath towel is completely filling the space of the right-hand window, too dense to be moved by summer breezes.

Monica sometimes has to tell herself to block it all out, no matter how much she welcomes the intrusion of life through writing, the digression brought on by something said directly to her, something overheard or glimpsed while working. Still, to get anything done, Monica can’t continually be looking away from the page. First there has to be a page to look away from and, for that page to come into being, Monica has to be as focused on the language before her, to the exclusion of the world around it, as the fine point of the pen or pencil pressing into paper.

Movement forward toward typewriter and folded scrap paper with its barely-legible, barbed and tangled lines of scrawl corresponds to earlier moment of leaning back away from written March ‘76 into living June ‘76 around her? Has to remind herself: where was she in March ‘76 when June ‘76 (where she’s trying not to know she is now) intruded?: and she’s almost succeeded in reading herself back into her March notes when a loud thumping next door keeps her in June. Has to lean away from the typewriter again — has to get up, in fact — to see that it’s thin and nervous yet oddly good-looking Lena Coffin next door, banging with the heels of both hands, straining and banging upward against the inside of the upper edge of the lower window frame, trying to get the windows of the enclosed porch room open. Banging and banging and straining and straining and making very little progress until one of her tenants, Allison Savas (short, with dark black hair, hunched shoulders and dark-rimmed glasses) hears or sees Lena struggling and lends some of the pent-up force in her arms and shoulders to the task of forcing up one frozen window, then another. . . .

On what day in March do blue-black clouds together with naked sun create a harsh, diffuse light above the roofs? An above-the-roofs, still-wintry view that can make a room cold because it’s forced to look at it. Monica’s new bamboo blinds (picked up in Manhattan (on what day?) on the way to dinner in Il Monello) mediate the harshness of that stare. The golden veil of an ambiguous season, between inside and outside. Whatever’s gold in the harsh light over the roofs is caught and stored in that dense, horizontal web of fine rods and then radiated inward: mysteriously warm, mysteriously gold and green interior: angular, vertical or diagonal branches of trees projected (as “shadows”?) through horizontal rods, cold sun forced to warm itself up there and, on this side, darkest of dark green avocado leaves opaquely against it. Taking it all in (trying to take it all in), writing it all down (trying to write it all down), Monica is hyper-aware that she’s here, in this west-facing green room on ABC Street, at this moment in March 1976. How far, she wonders, can this moment travel with her or for her.

Monica’s notes clearly say that it’s on March 9 that both snow and light are falling with difficulty through the narrow horizontals of the new bamboo blinds. Monica notes also the odd, pearly snow-light that has as much to do with the broken panorama of snowy roofs as the silver skin of a lake does with the illuminated panel of sky above it.

Notes skip to March 11 when it thaws. According to the definitive word of Tommy and Riley Liman’s mom, Audrey, this was “the last snow and the last thaw” of the year: of no help to Pat Corcoran, who uses the slippery last snow and last thaw of the year to fall down the porch steps on the morning of the 11th. Pat’s explanation: at 7 a.m., after snow had turned to rain, it froze again and the steps only looked wet but were actually slick and icy: just had to set one foot on them. . . .

Also on March 11, but at what hour?, sounds of water dripping everywhere immediately flow into the visible: rapid dripping and muscular rushing (down drainpipe, down alley and driveway): silver skin of tiny, irregular lakes or fathomless black cavities in gutters and sidewalks wherever Monica looks or walks. . . . A rushing, dripping universe of sound is, in general, eclipsed by the full-time job of looking. . . .

It rains all night, from March 11 into March 12. And March 12 is nothing but wind.

Wind blows as if it has a job to do and that job is to bring back cold air. Cold wanted to go wherever it goes in March but wind blows all day and forces it back, drying puddles with unnatural speed.

Wind and sun have an effect on one another: extraordinarily dazzling light in the alley — the narrow line-of-sight that continues for blocks — between the Sloths’ white shingle house and to its left the Greengrasses' dark, bricked-up twin of the Sloths’ house. Wind and light blow through it in equal measure, one polishing the other — a white, gauzy shirt struggling wildly on a line in the distance.

Somewhere Leo Romero is sawing in the sound-universe that occasionally saws its way through the visible, but is it in March or in June?

Typing her handwritten notes (in this case typing cold March notes in warm June) is a way for Monica to write her way back into her own life once, twice, how many times? Finds herself in her handwritten notes recounting the events of a film most likely watched in March, not June (no evidence of the passing world of June intruding) and most likely also a film watched at home, on television. Also not noted: title of film, name of director, actors, etc. (Just pure plot, dialogue, mis-en-scene in an odd vacuum of identity.) No way to look it up and retrieve information about it. No way to refresh her memory later. Her only “memory” is this re-creation (by herself and possibly also by David, who has a liking for converting film action and dialogue into language on the page).

Story of the WWII German Air Force officer “von Werra”

1) Von Werra crash-lands in a field in England: referred to in the film (according to Monica’s notes) as “an English Field” or “The English Field”, as if a field in England has distinctive national or cultural characteristics.

2) Von Werra is captured (in the English field?) by how many constables, all unarmed, together with a shopkeeper in a white apron.

3) Scenes of von Werra’s internment in a British prisoner-of-war camp.

4) Interrogation of von Werra by a British Intelligence officer:

“You should know,” von Werra says (but with exactly what tonal shading, what slight color of meaning (pride, defiance, sarcasm, arrogance and so on) Monica can’t gauge because she doesn’t know who’s playing von Werra), “that an interrogation will get you nowhere with a soldier like me.”

“Oh” (playing along in a tone both casual and flattering) “we wouldn’t waste our time trying to get anything out of a man like you. You’re right about that. We saw that at once. I was just curious about you and wanted to have a bit of a chat. . . . Just a friendly conversation by the fire — man to man — you in your armchair, me in mine. . . .”

No record in Monica’s notes about von Werra’s (the unidentified actor’s) expression; therefore no way to judge whether the British officer’s chatty technique is fooling von Werra, even a little.

5) Von Werra is transferred to another camp where, on the way back from Exercise Hour, singing a German tune along with other German prisoners walking or marching down the English road, he escapes for the first time. Two farm girls with pitchforks are the only ones to see him slip over the fieldstone wall, glide without turning or with only the slightest backward look across the distance of another English field and into the safety of an English forest. Reluctant to leave the forest? He hides in it for how long? Still in the forest, but on a slope with an English road below it (it wouldn’t take much for von Werra to roll out of the forest shade and into view), he watches (and listens to) a British solider galloping loudly down the road on his horse, seeing nothing, as if blinded by the noise his horse’s hoofs are making on the hard surface.

If the film is on television in March why does Monica again find herself leaning back from her typewriter into June? Forced out of March and out of the film (out of the English countryside) by Greg Coffin’s band, practicing with or without Greg, next door or far away in the open garage of Babette and Grete’s house near the beach (but as audible as if it were next door)? Earlier, tall and thin Greg Coffin, who’d gotten up late (time not noted) and wandered out onto his raftlike second floor front porch in his bathing suit, rubbing face and hair as if trying to wake up, wandered back into the big, loft-like front room that’s both Greg-and-Lena’s kitchen and his piano room (and probably other things too) and started fooling around on his synthesizer (not his usual piano scaffolding). . . . Monica was struck by Greg’s posture leaning over the railing, paying no attention to (ignoring?) Lena, JoJo, Joshua and Rosamond who, it seemed to Monica, were deliberately making noise (in a friendly, cheerful way) to get his attention. Sleepy but also elsewhere in some other way.

Yvonne Wilding (good-looking, slouching, drugged?) passes Monica twice: arrives in a much-too-heavy sweater, rushes inside, comes back out in a bathing suit. Smoking, starts to give Monica a mumbled reason for the sweater (says it has something to do with work, though Monica has no idea Yvonne Wilding is working) and heads for the beach to cool off.

Loud banging in Greg-and-Lena’s enclosed groundfloor front porch and ping pong room keeps Monica in June a little longer.

Landlord’s son, Kenny (squat, big-assed, near-sighted, pretty much like mother, father, sister) also keeps Monica from getting back to the too-handsome, too-blond German pilot hiding in the English countryside, by clumsily trying to hack down a sapling first making its way into life in the narrow space between the massive, cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her apartment and the landlord’s ugly, not-quite-modern two family next door. Narrow alley, which has a wooden fence running its length, is a surprisingly leafy, shaded space where David sometimes likes to put a chair and write, invisible to the passing world of ABC Street. Kenny is trying to hack the little sapling down (young and slender as it is, it doesn’t want to be hacked down and is putting up a fight) with a rusty shovel-blade instead of a saw or an axe and the small branches are taking forever to give up their sharp, painful cracking. The terrible sound of blunt human stupidity carried into action — destruction that always gives itself its good reasons — and it stops Monica from seeing, hearing, thinking or writing. . . .

6) A succession of shots captures the passage of days; days pass horizontally as von Werra makes his way across the English landscape: green or muddy hills, bogs, the empty forests of winter, endless tracts of mud, shallow trenches, stone walls, bogs again — an exhausting catalogue of English landscape features. . . .

There the figure of von Werra is in the distance.

An English farm girl (looks exactly like one of the earlier English farm girls with their pitchforks) is the only one to spot him.

“There he is! That’s him just going over the hill!”

7) Another capture and another transfer from one camp to another.

Scenes of von Werra, with other inmates, digging a tunnel. The details of his escape (listed by Monica as “Escape #2”) are lost — because neither Monica nor David made any attempt to recreate them or because the film, like almost every film on television in 1976, is created anew, created as a different film, by snipping out bits of action-and-dialogue considered non-essential to the advancement of the plot and splicing in little, connected and repetitive loops of advertisements always in the same sequence. Monica has wrestled with this thought more than once: altered by what’s added and by what’s missing, a film on television is translated into another film, but that misinterpretation is the film that first becomes our own. . . .

Scenes of the tunnel being dug are missing but the prisoners somehow dig the tunnel without the help of our watching them and somehow the resourceful von Werra (bizarrely presented as a sort of too-blond, too-beautifully-handsome Nazi Odysseus) escapes again.

8) Von Werra in a handsome, fleece-lined leather flight jacket, the sort that every boy would like to have.

Now von Werra is a Dutch officer, “Captain van Lott”, Dutch but an RAF pilot.

A complex, interesting scene in a railway depot.

“I’m Dutch officer van Lott: my plane just crashed north of here — not too far from here, actually — in an English field near the railroad track. I followed the track from there — used it to get here. . . .”

The railway clerk has his suspicions, but nevertheless arranges for von Werra/van Lott to be driven to an RAF base.

Lengthy questioning.

The handsome leather flying suit with its beautiful fleece lining seems to arouse their suspicions. It’s discussed and analyzed at length.

Monica has the nagging feeling while writing or typing that the order of the scenes (not to mention their exact look and meaning) is not certain in her (or David’s) notes. The scenes seem scrambled to her, as if the units of his progress — questioned by one Englishman after another, every one of whom has suspicions yet does nothing — a kind of amiable stupidity that the film seems to link to being English — are interchangeable.

Is it at the RAF base, for example, that, while von Werra/van Lott is being interrogated, a phone call is made to Aberdeen to confirm something about van Lott’s identity? And is it then (with his Odyssean alertness) that he gets wind of their suspicions and makes Escape #3 through a bathroom window? Makes his way (Monica thinks her notes say) to an RAF hangar and attempts to steal the experimental Hurricane Fighter “Aperture #2”. Notes say “at gunpoint”, but where did he get a gun?

9) Captured again?

Yet here he is in a pickup truck, a Dutch seaman (no name noted) looking for work.

10) There’s a gap in Monica’s (and/or David’s) notes after the ride in the pickup. Now he’s a prisoner again: one of a group of German prisoners for some reason being sent by ship across the Atlantic to Canada — as if Canada itself were a large, escape-proof wasteland.

11) Now von Werra is in Canada, on a train with other German prisoners.

A scene on the train that has to do with eating apples, recounted in Monica’s or David’s notes only in a sketchy way.

“These beggars act as if they’ve never seen apples before!” (von Werra talking contemptuously about other prisoners as they hungrily wolf down apples? If someone else’s voice, Monica can’t figure out why she wouldn’t have said so.)

“Can’t we have more heat?!”

Also on the train. Also von Werra?

12) Escape #4: others attempt it, but only von Werra succeeds: the others don’t make it off the train or are captured immediately: von Werra alone is able to slip out a small train window undetected: down the snow-slope extending from the artificial embankment built up under the tracks — one unbroken sheet into the distance — as far as von Werra can see. “Now I know where I am. This is not muddy England with its rain and its horses and horsy set and its fairytale little farm-market towns and farm-girls! This is Canada: nothing but snow, nothing but frozen wasteland that goes on forever without demarcation. . . .”

A terrible, difficult trek through deep snow in a direction he calculates to be south, toward the Saint Lawrence and the border. Goal is to get to neutral American soil. . . .

For the first time von Werra is exhausted and may find himself thinking again: “So this is all there is to Canada: nothing but snow. . . .”

A scene (barely written) that again bizarrely demonstrates von Werra’s wiliness and super-human will, this time crossing the frozen Saint Lawrence. May be a scene in a rowboat, but Monica’s (or David’s) notes aren’t clear.

Something about a difficult climb up a ladder. (Monica notes von Werra’s exhaustion again, but doesn’t sketch any of the events that show it.)

13) Von Werra’s made it: he’s in the U.S.A.

“Iverson, U.S.A.”

Captured again (what number?), but he may expect and even want it.

The machinery of what-happens-next is missing in Monica’s and David’s notes. Von Werra decides (or needs) to get back to Germany.

14) Not exactly, not purely, Escape #5, because von Werra is being helped. No longer wily Odysseus, just a German officer being helped to return for the good of the fatherland.

Across the border into Mexico.

Mexico to Guatemala.

Guatemala to Brazil.

Brazil to Bolivia.

Bolivia to Argentina.

From Argentina to Europe (details of European journey not noted).

Arrives in Berlin on April 18, 1941, is honored, decorated with crosses, etc.

Several months later his aircraft disappears over the North Sea.

On what day in March does a small, French blue box arrive in the mail: inside a French blue pack of Gauloises “Disque Bleu” cigarettes, an odd advertising promotion. Box seems to have been meant for David (a non-smoker who has no mailing address of his own), but the sender has absurdly misconstrued David’s name as “Delil” and turned his second name into “Straw”. Both Monica and David love the absurd, made-up-name “Delil Straw” and decide to file it away to use someday in a novel, Space Novel, story or chamber fiction.

Also in the mail: an announcement that “Spencer Holst” is reading in Carnegie Hall. Monica knows that she knows the name “Spencer Holst” — knows that she knows it in some personal way — that she’s crossed paths with “Spencer Holst” sometime and that that’s the reason she’s being sent this announcement — but can’t at all figure out when or why she met him and can’t picture what “Spencer Holst” looks like either.

Notes say: another cold day in March (one of many). Because there’s nothing of spring in these days Monica (from her front, west-facing green room windows?) is surprised to see what she takes to be a baby robin (because of the characteristic sweet potato “red” of the breast that — not robin-like? — seems to extend to the head) at Lena Coffin’s second floor porch feeder.

Out of the corner of her eye, in a round mirror hanging to her right, Monica sees herself typing a sentence with herself in it inside her room of green and bamboo (two wraparound smooth planes of a green that has as much life in it as the green flesh of an avocado and of the lime that’s squeezed on it and two golden grids of bamboo) smoking a pungent Gauloises Disque Bleu.

Monica observes that Leo Romero and Lena Coffin have always resembled one another or have started to resemble one another over time, the more their paths cross. Monica doesn’t say, and doesn’t know for sure, if she only means the way their black, thick and curly hair frames their oval faces, their unnatural thinness, their tension and wiry jumpiness. . . . Or is she talking about some other condition Leo and Lena increasingly have in common?

WANDA BAER STORIES

a) On Tuesday, March 16, despite the inevitable damp chill after a morning of March rain, Monica is outside on the front porch, writing about Wanda Baer. (How Monica’s dressed on a cold and wet March day not noted.)

b) Wanda Baer has stories to tell about some of her recent experiences and tells them to Monica during the course of what must be an impossibly long and slow car ride to Manhattan from their narrow strip of land between bay and ocean.

c) Early in the evening of Monday, March 15, Wanda Baer calls Monica to tell her that the last few weeks have been terrible. The reason why Monica hasn’t seen much of her and the reason why, yesterday afternoon, when she was coming back from a horrible walk on the beach — not the “walk on the beach” people picture when they talk about going for a walk on the beach — just someone dead-alive as a big uncooked turkey or capon on a formica counter, dead but alive in the wrong way, a dead, uncooked capon or turkey somehow alive — stuffed? — and buzzing with anxiety (which Dr. DaVinci always says is a sign of life, but is a horrible, uncomfortable sensation) inside a dead turkey walking on the beach looking like a living, happy person smelling ocean air and feeling ocean breezes but feeling absolutely nothing but her own dead anxiety, just a big sandbag trying to get through the sand — she couldn’t stop to talk, could barely say hello when she ran into Monica talking to Grete and Nicole Renard on the boardwalk yesterday afternoon. . . .

Not just yesterday, this horrible state has been going on for weeks. But seeing herself through Monica’s eyes — and even through Nicole’s and Grete’s eyes — made her realize that she’d better tell Monica what was going on and get her advice.

Tonight she has a car (says it’s a big one, but doesn’t say whose it is) and she’d love to drive anywhere Monica wants and have dinner so they can talk.

This is the condition Wanda Baer is in: when Monica says that she’s already made a plan to be in Manhattan tonight to meet a friend for dinner, but that, if Wanda likes, they can drive in together, leave a little earlier so they’ll have time to talk in the car or maybe even have a coffee together — Wanda Baer only hears “Manhattan” and “dinner” and says that dinner in Manhattan with Monica is just what she wanted!

d) Begin to drive (car is a big American car, as Wanda said) and cold March rain picks up again or they drive into it, heading north and slightly west. Driving slowly because of the steady rain against the windshield, Wanda Baer has time to tell her stories. Driving slowly and talking (staring straight ahead?) while Monica is listening, looking at the colorful world go by abstractly — like so many shampoo, cosmetic and powder bottles, tubes and tins, knickknacks, brushes and mirrors through the glass panel of a shower stall — and at the same time trying to write-before-writing by untangling at least a few of the tangles of the tangled order of Wanda’s stories that may really be all one story made to seem like many different stories because of all the knots in her string.

Let’s see: she woke up on Saturday and couldn’t move. Thought about getting up, knew that she should get up, but couldn’t. Does Monica think that’s inertia? Is “inertia” the right word for not being able to get up? True, she was inert, but does being inert automatically mean that you feel awful? It seems to her that it’s even possible to enjoy being inert: to be in a position and not want to change that position (not want to leave the comfortable chair where you’ve slouched to get something in the kitchen, for example): that’s entirely different — isn’t it? — from her horrible feeling on Saturday. She’s trying to find a way to make Monica feel what it was like to wake up and not be able to get out of bed. For example: where’s the line — where exactly is the line — between “not being able to” and “not wanting to”? Can almost feel now what it felt like to be in bed, under the covers, world far away and disconnected. Rest of the world (everything not her in her bed) might as well be in outer space, that’s how little she could feel it. Not warm and comfortable and cozy in her bed, but at least she could tell that her body was touching the sheet and mattress! If she got out of bed. . . is it completely true to say: if she got out of bed what would stop her from being able to walk through the wall? True, but not completely true. The longer she stayed in bed the more disconnected she felt. But also — does this make sense? — the more drugged she felt, as if she’d swallowed poison. Lying there, unable to (not wanting to) move, because she was poisoned — or poisoned by lying there? Lying there was making her turn into a poison for herself. When the self drinks too much of its own self it drugs and poisons itself? Drugged, poisoned, disconnected — all day and into the night in bed. . . . When the room got dark and the windows got dark she thought to herself: I’d better move! better force myself up, get dressed, get out, go somewhere. . . . Or maybe that’s true but not completely true either. Maybe she just finally got up . . . .

Knows that she got in the car (Monica registers the fact that Wanda Baer doesn’t own a car and wonders 1) whose car was available to her and 2) if it’s the same big American car they’re driving in now) and began driving. Driving through the world: driving somewhere (but where?), down real streets, road under her, sidewalks, houses, stores on one side or both, could be water, could be one tree or a whole street of trees, could even be a park, could be apartment houses or some other kind of big building: it was almost the same feeling she had in bed. Same, but not exactly the same. She was moving and she wasn’t in her apartment or on her mattress, but still no connection. Wonders how true it is to say that she couldn’t exactly feel the automobile. She was the one driving (didn’t think someone else was driving her, didn’t feel like a passenger in someone else’s car), she was the one turning the wheel, not crashing. . . but in no way having a sensation of driving, moving, being in a car. How does Monica explain that? Wants to know if Monica thinks that’s like being a ghost in your own life: can make things happen or someone else could probably see her car driving down the street — but can’t at all feel it yourself. . . !

She’s pretty sure she remembers actually thinking at one point, “what am I doing here?” And maybe being able to have that thought made her see that she was on a highway, in traffic, moving fast, but not as fast as everyone around her. Did that scare her? Not sure if that’s true. Not sure if it’s true either that she thought to herself that she needed to see someone, talk to another person, get out of her own skin and head (needed to stop being alone), but it’s definitely true that for some reason she knew that she was not far from the parkway exit for Dalia’s apartment.

Dalia was asleep. She’d been teaching Sunday school, her only job. Finding Dalia asleep is not unusual. Dalia may give as her reason that she was teaching and teaching exhausted her, but Wanda Baer knows that that makes no sense. It isn’t her little bit of teaching that exhausts Dalia. Dalia sleeps a lot, especially in the afternoon — when she should be awake and doing something. Wanda Baer says that she understands this very well. Too well, in fact. Because she’s been sleeping too much herself. “Sleeping” isn’t even an honest word for it, it’s more like the drugged and disconnected state she was trying (and finding it hard) to make Monica understand. It’s true that you’re “exhausted”, but why? From what exactly? More exhausted from doing next-to-nothing than from doing something. Wanda says that after a few classes, for example, like Dalia after a little teaching, she’s mysteriously exhausted, has to lie down and then doesn’t want to (can’t) get up. And Dalia’s exhaustion may even be worse than hers! But this is one thing she needs Monica to answer: if it’s obvious to her (any idiot can see it!) that Dalia’s depressed, does it automatically follow that she’s depressed too?

She and Dalia have been meeting three times a week in the Campus Sugar Bowl and three times a week they have the same horrible, depressing conversation. It always starts like this: Dalia will say, (louder than she thinks, almost wailing, audible enough for heads to turn) “what am I doing?! where am I going?! what’s the sense to all this??! what am I going to do with my life?!”: and on and on like that. It makes her crazy. Someone else would know how to answer, but she doesn’t! Other people might not know, but she’s sure that Monica does, that she’s always been like that: she needs time to figure out what just happened. Even worse: she needs time to know what she just felt! People expect you to react right away. They want to see an emotion on your face. Want you to say something sincere and intelligent, express some feeling, help figure things out. . . . She’s never been able to do any of that. Needs to take her distance. More people expect her to act normal and human, more distance she needs. Hasn’t Monica noticed that her letters are always more intelligent, more thoughtful than she is in person? Her thinking actually gets clearer when she has a chance to write! Can hear when she talks sometimes (not always) what a frozen dope she sounds like. But when she writes in her diary or writes a letter and reads it over she’s surprised and impressed by how intelligent and insightful — how un-frozen — that person is. If only she could just write to people instead of talking! Write a letter the day after having dinner with someone. . . . So, finally, she wrote a letter to Dalia. She was honest and direct: “I don’t want to continue our relationship this way. I can’t go on having the same depressing conversations with you whenever we meet. Talking to you is like drinking a little poison. You get used to it, you don’t die, but you’re poisoned. I think I’m getting poisoned by your depression. I have too many problems of my own to be able to defend myself. So — if we’re going to be friends — you’ve got to change. . . .” Thinks the letter was better than that, but that’s the idea. She told the truth, something she never does when she meets Dalia in the Campus Sugar Bowl. Figured they’d discuss the letter the next time they saw each other — and that would be a way of talking about their relationship and then maybe that would be a way of getting Dalia to see that she had to do something about her depression. . . . But of course the next time she saw Dalia after the letter was the night she drove to Dalia’s place without knowing where she was going. . . . Started to try to tell Dalia about her weird experience in the car, but Dalia didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to talk about anything. Didn’t want to be in her apartment. “I don’t want to sit around my apartment with you, talking about something depressing!” Dalia seemed happy to see her, but she thinks the only reason Dalia might have been happy to see her was because she needed to get out of her apartment! Wanted to drive somewhere — anywhere — had no idea where — and (in her crazy condition) neither did she. Where can you go at 3 a.m.? So they got in the car and started driving and she ended up back where she came from — in her own neighborhood! in the 24 hour Cornucopia Diner looking out at the bay from the other side of Bay Drive! Eating her reuben sandwich and drinking her strawberry ice cream soda she thinks she started to feel more alive. Looking across the table at Dalia (with the dark bay just barely visible — there only because you know it’s there? — can’t tell whatever lights are moving on it or glowing at the airport or on a bridge or highway from the lights that are always spread across the inner bubble of any diner window anywhere) she remembers feeling that she couldn’t just sit there stuffing her face with her reuben and soda (which were actually pretty good) without confronting Dalia in some way. So she said: “you haven’t said one word about my letter! You must have read my letter. . .!” No answer. So she’s pretty sure (after a while it gets hard to tell if you’re making it up — if what you think is memory is just the mind telling you the story of what could have or should have happened) that Dalia’s silence made her angry enough to say to Dalia that the only time Dalia ever opened her mouth was to talk about her own misery. No interest at all in the horrible sensations she (Wanda) was having. . . ! Thinks she also managed to say that when she arrived at Dalia’s — it was probably the reason she drove to Dalia’s without knowing where she was or where she was going! — it was important for her to get Dalia’s opinion about her horrible feeling of disconnection — her inertia that might even be paralysis, her feeling of being drugged or poisoned, sensation of being far away from everything and without a body, a body-less ghost that could walk through walls — a dead-alive body driving through a horrible body-less ghost-world. . . . She’s almost certain she said all that or something similar to that and that all Dalia said was, “don’t tell me I didn’t read your letter, because I did! I read your letter and I can’t say you’re wrong. You don’t want to be around someone depressed because you can’t handle it. I can’t argue with that. That makes sense. But that’s exactly why you should understand why I don’t want to hear about your depression. . . .”

Wanda Baer wants Monica to tell her how she should have answered that. It confused her and shut her up. Her rueben sandwich was all cold and congealed — it was disgusting — but she started nibbling at it again. Dalia must have noticed that (don’t they always notice stuff like that?) because she went on the attack. She said that she (Wanda) left something out, as usual: Wanda had money, while she lived in poverty. Wanda had a nice apartment in a nice house in a nice neighborhood while she lived in a crummy apartment in a crummy neighborhood. So it isn’t hard to figure out why she’s depressed, but it is hard to figure out why Wanda’s depressed. Wanda thinks now that she should have answered (but didn’t) that there’s some crazy way that Dalia is bragging about her horrible life. In some topsy-turvy way Dalia thinks her poverty makes her superior. But Dalia hardly ever works and that’s why she’s been stuck (if she is stuck) in her lousy apartment in her lousy neighborhood for eight years or more. Thinks Dalia doesn’t work to give herself a reason for having the crappy life she has! Wanda says that she should have said that she finds Dalia’s neighborhood and apartment ugly and depressing, but does Dalia? Does Dalia really? Doesn’t work — so she can’t leave — then can say she’s “stuck” there — and then being “stuck” there is her reason she’s depressed and can’t work so can’t leave and on and on like that forever. . . . Should have said all that, but she’s actually only really thinking it now, talking to Monica. . . said nothing then, just ate too much of the dead corpse of her sandwich and ended up feeling sick. . . .

Wanda Baer wants Monica’s opinion about this too: a) does Dalia glorify her poverty, her lousy neighborhood, lousy apartment, etc. because she thinks it’s some sort of stupid weapon against Wanda — and anyone else who hates the idea of living like that? Even though (or just because) Wanda never says anything to Dalia about how much Dalia’s apartment and neighborhood disgust and depress her (bends over backward not to say anything) Dalia probably knows how she feels — so she makes a big deal about her “poverty” to make Wanda feel middle class! Dalia knows that she has a tiny little apartment — no bigger than a tube of elbow macaroni — in the attic of a multiple dwelling where there must be five, six, eight other apartments and that her little tube of an apartment worms its way right through the middle of part of the landlord’s apartment — right between two of their bedrooms! Does Monica think that Dalia actually sees that as middle class? Does Monica think that’s middle class? That she’s middle class? Can your way of life be middle class and yourself not be middle class? Or the other way around? There’s this possibility too: Dalia really loves her crappy way of life and couldn’t live any other way. Couldn’t live in any other neighborhood and is lying to herself when she says it depresses her.

Wants to know how you can ever answer questions like that. Seems to her that either thing could be true and that gives her a headache. . . .

b) Monica has to answer this: is it a sign of depression or is it exactly the same thing as the impossible-to-answer questions about Dalia and her apartment and why — why really, why exactly — she lives in that neighborhood that Dalia’s relationships with men are always so sick. Always sick, insane and depressing. Guy she’s involved with right now, for example, has an incurable disease and there never has been — never can be — any sex (nature of disease not given by Wanda or noted by Monica). Dalia claims that no sex doesn’t matter, but Wanda doesn’t believe that’s true and wonders if Monica agrees with her that there’s some weird similarity between that and the peeling paint and broken plaster in Dalia’s apartment that Dalia’s never in eight years done anything about. . . .

Let’s see: what happened next? Thinks they got onto the subject of suicide, one of Dalia’s favorite topics. Dalia is obsessed by suicide. Thinks and talks about it constantly, but says that she “doesn’t have the guts” to do it. Wanda argues with her about it but it’s as pointless as all their other arguments because no matter what Dalia says Wanda really has no idea what she’s thinking. Last week, for example, she had a strange experience: Dalia asked her to drive to the campus of one of the City colleges, took her to a spot on campus and told her that exactly on that spot where they were standing a student had just recently committed suicide. Jumped from the building that was throwing its chilly shadow on them and landed here (on the un-stained pavement under their feet). Had a newspaper with her and, while they were standing there, read her a long article.

Wanda has a copy of the article in the car and gives it to Monica (“for the Chronicle”).

“COLLEGE STUDENT DIES IN PLUNGE”

“A twenty year old sophomore jumped or fell Wednesday afternoon from a ledge on the sun deck outside the Student Union Building penthouse. He died two hours later at a nearby hospital and police and college security officials have not yet determined whether the death was a suicide or an accident. They have discounted homicide. According to college security officials the student, Arthur Sypes, fell seven floors into the narrow alley between the Student Union and Valegrove Towers, a six floor apartment building, at about 1:30 p.m. A student passing by (identified as Edgar Cereno) heard a muffled cry followed by a thud and reported the fall to Student Union authorities. Security guard Luke Snell, who was also passing, revived Sypes, bleeding from his mouth and nose, by giving him artificial respiration. Police and an ambulance arrived within minutes to take the blond-bearded youth to Outerborough Hospital. He was pronounced dead at 3:42 p.m. from major multiple head trauma. Sypes’ father said that his son had suffered a head injury stumbling as he got off a train on a college-sponsored tour of Italy in December and that he’d been in great pain ever since. Sypes had left a looseleaf ring binder filled with a hundred-or-so pages of indecipherable longhand and a music textbook on the sun deck ledge. No other students were reported in the area at the time of the incident. The ledge, which is exactly forty inches wide, cannot be seen from inside the penthouse.”

Wanda says that while Dalia was reading her the article — which seemed to her gruesome and depressing — she felt a chill because she recognized the name “Sypes”! She knew that she knew the dead student! Or didn’t really “know” him but had just seen him, just sort of met him on the beach — not one week before he killed himself! — because Lowell knew him, said hello to him on the beach and introduced them. He’s the younger brother of someone that Lowell’s been friendly with since childhood. . . .

Doesn’t know whether Lowell knows about the suicide or not — or whether it would affect him if he did know. Would it depress him? Should she call Lowell? Would she want someone to call her with news like that? Wouldn’t calling Lowell be something like Dalia dragging her to the suicide spot and reading her the article? — word for word and with more animation and excitement than she showed about anything else? Would she care, would she be depressed about the suicide if Dalia hadn’t made her stand in the shade of the Student Union Building, right on the pavement that had obviously been scoured clean?

Mentioning Lowell makes Wanda remember this also: Lowell met Dalia through her (as she thinks Monica already knows). Thinks he found her attractive, but she’s not sure. Does know for sure that Lowell called Dalia a couple of times and finally decided to ask her out to dinner. Said that he had an urge to go to Chinatown. A craving for Lin’s Garden food. And for whatever reason thought it would be interesting to sit in a restaurant with Dalia and get to know her. Thinks she remembers Lowell saying that he could tell that there were interesting dark depths there and that he was curious. But then, when the time came, when he drove over to her place to pick her up, she didn’t want to go out. He tried to reason with her: he was dying for Chinese food (for Lin’s Garden Chinese food) and was in the mood for being in a restaurant, not sitting around someone’s apartment all night talking. (Didn’t say: sitting around Dalia’s repulsive apartment.) Dalia was sweet about it. She apologized, but wouldn’t budge: never eats Chinese food and listed all Chinese food’s unhealthy qualities. So, Lowell said, Dalia got her way. They stayed in and talked. But he found out all he needed to know about her from that (that she was someone who probably always got her way, one way or another) and he definitely won’t call her again.

What else? Wanda Baer thinks she remembers Lowell saying — after they met Sypes on the beach —that he’d had a nervous breakdown, had been hospitalized and still suffered from terrible headaches.

Also this (and this is important, doesn’t know how she almost forgot it!): she wants Monica’s opinion about Dr. DaVinci’s analysis and advice. Or maybe “advice” isn’t the right word. More like instructions. . . . In her Monday session with Dr. DaVinci, after the Saturday when she couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t move even in bed, Dr. DaVinci surprised her by saying that she should have telephoned. Should have made the effort to get to the telephone and call him. She should have considered it an emergency, as serious as a heart attack (or maybe he compared it to another fatal or near-fatal disease and she’s got it mixed up). He offered to call her every day to make sure she hadn’t fallen into another state like that. She was moved by his concern, but she said “no! don’t do that! it would make me too nervous to think it’s you every time the phone rings!” She laughed at herself when she said that and thought he would laugh too, but he didn’t. His tone was serious and never changed. “I want you to listen to me today,” he said. “I want you to listen and pay attention and really hear what I’m saying to you.” He said that when he looked into the waiting room to call her today he noticed that it took her an unusually long time to respond: her gaze was rigid and she was staring straight ahead. (No movement of head or eyes.) That concerned him greatly. That’s why, as soon as she came in and stretched out, he made her move her eyes around — rotate them — look here and there — almost like he was trying to get them unstuck! “I want you to make a conscious effort to move your eyes, the way we’re doing now. And I want you to remember my words and picture my face talking to you.” Then he made her recite back his directions. “Remember to move. I want you to keep moving. Move your body, move your eyes. Force it if you have to. . .” Remembers that he made a sort of pushing gesture with his arms and she took that to mean (does Monica agree?) that she needed to give herself a shove to keep herself in motion. Then he said something that really bothered her. “Of course you’re young. But that alone is no solution — and it also doesn’t account for all the energy you have. There’s no such thing as ‘too much’ energy. But you have more energy than most of the patients I see and you have no idea what to do with it. So — if you think about the amount of energy you have — the potential movement in you — and then you realize that up until this minute in my office you haven’t done anything — that the circumference of your life is really tiny — it’s no wonder you feel empty and you’re miserable!” He said that the lack of significant movement in her life had started to become physiological and that’s not something he can ignore. . .

This is not clear (to Wanda then, while driving in the rain toward Manhattan, or to Monica later, while writing, or later still, while typing what she’d written or later still?): she doesn’t see how it could be in the same session, because it doesn’t make sense, but how could there have been another session, another time after she’d been out with Dalia? Maybe Monica can help her figure it out: did this happen in the Cornucopia Diner or another night in another restaurant? While Dalia was talking, telling one of her usual horrible, depressing tales, Wanda felt herself getting sluggish and sleepy right then, felt it coming over her as if she could lie down across two chairs or on a barely-padded bench in a booth and go to sleep.

Got home that night and fell into a stupor, woke up in a strange, horrible mood, not as severe as the other time, but still with no desire, no zest for getting up. “What’s the point?” Thought of Dr. DaVinci and forced herself to get up and go through the motions, but still with the feeling, “why? what for? what’s the advantage to not being in bed?” She doesn’t remember it, but that must be when she called Dr. DaVinci and that must be why there’s another session that she’s getting mixed up with the first one. This time she must have gone into detail about her relationship with Dalia — because now she has two sets of instructions from Dr. DaVinci: a) force herself to move — her eyes, her face in general and her body, of course — and move also in the larger sense of taking action in her life and b) follow Lowell’s example and stay away from Dalia.

On what day in July ‘76 is Sylvia Greengrass, a white bandana around her thinning scrubpad of reddish hair, carrying a beach chair northward along the west side of ABC Street, returning from the beach to her little brick fortress in white beach shoes and white beach dress?

Lean forward out of the moment: into the ecstasy of language, even if it’s the ecstasy of rewriting March ‘76 notes about Wanda Baer and her dangerously depressed friend, Dalia. Unlike other forms of ecstasy, built into consciousness? Sometimes — not always — sentences cascade one into the other and then there’s a waterfall the mind goes over into a special state of lucidity — out into the unchanging panorama with its weird rotation of sameness and difference.

Sooner or later there has to be a moment of leaning back out of the cascade of writing that’s come to rest and there Monica is in July: Sylvia Greengrass returns from the beach and disappears into the deep, permanent shade of the narrow driveway between her house and the Sloths’ white-shingle-covered twin house to the north and then Wanda Baer returns from walking Bah-Wah. Says that she went to the beach with Bah-Wah and ran into Norma Rosenkranz (not the person she needed to see!) walking her ugly dog Brownie. While Bah-Wah and Brownie were going crazy digging holes in the sand together she was stuck listening to Norma Rosenkranz: searching for the job she’s never going to get, getting along a little better with her mother and on and on like that. Then (because Norma is really always horribly depressed and nuts) out of the blue she looked at the long, deep holes the dogs were in ecstasy digging and said: wasn’t it weird that the dogs had decided to dig three graves. Also: three graves, not two and not four. What could that mean? She can’t explain to Monica how profoundly Norma Rosenkranz’s morbid craziness disturbed her. Had to get away from her and had a terrible time pulling Bah-Wah off the beach. . . .

On a hot July 9 Monica is on the front porch, typing and editing written (barely legible) March notes. Nicole Renard, Nicole’s sister JoAnne and Grete Forest, on their way back from the beach and about to go up the orange brick front steps of Greg-and-Lena’s house, spot Monica behind the tall Rhinebeck pine and stop to chat. One of the three (which one not noted) says that all they did was walk, no one went in the water, can’t say why. Nicole says that it makes no sense: she already went swimming on Sunday and definitely would have been happy to go in again today, but no one else wanted to, so she didn’t go in either and now she thinks it was stupid. Monica says that she and David have been trying to figure out why neither one of them has gone swimming yet — as if there’s a feeling that winter stayed late equally in the mind and in the ocean. Fear of diving under a very thin surface of summer and finding what?

Nicole suggests that, if Monica’s willing, and maybe even David too (though she knows that he hates to be cold), they could go back and take a swim together later when there’ll be some shadows on the beach and it will still be too hot on the porch for writing. . . .

Talking about the beach and swimming reminds Grete that she has a story to tell: Andy (last name never recorded, possibly never known by Monica), the tobacco-blond-bearded lifeguard who rents the second floor rear studio in Greg and Lena’s every spring and summer with his girlfriend Nadja, has a serious staph infection (swollen lymph glands etc.) that he may have picked up (she’s not 100% sure) after he went swimming in the cold ocean last week. This too: Nadja is going to be a lifeguard for the first time this year. Surprises her a little, because she always thought of Nadja as very likable, very beautiful, but lazy: likes to bicycle and may even be athletic in her own way, but only if she can fit bicycling, swimming, etc. into her smooth and pliant way of passing the day. Lifeguarding could have been another athletic but pleasant way of passing the day for Nadja, but it won’t be because of Andy’s idiotic lifeguarding code of ethics. He thought it was unethical to use his seniority and influence to make sure Nadja was assigned to a local beach, so they’re making her travel all the way to Staten Island while guys who scored much lower than her are getting the beaches she could have had. What else? Thinks Andy told her (but she’s not sure) that Nadja may finally be willing to get married. . . .

Typing (rewriting) in the hot shade of the porch.

Preoccupied by the stories other people tell us, as if they were our own. Are our own once we’ve become preoccupied with them?

Monica makes these notations quickly:

1) Andy Forest just had his hair cut and now it looks exactly like his brother-in-law Greg Coffin’s.

2) Greg Coffin’s haircut and Andy Forest’s haircut look like Joshua Coffin’s haircut, but Monica can’t remember if Joshua Coffin’s haircut came first.

3) Grete Forest, always loose-limbed and girlish, a beautiful woman with a girlish gait, has new, sad lines around her eyes. Eyes make a direct, sad contact with Monica’s as she talks about things that don’t seem sad at all.

4) JoAnne Renard used to look a little more like her sister Nicole. Monica wonders what in JoAnne’s life has whittled away everything that isn’t blandly normal: whittled the warm and pleasing softness in her face to a trim boniness: thin face sculpts a big nose that wasn’t a big nose only a few years ago. And the size of her nose seems absurdly meaningful.

5) Only Nicole, of the three women returning from the beach, still seems on the right side of time.

6) Are these the minute changes we never see as they’re happening or are these already the visible end products of invisible events?

David decides to join Monica when she goes swimming on July 9 (first time in 1976). Truth may be: no great lover of the beach, David goes only to be with Monica and immediately finds the water icy. Iciness is so deep and central to the ocean’s core that hot sun doesn’t dissolve it. So David spends a good part of the day on the beach (Monica sometimes with him, sometimes in the water) eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking strong iced coffee.

July notes say that a gardener named Dominick Ianni was mowing the Greengrasses' two little plots of lawn (guarded by a low brick wall, spiked iron fence and gate) before Sylvia Greengrass returned from the beach in white bandana, white dress and shoes. Monica wonders how her notes can be accurate when she knows that mowing his two little plots of lawn grass is one of suntanned and wiry Enos Greengrass’s great passions, possibly second only to hosing clean the driveway he shares with the Sloths: hosing driveway with expert side-to-side swings of the hose (nozzle turned on high), then hosing sidewalk, even a little way into the gutter, as if there’s a longing to hose dirt and debris all the way to bay or ocean. . . .

Lean forward? Not easy to lean out of the heat of July (distracting more because it’s unpleasant or because it’s pleasant?) into icy (undated) days of March: no sun, only cold rain and wind for days. “On Thursday night”, though Monica already has a cold and is losing her voice, she and David are on the beach in the rain, thrilled by the storm in and around the ocean at high tide. Surf breaks over the boardwalk railing and deposits sedge along the beach as fragrant as mown grass. Feel the full force of the ocean like this: imagine that they’re in the faded blue rowboat flung out of the water at their feet, breaking into pieces what had held together for half a century or more.

On an undated day in the third week of March Monica is typing into her Chronicle a letter from Jonathan Williams of the Jargon Society, Highlands, North Carolina, dated March 15, 1976.

“Dear Monica and David,

“I wont say no to your sending me the manuscript of Green Inventory (5) (Discovery of the World/Discovery of the Word), but I will confess that there are two problems: (1) I am swimming in accepted, but unpublished, texts for Jargon, and the funding and production of these will take at least three years to achieve before I take on yet more. . . (2) your work sounds much more on the wave-lengths of Richard Kostelanetz and Dick Higgins than it does on mine. I.e., us southerners ain’t very ‘conceptual’, despite Dore Ashton’s efforts to make me seem so in some art magazine. In fact, we barely have ‘minds’ at all down here in the Big Foot Country, facts first pointed out by Tocqueville and W.J. Cash. However, if you really see Jargon as a place into your work would fit, then send ahead. I do hope you have some sense of the books I have been doing. Mason Jordan Mason, Mina Loy, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Meyer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard seem in another part of the ballpark - - but I may have it all wrong. Ultimately, I never presume to know what I want until I see it. That is a confession, but not an open sesame. . . .

“I am driving to such scintillating places as Roswell, New Mexico, Fort Worth, Texas, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Bainbridge, Georgia now, for foundation-begging, poetry reading, and seeking after two photographers. Back here April 9th.

“Best wishes,

“Jonathan Williams” (large, bold and black ink script signature)

“Jonathan Williams,” (typed)

“Director”

Long list of Directors, Advisors and Particular Friends of the Society below, a second address for Williams in Corn Close, Dentdale, Sedbergh, Cumbria, England and still one more address, a business address in Millerton, N.Y.

On another undated day in the third week of March Nelly X knocks on Pat Corcoran’s front porch door and then has trouble getting directly to the point: that is, she’d like to know if, despite the cold weather, Timothy Corcoran would like to come out and play with her son, Jimmy. Does Nelly X invite Timothy Corcoran over to the X/Kropotkin house nine blocks away? (Not said or not heard.) Stands awkwardly in the open doorway, letting cold air blow in and waiting for Pat Corcoran’s response, but Monica fails to record it.

Air like January, bird cries of March.

March 19 is a warm and comfortable day for working out of doors and Monica, though she still has laryngitis, is on the porch, writing. (No outdoor typewriting — no transcription of earlier handwritten scrawl into typewriter — until warmer weather.) Doesn’t get far into whatever it is she’s working on (not noted) when she hears Joan Regan — wheeling a chocolate brown baby carriage back and forth along her side (the west side) of ABC Street — calling up to old Rae Ryan sitting tranquilly on the Regans’ porch, waiting for the world to deposit something, as it always does.

“A terrible week, wasn’t it?”

“Awfully cold, yes.”

Street takes its time breaking through the moment and then Rae Ryan may see a little more clearly that Joan Regan isn’t just strolling back and forth, she’s wheeling a carriage. . . .

“Is that the little girl. . . ?”

“Yes, Fionnuala’s second. . . .”

From where she’s sitting (because of the pine tree or the holly bush or because of light and shadow) Monica can’t see old Rae Ryan at all and can barely see Joan Regan wheeling Fionnuala’s chocolate brown carriage.

“And just how old would she be now, Joan?”

“Well, Rae, she’ll be four months on April fourth, I think. Let’s see: December, January. . . yes, Rae, I think four months in April is right. . . .”

“Not quite four months yet, then. Let’s not take two weeks away from her already, Joan,” and she laughs. But Joan Regan, who’s much closer to Rae Ryan than Monica, doesn’t seem to hear her clearly, as if Rae Ryan’s words traveled directly across the street, over her head, missing her entirely, and she answers irrelevantly: “Yes, they had to get some groceries, so I’m watching her.”

While hearing what’s traveling her way from across the street Monica is looking at what’s near at hand:

Light on pine needles (does light on = color of?)

Light on leaves that are green all year.

Light on leaves and light on needles don’t yield the same green, but difference in the two greens is not noted here.

Looking at light on leaves and on needle-leaves and in some way trying to separate leaf masses from the light on them is it possible to still be listening — to really tune herself to listening? The street seems more silent, though it’s possible that it isn’t a question of looking-replacing-hearing, but simply that Joan Regan and Rae Ryan have stopped talking and are just existing for a little while in the warm day.

The universe of sound seems to have reorganized itself around Monica’s looking, almost the way it does around someone indoors (even with windows open): sound of human voices, sound of bird songs (rarely a complete song, usually a string of smooth or barbed wire clipped to a longer or shorter length) spin together in the air and human hearing has to drift out to it through venetian slats, into the warm breezes of middle air where voices are comfortable traveling.

Monica notes that we hear birds far more often than we see them. They populate our sound world but always surprise us in our visible world.

Reminds her to wonder: what was the large bird she spotted earlier on the 19th in a tree on Coast Boulevard? A large grey bird with a stiff tail at a severe angle. Reminds herself also to ask David if he can find out what she saw. The kind of puzzle-solving or detective-work by thumbing through reference books that David relishes.

At what time on the same warm March day does Monica hear Nelly X’s voice? And, only seconds after hearing Nelly X, Nelly X spots Monica and joins her on the porch or (not clear in Monica’s notes) Monica descends the short flight of steps and stands with Nelly X directly in warm sunlight on the sidewalk where winter is still stored in and under the yellow-grey paving blocks.

Nutty as ever or even nuttier? Song of vague yet obsessive worries (usually about handsome seven-year-old son Jimmy) escalates through endless loops and repetitions into a boring (unbearable?) shrillness. Monica can only take so much of it, but in some way feels obligated to listen to some of it. Chronicle, almost always a source of something like ecstasy for Monica, has its obligations that are not at all ecstatic yet may lead to (are a necessary part of?) ecstasy.

Notes also say “high-pitched and dry” and “a sweetly sickening little girl monotone”.

Let’s see: this is the story — story made up of nothing but worries — that Nelly X needs to tell about handsome little Jimmy (looks something like Troy Donohue): the other day Jimmy came home from school complaining (crying?) that he had no friends in class. That upset Nelly so much (remembering how she felt ostracized and isolated as a child) that she insisted that she and husband Bill Kropotkin visit Jimmy’s teacher and question her about Jimmy’s problems at school. Doesn’t Monica agree that any parent, seeing her child shunned and rejected and upset enough about it to cry to his mother, would do the same thing? Wouldn’t Monica want to know why other children don’t like her child? Try and get to the bottom of it right away? Wouldn’t she feel that her son’s teacher had some responsibility and needed to be questioned? and needed to see also that there were concerned parents. . . ?

And Bill? What does Bill think? Now that she thinks about it, Monica says, she hasn’t seen Nelly X’s husband, Bill Kropotkin, for a long time. (Nelly X’s husband Bill is of course not a member of the “X” clan, he’s a scholar who’s fallen out of the safety of the academic tree and now does this and that to help support the family and whose gloomy, somewhat angry face always has dark shadows he can never seem to shave out of their deep furrows. Nelly X may or may not call herself “Nelly Kropotkin”, but Monica’s known the X’s too long for her to think of Nelly that way.)

Bill is unconcerned. Bill Kropotkin is Bill Kropotkin and has always been Bill Kropotkin and is unconcerned about whether his son is getting along with his classmates or about anything else. His only concern, as usual, is with trying to turn his Fourier articles into a publishable book. The Anarchist Press has shown interest, but that was a year ago. Someone there read one of Bill’s articles in a scholarly journal and thought Bill had a fresh perspective, but it’s taking him forever to get it all together into book form. Never stops doing research, never stops piling up notes, and that’s why no one ever sees him. He’s home right now, indoors, up to his neck in paper on a day like this, patching together his notes on Fourier and Proudhon instead of spending the day outdoors with his son. . . . There’s no question that Bill’s unemployment compensation will run out before he submits a manuscript to the publisher. Not that the book’s going to earn anything. . . ! Bill’s been lost all his life in a period that interests very few people: the mid-nineteenth century when Communism was being hatched and there were other, secondary figures (the forgotten, somewhat cracked ones that Bill’s obsessed with) who split off from Marx and the others because they were more humanistic or romantic or utopian or because they were mystics or anarchists: that’s where her husband, Bill Kropotkin, really lives. In real life he applied for one of those grants that he never gets, his unemployment will run out and he’ll be driving a cab again this summer. . . .

And did Bill ever go with her to see the teacher?

Yes. She got Bill to go, but then of course the teacher said that she couldn’t imagine what Jimmy was talking about. Not true that he has no friends. Certainly not “ostracized”. In fact, he’s very popular and always seems happy and mischievous. So now she’s worried because Jimmy wanted her to think he’s as lonely and miserable as she was when he isn’t. . . .

Monica may be in MOMA on March 19 to see an exhibition of works by an artist who interests her or (more likely) to see a film, but neither film nor artist is noted. Her only notes are about a few things she observes in the MOMA sculpture garden (where already, on this warm March day, there are café tables and chairs):

a) Two people (gender not noted) at a garden café table and on the table: oranges (being sectioned and eaten), bagels (too pale a caramel to be properly baked or toasted), green bottles of beer (number not noted).

b) Beautiful New York light: at this afternoon hour (what hour exactly not noted) sun along the upper edges of buildings only, absorbed and softened by subtly different stone and reflected with different degrees of brilliance by various strips or squares of metal, glass, etc., depending on angle, composition, lack of transparency. . . and framed to make someone in the garden (or garden café) encounter the street as a real, changeable street but also as something designed into the museum’s architecture as one more aesthetic experience (and in that sense pre-experienced for you before you can experience it yourself). In Monica’s view, for things to be really random they have to be more of a mess: that is, chaos framed for viewing is already something different from chaos. (It isn’t news to anyone that artworks in museums are a little like zoo animals.)

c) And yet: there across the way from the sculpture garden in the (what story?) window of a handsome town house on W. 54 Street, an elderly woman wrapped in something beautiful in a deep chair with a tall green back is being served (what?) on a tray, just visible through distended reflections.

d) Helene, pretty blonde schoolteacher and MOMA café regular Monica runs into, generally with Helene’s little circle of café regulars, whenever Monica stops in to have a cup of coffee and a slice of maple walnut layer cake in the MOMA café: at an outdoor table (somewhat unusual for Helene not to be indoors) with a guy who’s just her type (blond, lanky, a little younger than her, and with something hard-to-put-a-finger-on that’s slightly off). Helene is wearing blue eye shadow. Helene’s blue eye shadow interests Monica more than anything else that she can see or hear in MOMA. Does the magnetic or clustering principle of events demand that Helene (once she made the decision to wear eye shadow at all on March 19, 1976) put on blue eye shadow? Also blonde, but a little more or a little less than twice as old as Lily Romero and nowhere near as pale or as strangely beautiful. An attractive, not-quite-middle-aged blonde schoolteacher whose ever-so-feminine voice spreads a sort of perfumed powder in the air around her and through her very nice, very feminine clothing and personality: a fragrant powderpuff personality, yet there’s always something odd about the men she’s with and there are hints of a more darkly shaded life outside her daytime life of teaching and museum-going.

e)     1) Now sunlight has retreated (to a degree that’s only measurable after the moment has already occurred) to tile or slate rooftops only: sunlight so delicate, so transparent it’s barely a brushed-on wash of egg thinned with water.

        2) Four people (gender not noted) arrive, compose themselves around a small café table and immediately are in the thick of a conversation in Swedish.

        3) The woman (a MOMA café regular) Monica and David have always referred to as “the Slavic woman” without actually knowing if she’s Slavic makes an appearance in the garden café for the first time (for Monica) in 1976. Monica hasn’t seen her for a long time, now here she is, looking handsome, her beautiful chestnut hair pulled back and profoundly gleaming, suggesting — together with her intelligent good looks — a fragrance and mystery that may not be justified, not at all showing to the world the money-worries that Monica knows she has. With her a handsome, chestnut-haired man who could be her twin and therefore, to Monica, becomes “the Slavic man”.

        4) Two young men excitedly looking through a New York restaurant guide (which guide not noted or Monica is seated too far away to read its cover). One of them (Germanic accent?) points to a listing in the guidebook and says: “All the drinks you can drink for only $7.75!”

f) Not indicated why Monica is still in MOMA late enough to see that, at night, on March 19, the sculpture garden is so grey and bare she’d never know that just short hours earlier it had been warm and blooming with human life: the miraculous and absurd infinity of conversation and the imaginary biographies of those we don’t know at all or may know completely in one way but not at all in others.

This is not clear to Monica: leaning in or leaning out? Typing March 19 and March 20 notes in June, July, possibly August and leaning absolutely forward into reading handwritten March notes, editing them, rewriting, translating them into typewriter and in that way reading and writing her way completely inside March — only leaning back out into June-July-August if someone or something jerks her out of March. Or, something having jerked her out of March into the warm season around her (maybe just having leaned away from scrap paper and typewriter to take a break and look around), she’s completely in summer of ‘76.

For example: notes don’t say whether Monica meets Nicole Renard on her porch, on the sidewalk in front of her porch, on the boardwalk or somewhere else. Nicole seems more dressed for a cool day in March than for any day in August, but Monica knows that the evidence of Nicole’s clothing is inconclusive. Let’s see: from the ground up: beautiful brown suede boots, blue-on-white or white-on-blue long cotton skirt, hip-length belted blue suede jacket, oversized blue canvas shoulder bag, wave on wave of honey-brown hair with lines and dashes of gold combed through it. Says she was looking for Monica because she has two stories to tell her:

1) She’s flying down to Bermuda, possibly even tomorrow. Her mother, Mildred, is getting divorced after eight years of marriage to Klaus, in some ways more of a business partnership than a marriage. She wanted to visit Mildred a month ago in London, but Mildred said no, not right now, the time’s not right, she’d explain it later, etc., etc. Nicole thinks that Mildred didn’t want her to come to London because (though she’d never admit it) she’s self-conscious about the age difference between herself and her new boyfriend. It’s no secret that she’s been living with him — she’s not embarrassed about that — if anything she seems to want her (Nicole) to know how much better she’s feeling since she’s been living with this new what’s-his-name, how wonderful friends say she looks, how youthful, how glowing, blah blah, since this guy. But the one thing she does seem self-conscious about is the fact that he can’t be more than a year or two older than Nicole. So it’s Nicole’s opinion that Mildred made her wait until she (Mildred) went to Bermuda where there’d be no chance to bump into this guy whose name Nicole really doesn’t know . . . .

2) The two stories have a common thread in this way: she’s going to Bermuda not just to see her mother: she’s using Mildred’s divorce and the trip to Bermuda to get away from her Madison Avenue executive! She desperately wants Monica’s advice about whether or not this is the right way to handle it. There’s no question that she’s running away from him, but at the same time that she’s running away from him she gave him her Bermuda telephone number, hoping (is this nuts?) that he’s intelligent enough or at least sensitive enough to get the meaning of the deliberately mixed signal she’s given (the absurd “no” hidden in the “yes” of being given the number where she can be reached by the woman who’s obviously trying to get away from you). Monica knows how much she likes his company, so why is she running away from him? Yesterday, for the first time, their relationship became sexual. She knew that sex was inevitable and in some way she was dreading it. How long could a relationship that isn’t simply a friendship go on without it becoming sexual? Even though she knew it wouldn’t be good. This may sound stupid and it may be awful in its own way, but it’s true: he’d spent so much money on her, made so many grand, expensive gestures, “wined and dined” her in the best restaurants, taken her to this opening and that opening (took her to opening night of the Joffrey last week) etc, etc. that that added to the inevitability of sex. And she likes being with him. He’s intelligent, he’s entertaining, he’s not a child, he’s a man of the world with an important job that he takes seriously, yet there’s something. To like a man, to enjoy his company and spend as much time with him as if he were your boyfriend (maybe even to think of him as your boyfriend) but to know that you really aren’t attracted to him and don’t want to sleep with him — and at the same time to be aware that he wants much more than that from you, that he’s obviously attracted to you and is dying to sleep with you, may even be in love with you, whatever his idea of “you” is — when one person has that for another and the other feels none of that, isn’t that a horrible, doomed situation? He wants to be physically close, longs to get into you (and whatever it is he imagines you are) just the way you don’t want to get close to and into him.

And it’s awkward and terrible to like everything about a man but know that you’re completely un-attracted and that the sex that’s impossible to avoid without ending the relationship is going to be clumsy and awful. The difficult question is: what’s the reason for this disconnection? Does Monica know? She thinks she’s been able to isolate something and wants to know if Monica thinks it makes sense: in the midst of everything else there’s an impossible-to-explain note of inhibition in him: the one thing that may not matter any other time (someone else might not even notice it), but that’s impossible at the moment that (for her) has to be relaxed and playful and happy. It’s not the tenderness that other women talk about that she craves in sex: it’s the sense that it’s no big deal — no more serious than if they were two children playing in the water. . . . With her Madison Avenue guy it’s the wrong kind of seriousness and the wrong kind of intensity, if Monica knows what she means. It feels as if he’s reading too much meaning into the moment and it makes her self-conscious and uncomfortable. It’s as if she sees sex as a comedy and he sees it as an opera, maybe even a tragic one. . . . Is she making herself clear? It’s such a subtle sensation that it’s hard to put into words.

There’s this too: he doesn’t leave her alone. Yesterday morning, for example, between 9 a.m. and noon, he called her twenty-one times! And there have been times that have been even worse. She’s told him more than once that it bothers her, that she finds it weird, but it doesn’t stop him. So her mother’s divorce is coming along at a perfect time: she’ll go swimming, she’ll sunbathe on the beach and at Mildred’s pool, she’ll be alone and she’ll have time to figure out what to do. . . .

Monica’s notes say clearly: at 5:15 p.m. on August 4, while typing the March Chronicle, (hidden behind the dense boughs of the tall Rhinebeck pine), she sees (just below her in the sunbaked, weedy driveway) Greg and Andy enjoying working on Greg’s old car together (make, model, not even the color are noted). Happier hunched and banging away under the hood than they ever seem during band practice in Babette’s open garage. And a little later starkly pale (white as meringue) and strangely beautiful Lily Romero adds to Greg and Andy’s pleasure working together on Greg’s old car by bringing them tall glasses of iced tea to sip as they work.

Monica wonders: does her August note about Greg and Andy (that is, knowing for sure that she made this quick sketch of Greg and Andy while leaning back out of her immersion in March notes) prove that she ran into Nicole Renard and heard her two long stories in August rather than in March?

Out of order: may be the same thing as saying that it’s the natural order of the Chronicle to find a detached bit of fabric from someone’s story sewn in later for all sorts of possible reasons (leaning into/leaning out of the written page or the surrounding moment, lengthy intrusion of passing events, digression that develops its own need to be told, etc., etc.). Monica could always go back — could go back now, for example — and re-attach the detached bit of fabric to the time and place where it belongs, but why? Here it drifted and here it stays. Monica believes that to make the Chronicle orderly in this way would be to create a more serious dis-order.

Lean back into March immersion. Notes say that “last night” in MOMA the sculpture garden was “balmy” (spring into summer on the skin), yet grey and wintry to the eye (nothing blooming). Drive back from Manhattan toward the beach through the between-zone of Brooklyn and at the beach a black and gold world is rippling: dark gold moon that’s perfectly round in a black-within-black sky ripples in threads through black ocean and threads of black cloud can be found in the moon and all of it coursing (its cold spiciness arising exactly from what?) through Monica’s hair, north in waves toward the bay, where it dies before reaching Brooklyn.

“Out of order” too? On the same night that Monica and David are in MOMA Wanda Baer is in Chinatown with her West African friend, Abebi, who changed her name from “Ababi” when she married a man whose last name is Ahwesh because she liked the sound of “Abebi Ahwesh” more than the sound of “Ababi Ahwesh”. During the drive home Wanda Baer describes their dinner in Shanghai Town like this: only the spring rolls were perfect: the spicy eggplant, the Hunan-style lamb with spicy scallions, the crabs in Hoi sin sauce were all horribly disappointing. Not the way she remembered it at all. Why did the food seem so delicious the night she was there with Monica and David and so lousy tonight with Abebi? One other thing: she’s looking forward to tomorrow when her French friend (doesn’t say her beautiful, secretive, delicate and hyper-sensitive French friend, Cristalene) will be visiting.

Must be August?

Monica (while writing on her porch) records the appearance of one of the seldom-seen Arlington sisters, all three rather small, dark-haired, a little hunched and very hard to tell apart, knowing them only by seeing them from across the street — coming or going and sometimes only peering cautiously out from the entryway, as if from the mouth of an underground burrow. The three Arlington sisters live in the righthand (northernmost) house of a long row of not-quite-new attached houses, partly brick and partly shingle. The only sister who it’s at all possible to distinguish from the others is the one Monica sees now, the one who works. At about 5:30 p.m. on an undated day in an unidentified month that must be August the Arlington sister who works returns from work wearing nothing more than a pale blue cotton skirt and darker blue jacket.

On Thursday March 18 Fayette Hickox of The Paris Review calls with two stories to tell and has a long conversation with David:

1) George Plimpton had to go to Jamaica (reason not given or not recorded), won’t be back in town till some time in April and wanted Fayette to call and make sure that Monica and David could schedule a lunch meeting at his townhouse to sort out the format of THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL portfolio. David doesn’t tell Fayette that Monica has laryngitis and wouldn’t be able to meet George in March in any case.

2)   FH: “By the way, I have a piece of information for you.”

      D: “You have a piece of information for me?”

      FH: “Yes. I suppose you could call it that. A piece of information for you and for Monica. It might be considered ‘good news’ or it may just be a piece of information that could be of interest to you or you could actually take it as a message passed to you through me.”

      D: “Yes?”

      FH: “Do you know someone named Dorothy Dorm?”

      D: “No, I don’t ‘know’ Dorothy Dorm, but I have some idea who she is.”

      FH: “Do you know that she runs an interesting little magazine called So What? Do you know it?”

      D: “I’m aware of it, yes.”

      FH: “Well, I was in someone’s loft for one of those things you could call an ‘event’ but actually just feels like a party and a young woman came up to me and introduced herself as Dorothy Dorm and somehow she seemed to know that Paris Review was planning an art portfolio of THE BLUE HANGAR and that we’d already published an interesting story of yours and she made it seem that speaking to you was urgent. . . .”

      D: “But what for?”

      FH: “I don’t know exactly. All she said was that she’d been trying to get in touch with you — couldn’t find any of the usual ways to get in touch with you directly — and begged me to give her your telephone number. But naturally I said I felt uncomfortable about doing that without your permission. Do you want me to give her your number? Do you have some objection?”

      D: “No particular objection, no.”

      FH: “She said she had some manuscripts of yours. Is that true? Does she have some manuscripts of yours?”

      D: “True and not true. She has something, but not much.”

      FH: “Have you noticed how she seems to have a way of getting these major figures for her magazine? I guess you have to give her credit. . . .”

      D: “Do you know anything about her history?”

      FH: “No. Nothing. She seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. One day there was no Dorothy Dorm and the next day there was nothing but Dorothy Dorm. And she comes on strong. So What? hasn’t been around very long — yet, as I say, she’s published all these important figures in it: Rauschenberg and Cage and so on — and I know for a fact that she just flew out to Arizona and persuaded Paolo Soleri to give her something substantial. And now she’s pursuing you. . . ! And yet she comes on as just one more smart but noisy girl from Roslyn. . . .”

      D: “Is the efficiency of unencumbered ambition the same as what people call ‘will power’?”

      FH: “Well, that may be true, but I didn’t know that when I met her. I didn’t know anything about her. But I think I felt that. I felt that she was looking at me solely as a path to something (you!) — that she saw me as a potentially useful implement — and it certainly doesn’t make her particularly pleasant to deal with. Not very appetizing in my opinion. . . .”

After David’s conversation with Fayette Hickox on March 18 Monica has to remind David that he already knew something about Dorothy Dorm and So What? that Fayette Hickox obviously doesn’t know, that David probably forgot and that she (Monica) may have forgotten also, but that the Chronicle can’t forget. (Chronicle is her memory and she goes to it instead of trying to “remember”.) Not sure when exactly (didn’t copy down the date), but David once recounted to her (expressly for the Chronicle) a telephone conversation he had with Larry Lille when (for reasons not remembered or recorded) Dorothy Dorm’s name came up, possibly the first time David ever heard of her. Chronicle says that Larry Lille had a story to tell about Dorothy Dorm: when Dorothy Dorm first arrived in New York (can’t remember from where) she already knew exactly what she wanted and went after it aggressively. Came armed with a pretty accurate list of who to seek out for advice on how to get connected, how to get a magazine started, how to advertise herself, how to make a few quick ripples in the downtown art pond, etc., etc. And one of the people she made a beeline for was Edgar Zacharias (not himself and not Ralph Waldo Rice). That told him that she was well-informed about who mattered: who had had (probably still had) that same kind of ambition. Wonders how many others reacted the way Edgar did (apparently not too many!). He couldn’t be bothered. Treated her as a nuisance, a tourist. “If I gave that kind of advice to everyone who asked for it. . . .” Chronicle says that Larry Lille said that he had to admit that it wasn’t uninteresting to stand back and watch their little dance: ridiculous buzzsaw of undisguised ambition and absurd posture of self-importance. And he knows that Edgar was surprised that he miscalculated to that extent, because later, when she actually succeeded in making So What? a big deal, Edgar had the nerve (the opacity?) to submit a manuscript to her — and then was nuts enough to be shocked and furious when she sent it back!

Monica comes across another fragment of David’s conversation with Larry Lille later or (more likely) David’s memory of his long-ago conversation may be re-awakened by Monica’s fresh chronicling of it and he adds this: Larry Lille asked: less nutty or more nutty? More opaque or less opaque? Possible to say: “just Edgar being Edgar”: or would David say it exceeds even Edgar Zacharias’s standard of Edgar-Zacharias-ness? Could be before Dorothy Dorm predictably rejected Edgar’s manuscript, but he thinks it may actually have been after the manuscript rejection: Edgar Zacharias suddenly remembered that, though he’d brushed Dorothy Dorm off as a vulgar, social-climbing out-of-towner, he’d actually found Dorothy Dorm somewhat attractive and saw no problem with calling her up and asking her out (to do what not stated by Larry Lille, not remembered by David or not noted by Monica). Rejected again, of course, and more or less shocked and furious than before? Or (Edgar being Edgar) hardly noticed and on to the next anthology, next seminar, next trip abroad, next brilliant graduate student. . . .

At about ten a.m. on a chilly (undated) March day Monica is writing in a porch rocker in the southernmost corner of the porch to get some sun: well behind the Rhinebeck pine but not in its shade (sun slanting in from the ocean, under the deep porch overhang).

Late in the afternoon of a hot (undated) August day Monica is working (typing March notes?) in the same, southernmost corner of the porch (not far from Pat Corcoran’s front door), but a little closer to the Rhinebeck pine in order to be in its shade.

Typing her March Chronicle in August Monica finds a notation that isn’t clear but can’t think of the right person to straighten it out. Sketchy notation seems to say that at the moment of typing March ’76 in August ’76 Kitty’s wedding, which had been set for late October, is being postponed till the following July. Makes a note to a) get an explanation for the delay and b) find someone who can confirm the accuracy of these dates.

Porch life is beginning next door in Greg-and-Lena’s house: on the vast, raftlike second floor front porch running the width of the massive house; on the tiny groundfloor stone platform leading to the porch enclosure where pingpong is played; and on the small, run-down porch attached to the second floor rear studio. The massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her attic apartment, by contrast, only has the single, broad “groundfloor” front porch (up a flight of six grey board steps), shaded by pine, holly bush, etc. A man and a woman (identities unknown to Monica) are on Greg-and-Lena’s second floor front porch with tall Andy Forest (in jeans and sleeveless white undershirt): sunlight on the bare, muscular arms of Greg’s buddy and band-mate, Grete’s husband, guitarist-carpenter-and-fisherman. Enormity of the ocean — even though it’s at the far end of ABC Street — shines behind everything: all human figures on all porches and everything else. Enormity of ocean’s cool and spicy aroma as well.

Monica is alive — looking, breathing, recording, feeling air on skin — on this March day in 1976, trying to quickly sketch the elements of this instant of life.

What else? Lena Coffin, thin and plaintive, appears just long enough (on the second floor porch?) to cough and to tell Monica that she has bronchitis.

In the short time Lena’s on the porch talking to Monica (with difficulty, while coughing) Greg pops out with a younger man who looks oddly like him (Greg), at least in the quick double/profile Monica glimpses: two tall, lean men with angular-but-not-unfriendly faces. Pops back in at once — directly into the Coffins' spacious (loft-like?) kitchen that’s also their livingroom, diningroom and Greg’s piano room — as if Greg didn’t expect to find Lena on the porch, coughing and talking to someone (invisible to Greg) down below. After Greg’s back inside Lena adds that she wonders if Monica has an opinion on whether or not these two facts are related: 1) Greg has pretty much stopped working, stopped playing with the band, stopped playing solo, and it’s hard to figure out what in life Greg does want if he no longer wants that and 2) she’s been sick an awful lot lately and hasn’t been sleeping. Monica knows that Lena doesn’t want an answer and knows also that if she said even a little of what she’s thinking Lena would never tell her anything again.

On an undated day in March Monica pauses at the intersection of Salem Avenue and ABA Street to look at a tree she doesn’t remember ever having stopped to look at before, not exactly the same as the way she sometimes finds herself in front of a painting, traversing the depth of its surface, no more an illusion than any other reality known only by sight. Looks at it so long she might be reading and re-reading a difficult passage in a novel, listening for a resonance with something remembered from pages or chapters read weeks earlier. What’s stopped her here is the fact that it’s a tree whose branches are reed-like wands: fuzzy and grey-green but also grey-brown with unexpected red-brown tints hard to tell apart from the red-brown and grey-brown tints of the sparrows flying in and out of its green and open tangle.

Foreground colors always intensify background colors? In this case background sky-color of palest pale blue.

Is this tree with reed-like wand-branches what’s known as a “pussy willow”?

Are the “sparrows” really purple finches?

Pausing at the intersection of sun and ocean: warmth of sun settles pleasantly in the dense waves of Monica’s hair and inside her head and clothing: can only smell (not feel on skin) the cool spiciness of ocean breezes trying as usual to see if they can get all the way south —› north across the narrow width of the peninsula and into or even across the bay to the swampy edge of another borough.

How can she possibly know this? Monica wonders while typing March notes: Vicky Liman, the eldest of the Liman children, a girl with straight blonde hair and a long face, in some way horse-like yet also almost-beautiful, has at least one story to tell and must have told it (since Monica finds it recorded in her notes). Vicky Liman’s story is in Monica’s March notes as if she’s the one Vicky told it to, but she has no memory of having talked to Vicky Liman in March or any other time. She couldn’t say two words about the sound of Vicky Liman’s voice, yet here Vicky’s story is and it doesn’t sound (to Monica) filtered through retelling by a second or third voice.

1) Twenty-year-old Vicky Liman is back in New Hampshire with her boyfriend. Therefore her “story” had to have been told before she left.

2) Vicky Liman’s boyfriend is a twenty-six-year-old carpenter, originally from Broad Channel, who moved to a small (un-named) New Hampshire town years ago (how many years not told or not noted).

3) Boyfriend’s lived in New Hampshire so long a) he no longer feels at home in New York and b) has become the town carpenter (the only carpenter in town?).

4) Vicky Liman met her boyfriend when he was on a visit home. (Exactly when and how they met not told or not noted and this missing information makes it hard for Monica to understand how they could have met simply because he was home when their homes are in different neighborhoods.)

5) Vicky’s mother, Audrey (if there’s a Liman husband/father Monica doesn’t recall ever having seen him or heard his name mentioned) “accepts” (the word used in Monica’s notes) Vicky’s boyfriend and even paid Vicky’s way back and forth between New York and New Hampshire.

6) For a few months Audrey Liman was hopeful that Vicky’s boyfriend might move back to New York. His desire to be near Vicky, to see her every day, was so strong that he took an apartment on ABC Street, in Greg-and-Lena’s house, let’s see: 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5 houses from the Liman’s house (sandwiched between the Coffin/Forest “mother and daughter” and the Lenehans’ sprawling mess) toward the ocean end of the street. But he had to get back to work and now Vicky’s followed him to New Hampshire.

7) It isn’t clear in Monica’s notes whether it’s Vicky or Audrey who expresses or Audrey and Vicky both who express doubt about whether things will work out now that Vicky’s living with her boyfriend in the small town in New Hampshire where he’s the only carpenter, near absolutely nothing, without her family, without a job and with nothing to do. It also isn’t clear in Monica’s notes if it’s Audrey Liman who says that now that he got exactly what he thinks he wanted the boyfriend may have ruined everything.

Let’s see: Monica doesn’t think her notes clearly tell Vicky Liman’s story. She thinks it’s possible that Vicky Liman wasn’t good at telling her story or there may be all sorts of other reasons, but it seems to her that Vicky Liman’s so-called story is just a catalogue of events whose order probably needs to be reshuffled, even though she doesn’t feel like doing it.

Wonders this too: if the order of events in Vicky Liman’s story were reshuffled would it become possible for Vicky and her boyfriend to be the couple Monica saw with Andy Forest on Greg-and-Lena’s raftlike second floor front porch or for the carpenter-boyfriend to be the tall, angular guy Monica spotted briefly twinning with Greg Coffin, also on the second floor porch?

March 22 is bitter cold and Monica tries to remember if it’s another of Audrey Liman’s definitive weather principles that any cold day after March 21 is meant to be felt as a stinging slap with an ice-covered hand. By late March the longing for spring is so overwhelming (even days of false spring won’t be questioned) that an un-gloved slap of icy rain, snow and 65-mile-an-hour wind is meant to be a cruel lesson in the stupidity of longing. It’s either on the 21st or 22nd (unclear in Monica’s notes) that Monica agrees to walk four blocks west to Lowell’s apartment on ABG Street for breakfast and finds herself walking through bitter wind and freezing rain.

Let’s see: Monica runs into Nelly X two times on March 21st or 22nd: the first time, on the way to Lowell’s place on ABG Street through bitter-cold rain and wind, Monica and Nelly X hurry by one another with only a quick hello. Cross paths, but where? on ABC Street (Monica heading south, toward the boardwalk where she’d make a sharp right turn west, Nelly X headed north toward Coast Boulevard?); on the boardwalk, Monica rushing west through wind-driven rain, Nelly east?; on Coast Boulevard?; the beach?. Nelly X may pause to explain (unclearly) why she’s running (as if the weather isn’t enough of an explanation): it’s already almost eleven (may say “past eleven”) and she was supposed to be at the bus stop on Coast Boulevard to pick up Jimmy five minutes ago!

Monica makes a mental note not to forget — at the appropriate place — to translate into typewriter her handwritten notes about her second encounter with Nelly X.

Monica finds no explanation in her notes for the fact that Lowell isn’t home. There may be an explanation, may even be a note, but all that's recorded is Lowell’s empty apartment, the fact that something is wrong with the plumbing (no running water?) — therefore making breakfast would have been impossible — and the ocean view from the windows of Lowell’s small, second story apartment (three, four, five — Monica realizes she can’t say for sure how many houses from the beach).

Moment of cold sunshine through the windows of Lowell’s empty apartment. Cold that makes ocean’s already-cold blue an odder (deeper?) blue. Long, rust-red stain of the horizon, more red than rust, vividly alive but drying. Not quite the same: the rust-red of the changeable shoreline mirror-horizon: more rust than red, closer to the rust-brown that runs through winter hedges (called “winter’s rust” by Monica and David in section 21 of their long chamber fiction called “Time Table”, still unpublished in March ’76 but written when?).

Monica starts to write something (in her original handwritten notes? or while she’s typing and has a chance to think about what she’d written) about the “chamber fictions” she and David have been experimenting with, but hesitates because there’s too much to say about them and she has the feeling that the Chronicle will spit out like a mouthful of dirt and pebbles the kind of language it would take to talk seriously about the chamber fictions’ relationship to the Space Novels, to the long Green Inventory (Chronicle turned into a symphonic version of the chamber fictions) and also their relationship to the paintings and aesthetics of Mondrian, Rothko and other painters who saw meaning in the positioning and progressive shifting of blocks of color on the painting surface as well as to Michelle Butor’s interesting (interesting-enough-so-that-it-doesn’t-matter-if-he’s-wrong) essays about Rothko, Modrian, etc. — as well as Monica’s and David’s curiosity at this time about how much added significance and depth could be layered into fiction by a) using the wasted landscape of the page, whose topography could be broken up into zones (meaning of what’s written changed by where it appears on the page and the writer bound by a sort of topographical grammar) and/or b) seeing if a second narrative path could be added to the reader’s usual path through sentences and pages: a see-through layering of blocks of narrative from page to page through the space-time within a fiction. All these ideas (and other, related ones) interest Monica and David greatly at this time, but don't interest many others, and so they gradually lose their energy.

Monica walks back toward ABC Street along the shore. Cold sun seems to have burned away cold rain, but sun and wind reinforce one another — or do her handwritten notes say “strike with equal force against her” as she tries to make her way along the beach? March sun, of course stronger than December sun, is borne by wind as a blow against Monica’s face. (Audrey Liman again?)

Now is the place and time that Monica has to remind herself not to forget to type in her second encounter with Nelly X. She can see in her notes, scrawled almost illegibly in a different color ink, that she walked to Lowell’s place by way of the beach (not boardwalk, not Coast Boulevard, etc.) and that’s where she met Nelly X frantically hurrying because she thought she was late picking up Jimmy at his Coast Boulevard bus stop. Monica finds this an interesting fact about Nelly X: frantically hurrying, worried and guilty about little Jimmy, as usual, still she made a wide, looping detour south to the ocean. Why? Because, like Monica, she wanted to feel the full, bitter force of the weather? or for some other, loonier reason? For Monica this hard-to-explain detour by Nelly X helps balance all the irritating qualities that make Nelly X someone to avoid.

Monica can’t believe it: here, exactly at the same time she’s heading back from ABG Street to ABC Street, is Nelly X again! This time with little Troy-Donahue-like Jimmy in tow, again along the shoreline, against the wind. Oddly doesn’t seem to be headed for Ma X’s apartment in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the intersection of the boardwalk and ABC Street. Nelly pulls Jimmy off the beach with only a vaguely laughing “so long” — up across the boardwalk and down ABD Street, one block short of her mother’s. Image of disappearing, colorful beret and long wool coat down below Nelly X’s ankles. No record of Jimmy’s unremarkable clothing.

A few things seem to happen at 4:30 p.m. on March 21st or 22nd:

1) Monica is outside (on porch or street not noted) wrapped in her inherited brown, bear-like mouton against the bitter wind no longer west —› east along the shore, but tunneling with force north —› south down ABC Street from beyond the bay, beyond Brooklyn and Manhattan, burrowing into the ocean at so many points they seem infinite because nobody can bother counting them. Not noted why Monica returned from her cold and windy walk back from Lowell’s, went upstairs, wrapped herself in her bear-like brown mouton and went back down to put herself in the path of the cold again.

2) While standing outside Monica witnesses at least two events:

        a) A doctor enters the Greengrasses’ brick fortress directly across the way (not noted whether down the narrow driveway between the Greengrasses’ and the Sloths’ and through the side door or if allowed through the iron front gate, up the brick porch stairs and through the front door). Doctor’s visit brings to mind the fact that Monica hasn’t seen wiry Enos Greengrass for months.

        b) Not clear where Wanda Baer comes from or whether Monica only sees her in the distance, entering Greg-and-Lena’s house (where Wanda has an odd elbow of an apartment in the attic, bending through the small bedrooms of parents and children) or if Wanda Baer passes Monica and stops for a cold second to say something. She’s wearing nothing as a coat but a brown suede jacket — more like a man’s blazer or sport jacket than anything else — and the fact is, Wanda Baer says, she saw it in the men’s department (store not named or not recorded), loved it and bought it. But now she’s wondering if she looks a little too male in it. Wants Monica’s honest opinion, but she’s too cold to wait for it. May also have said something about looking forward to seeing her French friend, the beautiful and super-sensitive Cristalene — though, of course, as Monica knows, that relationship isn’t and can never be the kind of relationship Wanda would like with Cristalene. Says that everything is superficial right now: a superficial, weightless existence without work and without a relationship. . . . Or it should be weightless, should be light and carefree, but it isn’t. Or, if it’s possible, her existence is weightless but she’s not, always weighed down with anxiety. Her egg whites are never beaten completely: always some stubborn stuff that remains at the bottom of the bowl. . . .

        c) Doctor’s car is gone: never see him leave: a short visit.

On what day in late March does Pat Corcoran find Monica to tell her that Puff is gone again? Does Monica remember that the last time Puff disappeared she turned up in the Bronx?! The story of how she got there and how she was found is a long one. Too long to tell right now, Pat Corcoran says, and this is one of the many times Monica has no trouble deciding whether or not she’s grateful that (through the natural editing of the horizontal day’s random narration) a long story never gets told.

AVOCADO STORIES

In late March Monica’s brother Lowell gives her the gift of a second avocado plant grown from a pit into something beautiful. It seems that the second plant given to Monica is actually the first one grown. Grew it first, gave it second. The first-grown/second-given avocado plant is short with thick, densely leafing stems, more like a small shrub than the first-given/second-grown plant (tall, wandlike stems whose leaves begin high up on the stalk). The tall, first-given avocado plant with its high-up leaves has been standing on Monica’s enormous, found-in-the-trash oak desk/table since when? (Monica makes a mental note to go back and check to see if the arrival of plant and desk coincide and when — when exactly — that was.) At first outlined against one set of bare, nine-paned casement windows and then against the golden rods of the bamboo blinds. Second-given/first-grown, short, thick and densely leafing shrub-like avocado adds asymmetrical balance to the desk: two similar-and-dissimilar plants framing Monica at opposing corners of the desk, against the blinds and windows. It gives Monica great pleasure to work at her desk, surrounded by these never-ending gifts of Lowell’s.

Monica notes this too: all this avocado plant growing and giving (not to mention the plants grown and nurtured from pits by Lowell for himself) hint at the obsessive degree to which Lowell is an avocado-eater in 1976.

After March 22 a number of little occurrences are noted but not always dated, and for that reason it’s easy (later, in August, when Monica’s on the front porch typing her handwritten March notes and to some degree using typing as a preliminary way of editing and putting-in-order) to get the real sequence of events mixed up. Typed and mixed-up sequence of events as good as the real sequence? or do the missing dates change things in ways that matter?

For example: on an undated day that may be March 23 or 24 Monica notes a “blue chill” to the day. Chill penetrates a thin, beautiful layer of warm sunlight. Aroma that isn’t only the aroma of the ocean or even of the cool air blowing inland from it. What is this aroma exactly? Coolness itself an aroma? Sniffing cool air of at least two seasons with the self’s second nose of memory as well? Sunlight lies warmly on the surface of what? Chill is above and below it and so is the color blue, but are the chill of March 23 or 24 and the blue of March 23 or 24 exactly one and the same thing? Block of blue ocean, as always, at the end of the street as if poured there into the bottom of the tall, narrow beaker between ancient yellow and newer red brick apartment buildings. Solid block of cold blue ocean permanently poured out into the bottom end of the street. Blue sky without a cloud — and yet Monica notes the day’s sharply-defined “blue-whiteness”: sailing of 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 or 6 or even more three story, turn-of-the-century white shingle houses through blue sky (and through what else?). May be on this white surface that warm sun lies, very precisely clipped-in by cold blue. . . .

March 23 is noted clearly for two things: Monica’s lingering cold (voice still not back to normal) and, in the house’s communal mail box, a letter addressed to Yvonne Wilding from a Mrs. C. Grogan, 523 Clovelly Lane, Clovelly 1302, Sydney, Australia. The surface of the envelope of course tells Monica nothing beyond the obvious, but does make her wonder what could have happened in Australia to make someone write to slouching-and-goodlooking-clever-and-indifferent Yvonne, who rarely (never?) talks about her life in Australia and seems to have severed all family ties. . . .

One day it’s cold, another day not as cold, but which ones? “Thursday” and “Saturday” are noted but not clearly attached to corresponding temperatures. And then another day is “not as cold as yesterday”. At 5 p.m. of an undated day in late March the beach is unusually long, unusually golden and the undersides of waves are both green and warm (or notes may say “a warm green”). Is it also at 5 p.m. of the same day that a ship with a red smokestack is approaching (seeming to angle southeast out of the harbor and Narrows?). By chance Monica is taking this note on an undated day in March (on the beach or when she gets home) in red ink. In red ink she notes the distant ship’s red smokestack and the distant approach along the shore of a woman in a red coat, strolling arm in arm with a man whose dark clothing is not noted. Also noted in red ink (lingering on the cold beach after dark): a red bonfire (at first only something oddly red and bright in the sand, more star-like than flame-like, before Monica realizes that it’s a bonfire no more than one block west from where she’s standing or sitting).

Monica can’t say why a television news story on August 4 makes her lean back out of March. Typing the March Chronicle on August 4 she should be outside, but (even though it’s not noted) it’s possible that she’s indoors at her enormous oak desk/table in the green room (where there’s a television that could be turned on and visible) because August heat has taken over the porch, slipping under the second story overhang with afternoon sunlight, while, with casement windows cranked wide open to catch north flowing —› breezes from the ocean or <— south flowing breezes trying to get across the Atlantic from Canada, the plaster walls retain a green coolness.

Twenty-four deaths from “a mysterious illness” are reported at an American Legion Convention in Philadelphia, “cause unknown”. One-hundred-and-forty-some-odd people who attended the convention have been hospitalized: one or two have already “recovered” and been released while those who died did so rapidly after developing fevers of up to 107 degrees. Television news report makes this much clear: the mysterious illness affects the lungs, causes dangerously high levels of fever and severe headaches. While no one has suggested the possibility of foul play, Philadelphia homicide detectives have been seen questioning those who attended the convention without having to be hospitalized and are pursuing conventioneers who’ve scattered across the country.

Then, in August, pulled out of March by this strange news report from another reality, or later, Monica wonders what about this story cut across writing or typing.

On the same or another undated day in late March Monica makes note of the fact that her new bamboo blinds will change (have already changed) her easy way of exactly locating events occurring in or across her windows: lefthand or righthand set of nine small panes and within these sets upper, middle, lower, this corner or that corner, etc.: in this way the old casement windows mapped whatever happened in them with their own very precise brand of latitude and longitude — very much like the grid structure of the Blue Hangar in Floyd Bennet Airfield that Monica and David used in THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL to pinpoint the location of random events. Now, with the blinds lowered, light is more or less intense, less or more golden within a net of imperfectly ruled horizontal lines, but no way (for example) of tracking a bird’s flight path. . . .

On the same undated day in late March the sky is as blue (and also as cloudless?) as it should be and there’s as much green in the ocean as on land: whether warm green currents or cold green currents Monica has trouble telling from porch or open window (blinds raised); a perfect blue-green world with escalating bird sounds at a broken and scattered, hard-to-locate mid-air level.

Monica notes that writing about the blue sky is always a problem: is the blue sky inevitably “sky blue”, for example? She knows that Rilke, in his letters, thinking about Cézanne, was troubled by the color blue: wrestled with all the blues there are and the need to find a new language to get at the truth of the exact blue of the moment, just as with everything. Always the imperative to push away received language, the lazy common language of approximate truth. Sky may be (as it is now, as she writes or types) “sky blue” one minute and then the fine, rounded tip of something invisible draws a thin but slightly fuzzy chalk line across a great length of it — starts as a dull or gleaming point and at once is a fuzzed chalk line getting fatter and more cottony by the millisecond, utterly changing the blue around it. White changes blue? or line may be accompanied by something rumbling and explosive that’s inaudible to Monica on the front porch on ABC Street or there may be some other inaudible or invisible disturbance that changes one blue to another blue. Now sky may even be the blue of a pack of Gauloises “disques bleu” that arrives un-asked-for in the mail. . . .

Let’s see: what else happens on this undated day (same or another): Monica can’t say how she knows which Greengrass car is Sylvia Greengrass’s and which is Enos Greengrass’s but she must know because she writes that Sylvia Greengrass’s car (make, model, color not noted) pulls up at the curb (not in the narrow driveway between the Greengrasses’ and the Sloths’) and Sylvia Greengrass, next-door-neighbor-to-the-south Al Regan, thirty-year-old Greengrass daughter, Leslie, and Enos Greengrass, looking barely alive, get out. Monica is startled: always compact and energetic — a short, sun-darkened, tightly-wired, bald and bare-chested, compulsive driveway-hoser — Enos Greengrass looks slack, yellow, boneless, a peculiarly clay yellow little chicken being gripped by its boneless wings by Al and Sylvia. . . . Doesn’t seem to want to be held up: wants to sink to the ground and they have to take deeper handfuls to get him down the driveway, Leslie Greengrass following with Enos’ walker, through the brick fortress’s side door. . . .

On the same undated March day or another.

At about the same time as the Greengrass incident (or not at the same time at all).

Ryan Lenehan (middle of the three Lenehan boys, third eldest of the four Lenehan children) passes, on the way home south <— north from school, carrying a heavy load of books.

Passes again, bicycling south —› north toward Coast Boulevard and beyond.

Passes a third time (how much later?), again heading south —› north (having bicycled round the back of everything), bouncing a basketball. Round basketball wants to get to the round center of Earth, but yellow-grey pavement rejects it. The thud of this rejection, the stunned look on the basketball’s face, then another thud — how many? — from one margin to the other. Ryan calls out to Monica, “basketball practice!”, then disappears behind the holly bushes.

Not noted how much time passes before apple-faced Finnley Lenehan passes, elated, on his skateboard.

At 4:30 exactly on the same day a brilliant arrow of green light darts across the Regans’ lawn, under the giant elm, altering the green of the early grass to something hard to name, more like the water-light that passes through an old bottle fired green with a mineral salt no one remembers. Arrow of light doesn’t come to rest on the Regans’ lawn. Its light is odd and beautiful, but it behaves like something aimed right at one of the three hunched and dark-haired Arlington sisters who’ve just arrived home at their little ranch house under (just south of) the Regans’ old three story white shingle. Monica tries (while writing in March or typing in June, July or August) to remember the Arlington sisters’ names: knows there’s a Lorna and then there’s one whose name Monica can’t remember, though she does remember that her daughter’s name is Eunice. And then there’s the third sister (whose name escapes Monica at the moment of writing and then again at the moment of typing) who (how does Monica know this?) stays up most of the night, doesn’t fall asleep until the world is starting to show some blue light and then sleeps till noon or beyond. (In other words, there’s an Arlington sister who keeps the same hours as David!)

Let’s see: at what hour after 4:30 does Ryan Lenehan return from basketball practice, decide to sit on the front steps with Monica and chat. Has a story to tell that, as it unfolds, Monica isn’t sure she wants to hear (yet she records it): the Lenehan family knows a woman named Carla Ray Carlson, also known simply as Carla Carlson — who for some reason (Ryan knows this for a fact because he’s seen her do it!) signs her checks Carlita Carlson. But who exactly is Carla Ray or Carlita Carlson? Monica wants to know — and how did Ryan’s mother Nora, or the whole family, get to know her? Ryan tries to find an answer by dribbling his basketball — and the basketball does have something to say, but Ryan realizes that he’d need to know more than Morse code to decipher it and says that he never asked himself that question. It’s an interesting question, but he never thought about it. There are people who are in his life as if they’ve always been there and most of them — Monica is probably right — come from his mother. Mother meets them somewhere and then the whole family gets involved one way or another and you forget how you met them.

He can say this: the thing he thinks of first when he thinks of Carla Ray Carlson is that when he met her she had to weigh 300 pounds minimum and hardly ever got out of bed. Had to go to her place to see her. Weird thing is that his mother, the one who’s friendliest with Carla Carlson and sometimes even shopped for her and did other things to help her, was the one who joked about her weight and told the family things they probably didn’t need to know. Monica knows how his mother can crack herself up: great at telling stories, great at finding exactly the right words to make you see the most ridiculous image of someone — someone who might be stupid, for example, looks like a complete idiot when she describes him — and you can’t stop laughing even if you know it’s wrong and his mother of course is doubled over coughing and laughing and getting as red as if blood is going to come out of her eyes. He knows that Monica’s seen his mother that way. Well: his mother found the image of Carla Ray Carlson in bed, getting flabbier every day, white as dough made of nothing but milk and flour, without a muscle, unable to get up and stand on her feet anymore, hilarious. Had a whole routine she did that made her hysterical. She got such a kick out of telling the story about the time Carla found blood in her panties and couldn’t figure out why (an image he wishes he didn’t have in his mind!) that she could hardly get through it. But the other side of it of course is that without his mother Carla Ray Carlson might be dead. His mother went up there (sometimes she got Bobby Rafferty or Patty Callaghan to go with her) and called for an ambulance at least three times that he knows of, but Carla Ray refused to go. And it was his mother who realized that Carla had suddenly started losing an insane amount of weight. She said “ninety pounds in two weeks”, but he has no way of knowing if that’s true. Finally it was his mother who made the decision for Carla and that’s the reason Carla Ray Carlson’s been in Bayview Hospital since December. Thinks he heard someone say “cancer”, but when he asks a question no one gives him an honest answer. Doesn’t know either what anyone’s told his father because his father’s been sneaking bottles of brandy and lemon meringue pies to Carla whenever she asks for them and who can say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

These are some of the things the Chronicle does:    it continues (a daily infinity).

                                                                            it walks (sometimes takes a drive) horizontally down ABC Street or through the neighborhood.

                                                                            it keeps low to the ground, as if longing to move horizontally along the ground like the passing world it records, but also likes to glide over the roofs, parallel to the ground, and to settle on tree-branches.

                                                                            It also asks itself questions: does it stay mainly in its own neighborhood because there are laws (even if they’re laws invented by itself) that keep its universe bounded?

                                                                            Is it right to feel itself to be a universe, infinite in its own way, inclusive and digressive yet absolutely made of certain materials and not others? Some materials are pulled into it, others tossed out.

                                                                            Are its laws absolute or are they free to change themselves?

On March 24 bright yellow bath towels (exactly what yellow not noted, except that the yellow is so bright, flat and saturated it’s more like the yellow sheets of scrap paper — called “canary” yellow — she sometimes uses than like the absorbent surface of dyed cotton with its micro-shadows of tiny thread-loops) and soft rose-pink bath towels are reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s front (east-facing) picture window. Towels are reflected in an overlapping way — yellow flaps over rose-pink, rose-pink flaps over yellow and so on, randomly as the breeze moves and changes, sometimes in surprising, multiple layers of rose-pink-yellow-rose-pink etc. Monica loves the unstable beauty of the world as it frames itself and disappears. Can’t chase this beauty or this instability; can barely notice it as it forms, reforms and goes away. Rosenwassers’ picture window is on the second floor of the two story house where the Arlington sisters have their groundfloor apartment: therefore Monica realizes that what she wrote before about the Arlingtons living in a “ranch house” isn’t true. Isn’t a ranch house, just looks like one.

Monica is awake and outside by 9 a.m. Must be on the porch, her gaze angling slightly west and south to catch sight of the briefly framed towel reflections. Also sees light (from the direction of the ocean and doubly bright for that reason, as if the air has swallowed an ocean of reflections) evenly cut and spaced out on the grey planks of the porch floor by the bars of the left-hand (southernmost) railing. What’s seen and what’s heard can (to what exact degree?) be recorded, but only a living being can feel and smell air: its precise coolness, in what way its coolness is spring-like, coolness of the particles of ocean aroma that are carried in what’s pulsing north along the street. . . .

What else?

Pinpoints of light at the needle-edges of the odd, off-green of the Rhinebeck pine.

Smoky green lawns in the distance, like so many cups of green tea giving off their vapors.

Bolts of color (flowers that are actually there, but haven’t bloomed yet).

Light now dripping in pine tree (can almost see the drops forming and dripping from the needle-edges) and the glowing undersides of the dark, not-exactly-jade-green of the boughs as well. If not exactly “jade”, then what is the name of this dark green underside that has a smoky or ashen green overside?

The yellow sun-surface of what?

At exactly the same instant: David comes downstairs with a mug of foamy, steaming coffee for Monica to sip while she works in chilly but springlike air and Lena Coffin’s old car coughs and tries to clear its throat, struggling to shake off the morning chill and get started in the cracked and weedy earth-and-pavement driveway just below the south railing of Monica’s porch and also just to the left of the front grey board steps where she’s sitting, only partly hidden by the Rhinebeck pine. Monica can’t see Lena behind the wheel, but she can see Jojo and Rosamond Coffin in the back seat, where sunlight must be making it warm and boring.

Sipping hot coffee and utterly within its steam and aroma: bubble inside the day, side door into the day or step back from the day? Sipping hot coffee on a chilly March morning also a step back from writing and a step back from writing = less looking, less hearing, less being in the day in every possible way?

Noise of a helicopter shreds experience in its blender along with leaves, wind and dirt. There it is: a blue helicopter hovering at the south end of ABC Street, above the ocean and doubly or triply noisy because it’s fallen into the narrow beaker between apartment buildings that always has dark blue ocean at the bottom of it. Shredding of Monica’s private coffee bubble makes it possible for her to see that the brilliance and deep saturation of the towel-colors in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window have faded to dullest yellow, weakest pink and even a lifeless white.

Where did Peter Hedges (Janey Hedges’ husband) come from? Here he is, asking Monica politely if he’s interrupting anything — if she minds him waiting for Al Szarka on the steps with her? Fact that he’s already sitting, already uncapping a bottle of beer (brand not noted) doesn’t mean he isn’t being polite. As always, Peter Hedges has a paper bag of beer bottles with him, loose and rattling and clinking, not bound in a six-pack. Offers Monica a beer and/or a cigarette. In no time at all Peter Hedges is deep into beer: one beer smoothly after the other, as if drinking one continuous beer artificially broken into units, each cap that has to be popped a tiny pause in the lifelong beer stream. Are these tiny pauses the openings Peter Hedges needs to take in the world and assess it?

Peter Hedges has stories to tell and for some reason is eager to tell them to Monica.

He’s seen Monica on the steps or on the porch for months, looking around, writing stuff down, sometimes with a typewriter, most of the time with pen and paper. What could there be to write about in this neighborhood? Looks down the street while she’s writing — as if it’s a sketch pad and she’s sketching in a hurry before something turns into something else: nothing’s happening, there’s not even anything to see. His curiosity about what she’s doing is similar to suspicion. Can’t trust anything Al Szarka or Yvonne Wilding have to say about it and if Janey says that she likes Monica that means nothing. None of them has a clue about anything. But he’s worried that he may not be able to figure out what she’s after just by studying her while he tells his story.

Janey is pregnant again (in her eighth month). Married less than a year and here comes a second kid! No! not “less than a year”! Today is actually their anniversary! She was on the pill, but it made her bleed — so they had to drop that and buy a diaphragm for $40 and of course it didn’t work. How does he know it didn’t work? Laugh is harsh. Cause they used it once and here they are! But he’s going to make sure that never happens again.

He’ll lay out their financial situation and then he’d like to hear Monica’s opinion about whether they can afford a third (can they even afford a second?) child. They’re on Welfare. They get Medicaid. They get $190 every two weeks and Medicaid is paying the $1400 medical bill. Rent is $250 a month for two bedrooms, two baths on ACE Street. A two bedroom apartment on ACE Street isn’t his idea of living. Janey thinks that new carpeting will solve all their problems. He thinks that the only thing that can possibly solve their problems is planning. Have to plan for the future. Don’t spend money on stupid stuff like carpeting. Put money away for a house. Paying rent all your life is as stupid as working for someone all your life. Doesn’t know if Monica knows that he’s already in the contracting business with his older brother, Louie, who lives just up the block from Monica with his wife and new baby daughter. The business grosses $120,000 a year, but of course that’s not figuring in all their expenses: equipment, materials, etc. And the other problem is that they can’t take on anything but meaningless jobs because they’re not declaring their earnings. They haven’t been paying taxes, period. So, until they start doing that, they can’t think of themselves as a real business, can’t expand, can’t earn serious money. . . .

The good news is that right now his father’s putting a foundation under the summer cottage he’s always had out at Windy Pass so that he and Janey can have a year-round home of their own until they can afford something else. So that’s good, but it isn’t done yet and (knowing his father) god alone knows when it will be. So that’s uncertain — and there’s the business that isn’t really a business to worry about — and the second kid on the way. But what Janey’s worried and miserable about is the old carpeting! It makes him nuts. . . !

It isn’t easy for Monica to be certain what it is (what it is exactly) Peter Hedges wants from her and before she can think of the exact right thing to say Al Szarka joins them on the porch, his energy, as usual, the energy of the point of an elbow aimed at someone’s ribs.

Peter leaves to visit his brother Louie and Al Szarka decides not to go with him. His sharp edges can’t find a comfortable spot to settle down on, but Monica can see that Al, conscious of the fact that Peter Hedges — instead of escaping upstairs to Al’s place, bringing his bag of beers with him – hung out down here with Monica, yapping about god-alone-knows-what for half-an-hour or more, has the urge to tell Monica a story (or at least some broken fragment of a story) too.

Not sure what he wants to say, so begins like this: Does Monica know (that is, did Peter tell her?) that Peter got married when he was only seventeen? He’s only eighteen now, but looks much older.

Al (Monica doesn’t see him up close too often) has home-cut blond hair, unusually sharp teeth — like a whole mouth full of incisors — and blue eyes that are intensely focused (insanely focused?) but also somewhat watery. Voice has too much emotion in it no matter what he’s talking about, and it’s not always easy to tell if he’s enraged or overjoyed or just miserable to the point of anguish.

He says the lesson of Peter and Janey is not lost on him. Al is twenty-two (an old twenty-two?) and there’s no way. . . . All you have to do is look at your friends who’re married. Take a good look, especially at the ones who ran to have children right away . . . . He can’t picture it. “Married with a baby.” And still living like this? The way they all live, crowded into these little apartments, arguing about money. . . . Can Monica imagine Yvonne. . . ? Taking care of a baby? Makes himself laugh (with affection?): thinking of the absurdity of the idea of Yvonne taking care of a baby. . . . Peter and Janey couldn’t be doing it without Welfare and Medicaid. Peter actually had someone write up a document — someone who could write decent English — that said that Peter’s mother had been supporting them but now she was sick or something and couldn’t do it anymore (mother signed an affidavit confirming it) — so they could apply for Welfare and Medicaid. And Welfare believed it and gave them everything they wanted! But all that lying and all that red tape is not for him.

Monica would like to find a way to insert a cardinal’s song right here. There it is (as it often is), blood red on her neighbor’s tv antenna, its throat pulsing as if having no choice but to translate the coded electrons arriving through its feet. The opening notes are always startling: ecstatic, lyrical and very clearly shaped, ascending in a fixed sequence of elongated ovals — up through the tangled tree branches above the roofs and antennas. Ecstasy trails off and is interfered with, as always, by codes that are less lyrical, rougher, more guttural, less shaped. Still the cardinal? Is its coded song that complex? Or just the tangle of what it’s provoked. Just as Monica thinks she may be getting the hang of the cardinal’s song so that she might find a way to note it down on paper, like overhearing and writing down from memory the long, intimate monologue of someone at a restaurant table, it leaves: over two roofs or twenty: onto another antenna or settling somewhere in the wide-open weaving of the neighborhood.

“Later on the same day” Monica is taking a walk and stops on ABA Street to look at a tree: its wand-like branches are a fuzzy grey-green, like pussy willows. The owner of the tree (lawn it’s on, house behind it, etc.) appears (exactly from where not noted) and greets Monica warmly. Introduces himself as Xylon and says that he’s observed Monica observing the tree many times. It gives him almost as much satisfaction that someone else is paying attention to the invisible stages of the tree’s development as the fact that the tree has been flowering since February. He’s been able to watch the tree and to keep track of the handful of neighborhood people who come by regularly to look at it because he’s been home from work, recovering from a long illness. Indoors for months, confined to bed for endless stretches, he was forced to spend long hours looking out his bedroom window. He’s seen Monica alone and also a few times with her friend and in certain ways he feels he knows them.

He has a story to tell and this is it in a nutshell: being sick is a similar twilight state to retirement or retirement is a similar twilight state to sickness, but in fact he’s a long way from retirement. Even today, for example, he was asked to travel halfway across the country as a consultant on an irrigation project but had to say no. He’s an agronomist with advanced degrees in chemistry and engineering who emigrated to the States from Greece in 1939. Initially taught at Princeton but quickly realized that he needed to make more money and took a job in private industry.

There’s more to Xylon’s story, but what is it?

Conversation goes on a while longer, but at some point Monica becomes conscious of the fact that she doesn’t want to hear or know more about Xylon; she wants to get home to get down on paper whatever it is in the meeting that interests her or find out what interests her by getting it down on paper.

Let’s see: it’s not perfectly clear to her, but she thinks that Xylon said that he has two daughters: one who’s already married and a policewoman who he admires: married and a policewoman, yet also in law school. While the other one — the younger one —cares only about marrying her boyfriend: stays in college only because he’s forcing her to get a degree. (Optimistic about one, has no hope for the other.)

Hurriedly taking notes “later on the same day” Monica wonders when in his story she became aware (what exactly in his story made her become aware) that Xylon’s older daughter once was Wanda Baer’s roommate! If, Monica reasons, Xylon voiced some worry (can’t say for sure whether he did or didn’t) that his older daughter weighs three hundred pounds or more then, logically, that should be what reminded her that Wanda Baer once had a three hundred pound policewoman-roommate, about to get married and determined to go to law school no matter what. On the other hand, Monica reasons, Xylon had to have said something about his daughter’s weight, otherwise how could it have entered her mind and helped her connect Xylon’s daughter to Wanda Baer?

Monica is positive too that Xylon said something else to reinforce her certainty about the connection between Wanda Baer and his daughter but later (while translating handwritten notes into typewriter) can’t find it.

What else?: the ball-shaped tips of the pussy willow wands are turning yellow-green and there may even be a flush of a color that may not be red but makes you think of red. . . .

This too: Xylon apologizes to Monica for the run-down condition of his lawn and house and blames their neglect on his prolonged illness.

In other words: an apology, like most, that secretly contains its own denial?

Any test for the truth of the stories we’re told? Or: whether true in some ways, not true in others, true in yet another way just because they’re told.

Monica asks herself some questions while taking her note or later, while typing and editing her note. For example:

Is any event ever unique (only happened once, to us, therefore no one else can truly understand it)?

Is any event ever universal (whatever happens to us has also happened/also will happen to everyone, therefore everyone can understand it)?

Corollary to these questions: is she the only one (because of the perspective on how life works — patterns it forms of its own accord — given to her by years of Chronicling) who sees the connection between Wanda Baer and Xylon’s daughter as the central reason for meeting and listening to Xylon?: always-always the freakish lightening bolt of randomness that strikes us in the course of our horizontal path through the day that may actually be an even more freakish lightening bolt of order — invisible as order when viewed through the microscopic or telescopic perspective of life cut into units by the sharp chef’s knife of habit.

Xylon fell in love with the pussy willow tree when he saw it in Russia, so he imported one from Russia as soon as he bought his house. Planted it on his front lawn, unlike many others who keep their pussy willow trees indoors all year so that the warm interior will make their little trees flower during the winter for their owners alone.

When does Monica find out (and who is it that could have set her straight?) that an essential fact (one that she wasn’t sure she heard or remembered clearly) in Xylon’s story is wrong?

Xylon has three daughters, not two:

Eldest daughter (one missing in Monica's notes), leading a straightforward, conventional life as wife and probably mother too.

Youngest daughter, exactly as described.

Middle daughter is the three-hundred-pound-plus policewoman, going to law school, unmarried, whether gay or not not noted (or known) who was once-upon-a-time Wanda Baer’s roommate (Monica still can’t figure out when or where).

Where does this new, correct information about Xylon and his daughters come from? Neither noted nor remembered. (Not noted = not remembered.) The only possible source Monica can think of — the only one Monica knows who would know the facts — is Wanda Baer.

Monica doesn’t feel like going back and editing what’s already written and printed to bring it in line with the true version of events learned later. Leaves it to the reader to correct it or leave it alone.

On the way down ABC Street toward the boardwalk at 9:30 a.m. (on an undated day in late March) Monica sees Jojo Coffin waving to her as she approaches Babette-and-Grete’s “mother and daughter” just before and below the ancient yellow brick apartment house. Beautiful, tadpole-faced Jojo is in the passenger seat of Babette’s cocoa brown Camaro convertible. Monica stops to chat because it’s clear that Jojo wants her attention (has a tiny fragment of a story to tell): Rosamond (frowning, looking miserable in the back seat) is waiting for Grandma to drive her to the doctor. She has an awful case of pink-eye and her teacher told her not to come to school. So she’s home — might be home for days — and she’s grumpy.

It seems to Monica that Friday, March 26, is warm in a new way: working outside (that is, coming downstairs with pen and paper and the intention of working outside she’s having trouble getting started) in a world as blue from rim to rim and 360^o around as if she were on an island in the Mediterranean. To try to write is to drift in an ocean of blue paper. She feels inspired to do: nothing. Sits on the steps, pen in hand, trying to remember: was the Mediterranean the color of the blue paper she sometimes uses? Blue paper that blows up into blue sky, then falls into blue water: has nothing but sky and water in it. Or it may be altogether another blue for which she can’t find the word exactly. May be only now, reluctantly picking up her pen (probably not a blue pen, because she doesn’t like writing with blue ink), that the fluid languidness of the day — with its south to north breezes that might as well be currents of blue water — make writing as difficult as diving into blue shallows to scribble urgent notes on a pad as visible on the sunlit ocean floor as your own yellowish feet. Not as shallow as it looks? Pad not exactly situated where it seems to be? Dive and dive again, but just can’t touch it before you’re forced back to the surface. No point: might as well just float. . . .

Sky isn’t cloudless, but clouds are also blue: sky’s inner blue pulled out like pants pockets' darker cloth.

What is it that’s so urgent that Monica can’t let herself do nothing (float in the blue warmth of the day)? Monica feels compelled as a Chronicler to take notes while events are still inside language. She’s tempted to say: write with the hand of immediate experience, not with the handless glove of memory, but how long does it take for experience to become memory? Write quickly, as if you’re still where you just were. Finds herself trying to sketch in last night’s dinner and conversation with David and Wanda Baer in an odd, Romanian restaurant called “Le Beau Pere” on W. 13 Street in Manhattan — quickly, with as few pen-strokes as possible, but why? In order not to rely on memory, of course, but is there more to it? Let’s see: the restaurant is on the street level floor of a townhouse: 1313 W. 13 Street: the owner of the townhouse is the host of the restaurant (how this makes itself known not noted) and from the outset there’s the peculiar sense of being ushered into a room in a stranger’s house to have dinner. The room is dark: very little light is given off by the Victorian chandeliers hanging from a black ceiling; dim light of candlelit tables and the only other light the light of a small desk lamp on a desk toward the back of the room where the host, an exceedingly thin and pale man in a dark suit, hair as black as the ceiling and parted on the side, sits writing in a ledger with the aid of the desk lamp, bent over the desk as if seriously at work on something and not wanting to be disturbed. A banister, black, winding and shiny, leads to private quarters upstairs. The walls, not easy to make out in the dim light, appear to be red; deeper, murkier than cherry, more blood-like: a flash of color at the margins of the dark room. (Not noted who, if anyone, greeted them at the door: no record of the host rising from his desk.)

Is the atmosphere of the restaurant genuinely odd or is its oddness staged? If staged, not interesting. Not interesting to experience experience already experienced for us or foregrounded for us as an imitation of experience which we predictably experience as we’re meant to. Can our next bacon cheeseburger really be the riddle no one else has solved before? (Should we content ourselves with this?: the more naïve we are, the stupider even more so, the more surprising and entertaining life and all its imitations seem to be.)

Monica can’t help having these doubts then, while she’s in “Le Beau Pere”, or later, quickly sketching in her experience on a day whose languorous current flows against writing — but still she has to admit that she isn’t at all sure where the oddness and “mystery” of this restaurant lies between staged reality and reality. . . .

Finnley Lenehan, zipping by quickly on his skateboard (some speed wasted in friction, more lost as noise), cradling a small forest of fresh, violet-green broccoli, calls out to Monica: “my mother’s making Irish Stew!” and seems to skip from Lena’s orange brick and cracked white stucco multiple dwelling, 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5? houses south to the chickenwire gate of his own house, eager to get the broccoli to his mother, Nora.

Back into the fragrant day: perfume of tea, perfume of honey when there are neither.

Holly bush, green and unchanging all year, seems to be sprouting young, light green leaves — as if it wants to flower but can only manage to push out new leaves and a tea-like or honey-like fragrance that attracts the intense zzz-ing and darting of yellow jackets.

Warm shade of a pine tree on ABC Street does not resemble a sunny coastal town in southern Italy. Fragrance of strong coffee and a little plate of warm dessert on a sunny café table are not the tea-and-honey fragrance of sprouting March shrubbery in New York, but among the many things that are keeping Monica from writing about last night’s strange dinner the otherworldly perfume of early flowers on coastal breezes may be the most distracting — because the nose is sniffing it in reality and the self’s second nose of aroma-memory is sniffing it too. . . .

Lilac fragrance here or there?

Lilac even more dizzying than the others.

Aroma of lilacs leads to seeing lilacs: still in their green casings or barely opening, their tiny asparagus tips just the very earliest thought of purple.

Yellow comes first and then purple surprises us overnight, still overwhelmed by the masses of chrome yellow forsythia wands that are everywhere. Monica notes that, this year, ABC Street’s forsythias don’t compare in brilliance to the forsythias of ABA Street, as if ABC Street’s were still weakly dreaming of being forsythias instead of waking up and being forsythias.

Hard for Monica (or for anyone else) to see: skinny little Minnie Liman, Vicky Liman’s younger sister, walking by with her boyfriend, Berry: hard for Minnie and Berry to see Monica or the world through the fine blue mist that’s also a fine blue powder that’s also sea air blowing in from the ocean to the south and making Minnie and Berry quickly disappear as they hurry south toward the Limans’. . . .

Monica can’t tell clearly from her notes: does the smell of a motorcycle (its fuel, its exhaust, etc) precede or follow the noise of the motorcycle's explosion through the easily-torn fabric of the day.

Let’s see (forcing herself out of the day and all the other days it may contain): what else about “Le Beau Pere”? Wanda Baer returns from the bathroom and tells Monica that she must — she has to — go to the bathroom to see Dracula’s wallpaper! Naked women — naked voluptuous women — and a mirror directly facing the toilet, so that when you’re on the toilet you see yourself — you have no choice but to see yourself — half naked, surrounded by beautiful, naked women rolling all around each other. . . !

Monica wonders again: doing what they’re supposed to do? After Wanda Baer’s bathroom-wallpaper story Monica, David and Wanda Baer examine their surroundings, study the host, whisper and laugh about their shared observations. David, for one, thinks that the host is genuinely odd. For example: listening, as always, to conversations at other tables, using his peculiar ability to hear remotely, even to the farthest corner of any space (a kind of aural out-of-body transportation), he’s been trying to tune in to the host’s little lighted area in the darker-than-cherry-red-darkness, but the host hasn’t spoken a word — not even when an attractive young woman approached his desk to talk about a recent trip through Romania, her deep interest in Romanian cuisine, etc. She tried to ask questions about the menu, wondered if there was a French influence on what seemed to her an elevated, hard-to-define difference between the food here and what she’d been eating during her travels. . . . No answer. Ignored her completely. And when she persisted, he got up, made a little bow and walked away. . . .

What else? (Monica continues to struggle to take notes despite the double fragrance of the here-and-now and the here-and-somewhere-else.) Now they’re really curious about the food. A platter of traditional (Middle-Eastern or Greek or Turkish?) appetizers (stuffed grape leaves, artichoke hearts, humus, less-common and delicious pate or terrine or at least a thick slice of something from a baked loaf that may or may not be called “dulma bryndza” that seems to have an unfamiliar cheese as its basic ingredient) is very good, but not remarkable. What follows is so good, so unusual and hard-to-define, that Monica’s reluctance to write on this unearthly March day on ABC Street makes her write next-to-nothing in her sketchy notes: David’s “orange duckling” is nothing like the French “duck a l’orange” (possible reason the host turned his back on the young woman who found the food to be sophisticated and French?): skin is deliberately charred, not burnt, as if its impossible-to-identify spices rubbed into the skin have blackened it more than the fire of roasting, its orange sauce more bitter than sweet. Monica’s stuffed, boneless chicken is an unexplainable mystery: David and Monica keep tasting it, trying to figure it out. Skin also crisp, interior moist, stuffing and spices impossible to analyze and the flavor of the chicken different from and a thousand times better than any chicken she’s ever eaten. Can’t stop eating it, but in small mouthfuls, trying to figure out and remember the taste (nothing about the taste noted in any way that helps remember it). Wanda Baer orders moussaka and it’s very good but commonplace, like the appetizers.

Monica notes the correspondence between the otherworldly flavors of the food and the restaurant’s atmosphere, but can’t take it any further. Also writes in her notes (or types later) that she’d welcome recipes or suggestions that would help explain (and make it possible to reproduce?) what they ate.

What else? Viennese coffee, an unusually dense and dark double espresso with whipped cream and lime. Crème caramel? Other desserts, if any, not noted.

This too (almost forgotten: would be forgotten if Monica hadn’t scribbled a few “key” words on a scrap of paper in her handbag as a reminder for the next day): while they’re slowly making their way through the surprises and mysteries of the meal — tasting, talking, sharing, analyzing and also listening and looking around (Monica’s and David’s usual way of eating together, so that every meal goes on forever, a self-contained universe), Wanda Baer engages them with what may be a story — or both a story and a question she urgently needs their answer to.

In her last session with Dr. DaVinci he pretty much gave her a lecture and used a term she’d never heard before. He used the term about her and then went on about it in general — he had a lot to say about it — and she needs to know from Monica and David whether to take what Dr. DaVinci said as a criticism, or, even worse, as a sign that Dr. DaVinci’s getting sick of her: sick of her problems, sick of her complaints, sick of the flavor of the whole thing. Needs to know how concerned Monica and David think she should be.

This is what he said: psychoanalysts in the past, from Freud through someone named “Karl Abraham” and then some others after that (names not remembered by Wanda Baer), used the term “narcissistic neurosis” in a way that Reich later disagreed with. And he (Dr. DaVinci) himself has made observations in his practice that are in basic agreement with Reich but just a little different. What he’s come to believe is that she (Wanda) is a good example of what they used to call “narcissistic neurosis”: her preoccupation with her problems, incessant dwelling on her self and all its minor ups and downs, is a form of self-love, not “self-hatred” as it appears to the narcissistic patient. Obsession with your own misery is a form of self-love. The narcissistic neurotic (like Wanda) knows nothing but her own problems. Her problems and her misery are her universe. Essentially no one else exists: the lives of others are as meaningless to her as the reality of movie extras there to give flavor to the background of a scene. The narcissistic neurotic claims to hate her/his misery, but is really in love with it, otherwise why would he/she do so little to get rid of it? The stinky cheese of the self that the narcissistic neurotic loves the smell of. Nibbling on the stinky cheese of the self’s misery more enthralling to the narcissistic neurotic than a Beethoven sonata!

On the other hand (Dr. DaVinci went on) it used to be a universally held conviction that there was no way to help a narcissistic neurotic: so self-absorbed, so inward, such an endless, inward loop of self-sniffing misery, complaining and love of complaining and misery, the whole libido absorbed into this inward-turning loop, that it’s a lost cause. World is always inflicting injuries on the narcissistic neurotic and, it was thought, the narcissistic neurotic was so enamored of these injuries that it was a hopeless waste of time trying to get her/him to stop examining and lamenting them. . . . But he sees it a little differently.

He’s extremely cautious when treating the older chronically miserable patient: to interfere with the endless need to find a new grievance, new wound, new spool to wind the self around would be to block the older narcissistic neurotic’s desperate defense against the possibility of happiness, not in any cosmic sense, just in the sense of the threatening possibility of a happy moment. He lived through that catastrophe a long time ago: made a brilliant attack on such a person’s defenses and watched the whole hideous structure crumble with no way and no time to rebuild it in some better way. . . . But, with someone Wanda’s age, he feels it’s his duty to attack her, to criticize and put pressure on her — to get her moving and stop all that miserable garbage from solidifying.

Asked her three, five, ten times if she understood: wanted her to think about middle-aged or older relatives hopelessly in love with their own misery, the chronically unhappy ones it’s terrifying to think of becoming. . . . Said she understood what he was talking about, but does she? Does she really? How do you let who you are “crumble”? Is she afraid of happiness? Is Dr. DaVinci saying her self is like a stinky cheese she’s in love with and refuses to get rid of even though no one else can stand the smell. . . ?

One other note scribbled by Monica to help her remember the next day, but nevertheless overlooked — forgotten and found by accident later: Wanda Baer (before or after recounting Dr. DaVinci’s “narcissistic neurosis” lecture?) says that she’s worried about her sister, Cindy. Monica and David know of course that Cindy is twelve, but still looks and talks like a soft, blonde baby (just about kept in diapers by their father, Oscar, who gets some kind of weird thrill out of her lisping, babyish “yes Daddy’s” and “no Daddy’s”). Now Cindy is becoming anxious: an anxious, lisping baby who’s begun to pull the hairs out of her eyebrows over the tensions of the seventh grade! Calls her every day and most days more than once. For example: tomorrow Cindy has three stupid, meaningless tests and she’s having a nervous breakdown over them. She tries to be reassuring and to say the right thing — tries to imagine what Dr. DaVinci would say or Monica would say — but the truth is she has no idea how to help her. Wonders if Monica or David could give her a clue. . . .

On a day of unearthly beauty in late March:

Pat Corcoran’s washing machine is on the blink and Pat and Philip Corcoran are on their way (by car? on foot with a shopping cart? not noted) to the big, dreary laundromat on the run-down commercial block of AAF Street leading to boardwalk and beach.

A big pile of Themis’s stained Cornucopia Diner uniforms and aprons (along with other laundry?) is heaped in a laundry basket on the porch, but no sign of Themis.

Yvonne Wilding slouches up the porch steps, looking no more depressed, no more burdened than usual under a heavy sack of freshly-washed laundry.

“On Sunday” ABC Street’s forsythias are revived by the sun: drink it up and absorb a pure yellow from it. Is it the forsythias and their agitated yellow (almost blinding: saturated with yellow and radiating what can’t be absorbed) that are fragrant? All of ABC Street (all of this unusual New York City neighborhood by the sea?) radiant with sun being converted to yellow and spicy with fragrances from sources so multiple it would be impossible for Monica to list them. Monica would have to walk down every block and find every flower and shrub that’s just reached the point of beginning to release curled-up fragrance. Too much walking? Too many steps would inevitably equal too many words. And sometimes (often) chronicling requires having to write yourself out of words.

Monica wonders this: if the forsythias of ABC Street are revived — a wide-awake yellow instead of a drowsy yellow — then what can the already-wide-awake forsythias of ABA Street be like?

Walking from ABC Street toward ABA Street through a breezy world that seems all blue and yellow, but how many blues and how many yellows? Everywhere (stopping to look up, down, sideways, sniff the air and feel air on skin, etc.) Monica finds herself looking through butter yellow blossoms and chrome yellow wands at blues that have no end or back or bottom to them. Self or soul gazes into blue as if it wants to travel into what’s programmed to move away from it.

Monica finds herself again in front of the golden branches of Xylon’s tree, which Nelly X insists is “just a willow, not a pussy willow”.

Golden yellow of the reed-or-wand-like branches of Xylon’s tree makes the sky’s blue darker. Sail-like billowing of this darker blue like a blue skirt trying to turn a windy corner.

Wind in the sails of what?

Day condenses into a concentrated little blue-and-yellow blob way up in the open tangle of wand-branches — blob that hops along the branches and then squeezes out a sequence of song notes and squawk notes so long and complex there’s no way for Monica to remember or note it: underside of fat little bird is the glowing gold-yellow of Xylon’s tree, blue of back (and beak as well?) so dark it’s even darker than the sky’s indigo through Xylon’s golden branches.

Later on the same day the ocean is golden and oddly furrowed, like a wheatfield, and all the shore birds flying over it are the color of oatmeal the way Monica likes it — with lots of melted butter and cream folded in.

On the same heavenly day or on the next colder and breezier day Monica runs into Pat Corcoran’s young friend, Cathy Castle, approaching the house — on her way to visit Pat Corcoran — just as Monica is leaving. A young mother with three children, Cathy Castle’s face is (or was when Monica first met her) a tight little acorn of girlishness. A girlish, rather short young mother — a sapling when Monica first met her, now thickening a little into a tree — whose girlish acorn-face seems to age years in the span of months between their accidental meetings.

Today Cathy Castle looks exhausted (fresh wrinkles around the eyes) and says that she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Hesitates. Should she say more? She has a story to tell but doesn’t want Monica to think of her as a complainer. Doesn’t want to think of herself as a complainer: one of those chronic complainers who have a story to tell whenever you have the bad luck to run into them and whose stories are nothing but complaints. On the other hand: what story does she have to tell other than her complaints? If her life is nothing but problems and her story is nothing but complaints about them and she can tell that someone (Monica) sees in her eyes that she’s worn out — that she’s aging overnight exactly because she’s worn out — which path should you follow?: tell your endless sour story of complaints or shut up? Shut up and say nothing or tell Monica what Monica is probably already guessing. Doesn’t Monica agree that we generally only tell people what we suspect they already know? So why not tell Monica some of the things she’s probably not going to tell Pat Corcoran? (Pretty much tells Pat only what she wouldn’t mind posting on the supermarket bulletin board.)

Says that she knows she’s starting to look weird: like an aging little girl.

Hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Three-year-old twins, Debby and Patrick, who she has with her now — on foot, not in their busted, hand-me-down carriage that’s impossible to wheel (might as well carry it) — sleep in the same room as her (Cathy) and her husband (name not noted or never known). Both Debby and Patrick are early risers. If one of them sleeps late the other’s sure to wake up early (this morning, for example, they both woke up pretty much simultaneously at 5 a.m.), so her sleep is always interrupted.

Yesterday she got up at 6 a.m. to take Scarlet to the hospital: her throat was painful and she had to have her tonsils out. Should have been simple, should have been “routine”, but nothing is ever routine or simple when you go to Bayview Hospital. They didn’t admit that something went wrong, but she could tell: kept Scarlet for observation all afternoon (she (Cathy) had to take a couple of buses home and then bus back in the evening to pick Scarlet up because they had no bed for her overnight) and then they gave her a thousand warnings about bleeding. “Pay close attention! Watch carefully for any sign of bleeding if she coughs!” etc. etc. So of course she was a nervous wreck, had Scarlet sleep with her and watched her all night instead of sleeping.

Life might be a little easier if she got some help, but she doesn’t.

Her husband (Monica notes that Cathy Castle never uses his name) works nights, so he’s useless night and day.

Her mother’s dead.

Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law (who obviously know her situation better than anyone) never ever offer to help and her husband never tells them to help, so even though she knows it might be dumb she never gets any help because she refuses to ask.

What else?

Cooped up all winter and going nuts.

Weight dropped from 135 to 117 in three months because she was so miserable she stopped eating. Cooped up, looking at the same worn-out furniture, hearing the same conversations, she couldn’t stand the sight of food. She loves chicken. Can usually eat chicken any time in any form. And she likes potatoes just about any way you cook them too. So last night she made some breast of chicken the way she likes it (no recipe given) and a big pot of fresh mashed potato and the children loved it and her husband ate a big meal before going to work but the chicken disgusted her and all she could eat was a few forkfuls of potato. . . .

Lena Coffin doesn’t know what to do.

Someone’s parked her/his car at the mouth of the driveway and gone to the beach. Driveway’s blocked and Lena can’t back out. Starts honking, quickly figures out that honking is pointless, gets out of her car, paces a little trying to find a solution by studying the driveway, says something to Monica writing on her porch without expecting an answer and gets behind the parked car and stares at it as if trying to concentrate enough furious energy to push it out of the way.

Margaret Brennan and golden, light-as-air little Daisy Brennan wave and say “hi” to Lena and to Monica on their way home from the beach to their apartment in Alexi’s house toward the northern end of the street, but Lena’s too angry to wave back or even to see them.

Same day or another?

Notes (“out of order”) that Monica forgot to include or different notes about a similar experience on a different day?

Light-of-day is particularly clear and clean, but the moist ash-green needles of the tall Rhinebeck pine are dripping with something that resembles sleep.

If not sleep, what is it (dark and dripping under shaggy boughs)?

As the day continues breezes wake the pine tree up and make its needles shine.

Blows light in them.

Blows light out of them.

Blows light off and through them.

Now Monica sees bits and dashes of brilliant yellow forsythia through the broken plane of ash-green pine.

Light-of-day lends radiance to needle-leaves and yellow forsythia wands and glowing yellow and shining ash-green add a lustrous moistness to light-of-day.

Everything breathing in the light of everything else.

Radiance of each becomes the radiance of the other.

Absorbed from each and given to each.

On this supremely clear and radiant day everything invents everything else.

Sky can’t escape it.

What more (Monica wonders) can be said about its blue, recessive and cloudless, hiding another blue in whatever blue you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of.

No matter what, Monica wants always to record the fact that she’s here — taking notes because she’s alive and alive because she’s taking notes — on this day (whatever day), but today even more so.

Anyone (David, for example) waking up after 11 a.m. on this day will have no idea of the day. Already fading into ordinariness by eleven. Blue whitens in a subtle way and, with the subtle whitening of sky’s blue-in-blue, light on Earth gets duller, loses its power to animate one thing with another.

Working on the porch, smoking a solitary cigarette, sipping creamy iced coffee.

Enough of March has passed (from handwritten page to typewritten page) that when Monica leans back out of March it’s Friday, August 10 and Dominick Ianni is mowing Sylvia Greengrass’s lawn in plain, bright sunshine. Hot, as it should be. Noise of cicadas at its height (also as it should be). Monica wonders if it’s accurate to say that the noise of cicadas has a tapering shape to it, drilling its way to a point, while the noise that’s made by Dominick Ianni’s crew of industrial strength lawnmowers is wide and shapeless: pointed drilling of cicadas easily threshed up in its blades and engines. Atmosphere mangled with noise is also fragrant with freshly-cut grass. (Monica wishes that a reader with some idea of the math and physics of it could supply even an approximate number of just-cut slices of grass and weed blades.)

Monica may have pulled back her porch rocker entirely — away from typewriter and March notes that aren’t always easy to decipher — because she feels compelled to stay where she is and get some things that happened/are happening today into writing before their cell structures weaken and they turn into the slush of memory.

Let’s see: the last vase of hydrangeas was discarded earlier (whether a cloud of Monica’s favorite but undescribed, light-but-saturated-not-quite-sky-or-French-or-ultramarine-blue or some other impossibly shaded hydrangea color not noted and not noted either which neighbor’s overloaded bush David clipped them from).

No more hydrangeas to cut, therefore the end of one of the season’s inner, un-named seasons?

Her rocker pushed a little back from her typewriter, Monica’s trying to block out August in one way in order to write about it in another. More about hydrangeas? She doesn’t think so: other events of this August day that she had in mind to sketch in are refusing to be re-lived in language. Why would that be? Writing isn’t “automatic”, but she doesn’t have to remind herself to do what’s harder than it seems and let the pen conform to experience. And yet: it’s as if there’s a shadow or a branch in the mind’s way. . . . Turns her head a little and sees an enormous, unfamiliar young man (a “boy” of no more than fourteen or fifteen) crossing the wide porch boards from the front door toward the porch steps with an odd, padding softness, a little bear-like. Goes down the porch steps and some of his weight seems to rejoin him: carries sacks of trash from inside the house down the steps with ordinary human thudding.

Doesn’t head back in.

Sees Monica in the south-west corner in the shade of the pine — not typing (writing in a spiral-bound, narrow-ruled notebook), but with a typewriter in front of her on a bench and seems attracted to it. Crosses the porch, traversing the length of the wall where the Corcorans’ windows and door are, all the way to the railing (and behind Monica): an enormous figure padding quietly, but not necessarily trying to be quiet. More like an animal with padded feet that manages to arrive right next to you from the deep distance: shaggy and noiseless, now you know it’s there because you can hear it breathing.

Stands behind her contemplating the back of her head and may be trying to read what she’s writing. Can’t be sure. Staring at her typewriter? Just enough of a shadow to keep her from doing the writing that took her out of March.

May stand there, staring and breathing — padding back across the porch — approaching again, etc. — going back and forth across the porch like that for a while (saying nothing) before going in. Young, completely blank (and stupid?) face may help make the enormous figure odd but not as menacing as it could be. Monica thinks, for example, of Pam Leary’s enormous brother, Rudi Jolley, who came to visit when Pam and Ted Leary lived in the apartment below Monica’s and whose aura made you look over your shoulder as you walked up the porch steps on a dark night.

Enormous boy goes in and strange, retired pharmacist, Lon Gurion (thin black hair, black worm moustache, thick and strangled voice-tone) pops out, having too-swiftly crossed the maroon-carpeted hall from his dark little ground floor rear studio apartment with (Monica thinks, but it isn’t 100% certain) one small window looking down (north) into the hedge-and-fence-filled channel between the massive three-story multiple dwelling and the squat landlord’s modern-not-modern two-story.

Monica (trying to re-focus on the August day’s events that are losing their contour and oozing into memory) braces for the inevitable interruption. Lon Gurion is sure to have a story to tell and at the same time his stories are stories they’re also loony theories.

Wants Monica to know that his grandson is not retarded. Quite the contrary, in fact — as strange as that may seem, considering his silence, his blank stare, his lumbering gait, his awkwardness, etc., etc. All that is superficial and deceiving! Others aren’t, but he knows that Monica is too insightful to be fooled by it. She probably guessed at once that that dull and clumsy affect, that manatee-like glide of speckled blubber through warm water or warm air, masks a brilliant boy! So uncommonly brilliant he’s in a school for special children: the Walter Disney School in Chicago. Not “special” used dishonestly to mean the opposite of what it really means — not “special” when they really mean “retarded” — “special” as in: so brilliant he’s classified as “schizo-hyper-active”! A surprising term that actually comes close to matching one of the terms in his own system of psychological classification. . . .

What else? His grandson has an older sister, almost sixteen, who went to the same school and is now a counselor there: not quite as brilliant as his grandson and her brilliance not nearly as disguised by dullness or disturbance. Two younger sisters, nine and eleven, have their problems, but would never be classified as “schizo-hyper-active” because everything in them is more muted: their disturbance is muted and so is their intelligence. Wants to know: on which side of the age-old debate does Monica come down?: better to be normal to the point of mediocrity or brilliant to the point of being cracked. . . ?

Let’s see: after Lon Gurion loses his head of steam (a little more relaxed now that he feels he’s persuaded Monica about his grandson’s invisible brilliance) and has gone back to his tiny groundfloor-rear apartment, Monica finds herself wondering if all Lon Gurion’s grandchildren are the offspring of the only child of Lon Gurion’s Monica knows of (and may once have met): a daughter who lives in Connecticut and who raises a rare breed of dog called a “Papillon”. Breed of dog is so rare, according to Lon Gurion, that his daughter’s Papillons constitute most of the Papillon population living in the United States. Could the odd boy on the porch, transfixed by Monica or by her typewriter — and all the other odd grandchildren as well — be the offspring of the Papillon-raising daughter in Connecticut?

It’s David’s pleasure to go to the local library on Coast Boulevard near AAF Street and look “Papillon” up in all the reference books he can find: according to the “Shorter Oxford” a Papillon is “a breed of toy spaniel, having erect ears resembling the shape of a butterfly’s wings and a white coat with a few darker patches. . . . “ (Nothing about its rarity or where it’s bred.) According to another source the “Papillon is one of the oldest of the toy spaniels”. Also: “Papillons are parti-colored (white with markings of any color). An all white dog or a dog with no white is disqualified from the conformation show ring.” Same source also provides alternate names for the Papillon:

“Phalene (drop ear type)

“Continental Toy Spaniel

“Epagneul Nain Continental” and “Nicknames:

“Butterfly dog

“Squirrel dog (due to tail 'carriage' ” and “country of origin:

“France, Spain and Belgium”.

David also finds this:

“Papillons can be registered with AKC as the following colors:

“White & Black

“White & Lemon

“White & Red

“White & Sable

“White, Black & Tan

“Black, Brown & White

“Black, Red & White

“Brown & White

“Fawn & White

“Red, White & Sable

“Sable

“White

“White & Liver

“White & Silver.

“The most distinctive aspect of the Papillon is its large ears, which are well fringed with colored (not white) silky fur. The color covers both eyes and the front and back of the ears to give the ideal butterfly look. A white blaze and noseband is preferred over a solid-colored head. Nose, eye-rims, and lips should be black. Paw pads vary in color from black or pink depending on the coloring of the dog.”

Space is at last cleared for Monica to write about this August day. Happy to be rid of Lon Gurion: space warps around such people: mind feels the force of their inner whirlpools, even though their tales can be seductive. . Only the zzz-zzz-ing of yellowjackets to get in the way of thinking: not a few — hundreds of them zzz-zzz-ing around the perfumed leaves of what plant or shrub? Such a seductive tea-and-honey fragrance (honeysuckle where Monica sees none?) that Monica’s mind (or her mind’s mind and mind’s mind’s nose as well) is zzz-zzz-ing there too. . . .

Why does Monica find herself writing about Peggy Quinlan’s neck? Ink forcing its way into not-very-rounded grooves in paper says: “Peggy Q’s neck and lower face are surprisingly wrinkled. Surprising because the skin of her face above that lower jaw line, above the chin, has the glow of a beautiful young woman’s. An unusual dividing line in a face." Monica’s also written the phrase “folds of flesh”, but then can’t figure out how that fits in.

In a hurry to get things down, to remember by writing (true or exaggerated to say that her pen will do the remembering?), Monica can’t let herself care about the exact order of events: let the pen outline their shapes on paper and pay attention to “order” later.

She thinks it begins like this:

David on the sidewalk in front of the house on the afternoon of this August day or the one before, looking for Lou, the rolypoly mailman, who’s way overdue, or for some other not-noted reason, spots Peggy Quinlan’s husband, Al, in the distance — 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5 houses north, almost at ABC Street’s intersection with Coast Boulevard — trimming the Quinlans’ hedges because some leaves or branching twigs may have randomly popped up 1/2” or more above a perfectly level plane and are spoiling Al Quinlan’s clean and trim vision of the world, which extends from his personal hygiene all the way to the farthest horizons of ABC Street.

David calls up to Monica (writing or typing on the porch) to tell her (thinking of her Chronicle) that he’s sighted Al Quinlan because a sighting of Al Quinlan (whose voice neither Monica nor David can remember ever having heard) is almost as rare as sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker would be and he knows that the Quinlans’ zone of ABC Street isn’t visible from where Monica’s working on the porch. (David wonders aloud why seeing Al Quinlan trimming his hedges should remind him of — and make him feel a restless need to — get back to the barely-written sketches for a narrative revolving around the Lenehans: Nora, Laurel, Ambrose Sr., Ambrose Jr., Riley and Ryan, the “family friend” Kevin Douglas, etc. Why would Al Quinlan make him think of the Lenehans all the way at the southern end of the block and about getting back to figuring out how Monica’s zillions of notes about the Lenehans (and about the block) might relate to another idea that’s been eating at him and that seems to have no relation to the Lenehans, but could have a powerful, inverse relationship to the Lenehans because nothing about the Lenehans has to do with the future and the character that’s been buzzing and annoying him for months is a restless and detached young woman who wants to find a way into the future. . . .

Reports to Monica that — because he’s looking north — he also sees wiry Ellen Garvey tending to her flower beds and her lawn across from the Quinlans’ (or, to be exact, Monica would have to ask David to walk north and pace off the relative positions of the facing houses), rarely upright, always kneeling or on all fours in the earth, as lean, hard-working and weathered as a pioneer wrestling with a resistant plot of land.

Monica’s notes say that Peggy Quinlan is in front of her (the Quinlans’) house in a thin sweater on a chilly evening, but they don’t say whether it’s the evening of the same day that David reported to Monica about Peggy’s husband Al quietly restoring order to their hedges. Notes also don’t say how or why David (or Monica) is close enough to Peggy Quinlan to see how thin her sweater is or hear what she’s saying. David could be walking toward Lou, the rolypoly mailman, who’s waving as he approaches from the north, turning the corner after having rolled his cart west along Coast Boulevard from ABB Street, but no way to know for sure.

Monica’s notes do make a couple of things clear:

        a) at some point David gets all the mail for the house from Lou to save him at least one trip up the porch steps out of how many trips up how many flights of how many steps per day, per week, per year and that they chat on the sidewalk for five, ten or more minutes, as usual.

And b) Peggy Quinlan is in front of her house on a chilly evening, trying to figure out what to do about an old white car that’s blocking her driveway. Peggy says that it’s not just that a car shouldn’t be parked there at all. That’s obvious. It’s also the way it’s parked: at a crazy diagonal, as if someone wanted to make sure that there’s no way to find an inch of space to maneuver around it. As Monica and David know, she says, her mother is ninety-two — and at ninety-two there’s no such thing as being “in good health”. It’s day-to-day and minute-to-minute. Anything can happen at any moment. And if something did happen they’d be completely blocked by this idiot. Any solution they could come up with would take too long. . . .

Peggy Quinlan probably says more but Monica (pushed back out of March, but distracted from recording her August day) can’t think of it. What she writes (what she remembers thinking-but-not-saying while sympathizing with Peggy Quinlan) is that the old white car blocking the Quinlans’ driveway at a crazy angle looks like pony-tailed and permanently-stoned Artie Tilden’s. Resembles his car and the indifferent way it’s parked seems like Artie Tilden’s angle toward existence.

When does Monica find out that the car blocking Peggy Quinlan’s driveway is not Artie Tilden’s?

Let’s see:

                 1) After thinking (but not saying anything to Peggy Quinlan) about Artie Tilden, and at the same time making mental notes about the similarities and differences between Peggy Quinlan’s blocked driveway and Lena Coffin’s blocked driveway and Lena’s demeanor vs. Peggy’s demeanor, the wildly parked car starts to look less like Artie Tilden’s and more like John Corcoran’s, but that makes no sense (the Corcorans have their own cracked and weedy driveway to park in) and she dismisses it.

                 2) In Monica’s notes (struggling to concentrate and to remember by writing through distractions that are just distractions and not digressions that also have to be remembered (written)) David meets Lou, the rolypoly mailman, and takes the house’s mail from him to save him the trip, etc., but it can’t be the same August day and same moment he sees Lou wave from the corner and walks toward him (toward the Quinlans’), because all the circumstances described by Monica are different: David (seeing Lou approaching from one of the front, “green room” windows, cranked open to catch ocean breezes on an August day) hurries down two flights of steps, across the porch and down the porch steps to intercept Lou, who in any case is idling at the foot of the stairs, hoping David will appear and save him the trip up the 5, 6 or 7 wide board steps.

                 3) A package for Pat Corcoran sends David to the Corcorans’ front porch door and he’s surprised that it’s blond-blond little Timothy Corcoran who opens the door to take it. Timothy says that he’s the only one home: father’s probably at work and his mother’s on Long Island (not sure where exactly). His father came home from work last night in one of his moods — in such a bad mood he parked the car somewhere down the block and couldn’t even remember where he left it — and his mother said she was sick of it and his father got angry and they had a horrible fight. She called someone (friend or relative not said or noted), someone came for her — she tried to take him (Timothy) with her, but his father grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let go and his mother had to leave or it would have gotten even crazier.

Later on the same day David reports to Monica that he overheard (the accidental overhearing that automatically becomes deliberate listening and memorizing?) Philip Corcoran talking in the downstairs hall (not in his apartment, but why?) on a phone whose coiled wire he must have stretched to its full, straightened length through the Corcorans’ interior entrance just outside Lon Gurion’s rear studio apartment. A little unusual to hear Philip Corcoran’s voice: usually quiet and recessive with Monica and David, more loose and vocal overheard alone with Yvonne Wilding or when he’s had a few beers or smoked a joint with Al Szarka and his buddies or when he’s alone and assumes no one is within earshot and he practices the guitar and warbles weak, nasal versions of “Rocky Raccoon” and “Blackbird”, a little of the background music of his inner life leaking out.

“How is it your fault? It’s Dad’s fault, so why are you suffering so much?

“I don’t think he suffers. . . . .

“Why are you upset? Let him be upset. Why are you always the one. . . !”

Silence while he listens to a little longer speech at the other end of the line (somewhere not too far out on Long Island).

“How many times have I told you that. . . !

“You know I think that. . . . “

More anguished as it goes along?

“Of course you should leave!

“Should have left him a long time ago, but you didn’t! You always come back and he knows it. . . !”

David reports that he can still make out Philip’s voice, but it’s less intelligible, as if he’s cupped his mouth or turned away from the stairwell, so that his body’s blocking and absorbing the waves and vibrations that had been traveling all the way up to David’s ear as coherent units. . . .

“How am I hurting you? Why is it wrong to say that? Why am I always told I’m wrong when I tell the truth. . . ?

“This is what you always do to me. I didn’t say it’s your fault and I didn’t say you’re afraid to make a move. . . I only said . . . .

“Did I make a stupid joke? I don’t remember making a stupid joke — but if I did make a stupid joke I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. . . ."

When does Monica write that she forgot to record the saturated rose towel and internally shining emerald green towel framed by (ambiguously reflected on/flapping into the interior of) the front picture window of the Arlington sisters’ downstairs apartment in the attached “ranch house” just south of the Regans’ white three story shingle?

If something unexpected crosses our horizontal path along the street where we live (our horizontal path across the earth) is it out of order? Ignore it or pay attention to it? Exclude it because it doesn’t fit or chronicle it because, now that it’s crossed our path, it does fit. . . .

Not noted on what day in late March David reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that he ran into Nancy Wattle’s husband/Hank and Willy Wattle’s father and — he can’t say why — ? Wattle (first name never asked or told) went out of his way to say hello and engage him in conversation. May have said more, but all David remembers is that ? Wattle was born in Brooklyn, joined the Marines as soon as he was of age, was stationed in Kentucky and never saw any sort of combat. He lived in Kentucky for six years — so he can say that the Marines changed his life by giving him a taste for open spaces. Another way: his six years in Kentucky made it impossible for him to come home and live in Brooklyn. Even this neighborhood — surrounded by water — has a completely clear horizon only to the south. To the north you can see the city and it’s his theory that if you can see it it’s too close: city’s shoulders look like their whole aim in life is to shove the waters of the bay south into the ocean. David may know (he says) that he’s a corrections officer (the story of how he came to be a corrections officer is long and depressing and David can imagine how much he hates it). How do we end up where we don’t want to be, doing what we don’t want to do? How does it happen to so many? Can it just be a question of money? He doesn’t think so. Bad luck? Who we meet? Lack of courage? No imagination? Stupid advice? Marriage and children? Another excuse. . . . So what makes us do it. . . ? Well, maybe the upside of the downside is that it’s exactly the tension of being displaced that makes the world go round. Is it some sort of necessity? Maybe it’s part of the “grand plan”. But he can tell David this: he won’t be able to take it much longer — and then one day all the Wattles will just disappear from ABC Street. . . .

Monica overhears this: one of the tellers in one of the banks on AAF Street says that she’s glad — no, she’s overjoyed — that spring is coming: “winter gives me a bad feeling.”

“Well, so-and-so,” an elderly customer answers, “no one likes winter. I’ve never liked winter. It makes us all feel bad.”

“No, Mrs. Connelly, that’s not what I mean. I have those seasonal feelings too. I suppose everyone has that. But I’m talking about something different. When I was five” (in Monica’s handwritten notes it isn’t clear whether the teller says “five” or “nine”) “I fell on the ice and broke my arm. And the shock of that single step sliding away from me and the pain when my arm shattered on the ice has never left me. That long second of falling has been with me my whole life. So, whenever it snows — as soon as it begins to snow — first thin little snowfall of the year — way before there’s ice on the ground — I go back to that second when my foot slid out from under me and I’m frightened. I’m depressed like everyone else because it’s winter, but I’m frightened because I can feel myself starting to fall: so I spend the whole winter in a kind of frightened depression, waiting for spring. . . .”

On an undated day in late March David says that when he was with Peggy Quinlan he noticed something odd about her face: youthful above the chin, “hanging in folds” below it. Monica wonders how this observation migrated here from her earlier notes about Peggy Quinlan. (Or did the migration occur the other way around?)

On Tuesday, March 30, Monica and David are in the sun at the southernmost end of the porch, trying to help each other make two lists: a little (local?) catalogue of the state of what’s blooming/not blooming in early spring and a list of neighborhood people aged by the severe, snow-laden winter of ’76.

Let’s see:

1) Walking or driving, green and yellow are still the only colors seen along the streets and avenues.

2) Forsythias haven’t lost their brilliance: sunlight still converted there to chrome yellow that drips like paint. (The long, dripping yellow tangles of the forsythias are the color of earliest spring.)

3) Still not able to trace the aroma of tea-and-honey to its source. The mildly sweet aroma seems to exactly coincide with the blooming of forsythia but doesn’t seem to come from forsythia (sniffing doesn’t isolate it there).

4) Unidentified pale yellow flowers given to Monica and Wanda Baer by the owner of “Le Beau Pere” last week are still oddly vibrant (no visible change from the moment he clipped them).

5) Lilacs just opening out of their tight green sleeves: just showing the tip of a blackberry core of darkest purple. (Spotted while walking along Salem Avenue on March 30, not one day before).

6) Driving toward Manhattan, not through Brooklyn, but through Broad Channel, along Cross Bay Boulevard: Monica doesn’t think (has never thought) that the long rows of trees lining the sides of Cross Bay Boulevard are willows, but they look like willows and Monica doesn’t know what else to call them, so in her mind she calls them “willows”: a mist of earliest pea or beansprout green not visible in one tree but spun just-visibly through their long rows when looking-while-driving under them.

7) Xylon’s pussy willow on ABA Street — yellow before? — has now become green (what shade of green exactly not noted) throughout its open web of wands and tangles.

8) Hedges everywhere still have winter inside them: their invisible core is cold wood, branching and thorny: whatever thin sprinkles of green have begun to dot their surfaces don’t seem to come from that dark, reluctant center.

BRIEF OFF-THE-TOP-of-THE-HEAD CATALOGUE OF LOCAL ACQUAINTANCES & PASSERSBY AGED BY THE BRUTAL WINTER OF ’76

1) Cathy Castle (see the undated day in late March that may be March 28 or 29 — page number uncertain — for Monica’s quick sketch of Cathy Castle’s sudden thickening and souring out of an unnaturally prolonged girlhood).

2) Old age, climbing Peggy Quinlan like a vine, has reached just below her chin.

3) Greg Coffin (neither Monica nor David had given any thought to how Greg Coffin’s been looking before deciding to sit together in the sun to try and figure out who’s been aged, damaged or seriously altered by the harsh winter of ’76). It’s not so much Greg Coffin’s face that’s changed, and it may not even be a question of his having “aged” in the usual way, as it is a subtle change in his way of gesturing and moving through space. Greg Coffin’s physical signature has always been a fluid and relaxed aloofness that suits his slender height. Now (after the bitter winter) Greg seems to have lost the ease of movement that comes with indifference: crosses space impatiently, as if whatever space he’s in is a box he can’t wait to get out of. Monica can’t help wondering if he’s come to the conclusion that life, which already hasn’t gone as expected, is going to be disappointing. May have reasoned with himself: already disappointing: therefore (looking at life clearly and unsentimentally over a dark winter) the possibility of achieving his loftier ambitions (which turned out to have complications he had no way of foreseeing) is unlikely, even absurd. To be just one more endlessly-striving, little-known musician among zillions might be good enough for Leo (happy enough just to get to play his drums!) or even for Andy (just as happy fishing, crafting a cabinet, getting high as he is playing the guitar) but not for him. No matter how anyone defines it he can’t imagine where “success” is going to come from — and his loss of faith in life’s weedy possibility of sprouting surprises is visible from below in the movements of his legs and sudden, angry swing of his shoulders across the Coffins’ second floor porch.

4) Pat Corcoran just looks lousy (face broken out, skin a yellowing putty, eyes lifeless, voice dull, almost silent, usual fire hydrant of stories not spouting).

“Let’s see,” Monica and David ask each other, “anyone left out?”

5) Enos Greengrass? Both David and Monica have the sense that Enos Greengrass should be included, but neither can remember when exactly it was they saw him last or how terrible (how terrible exactly) he looked.

6) A woman who used to be seen passing regularly by Monica or David, seen only rarely now: Monica thinks her real name is “Pat” or “Patricia”, but she was never a Pat or Patricia to them: was always an “Agnes” (along with “Fat Agnes”) in Monica’s and in David’s notes, or was she sometimes a “Gloria” (also another name for Leila X)?: an obviously once-good-looking-or-just-glamorous woman always in stiletto heels and skin-tight, tropical-colored dresses passing on the opposite (west) side of the street, walking at a rapid but broken pace (because of her high, needle-pointed heels?) from oceanfront apartment house north toward Coast Boulevard. “Agnes” or “Gloria” passes in March ’76 looking a lot worse. Face, never easy to see from across the way, is for some reason as vivid to Monica or David as if one of them were the medicine cabinet mirror where Gloria or Agnes is studying herself before applying her makeup: face alarmingly furrowed and cross-hatched with fresh wrinkles. Where have they arrived from, as if having flown there like a flock of starlings into a tree?

6 1/2) “Agnes’s” or “Gloria’s” husband — whose real name could be “Dave” but who, to Monica and David, has always been “the Clock” (never “Clockface”?) — passes, looking terribly aged (exactly how not noted). Also can’t remember exactly why they called him “the Clock” or “Clockface”: shape of head or face seems most likely but there also could have been something ridiculously regular and predictable about his appearances heading north or south. Notes say something about a terrible loss of weight always equaling a terrible increase in wrinkles.

7) True or untrue, fair or unfair, to include the winter-phobic bank teller on their list?

On an undated day in late March Monica is walking on Coast Boulevard when someone in a passing car waves, calls out “hi” and pulls up: it’s Cousin Jo Ellen in a chatty mood: a story to tell? Or one of those daily non-stories that may be made of a dozen or more pulverized stories.

Cousin Jo Ellen says that she’s on her way to pick up a friend — “not Themis”. Goes out of her way to make it clear that she doesn’t want Monica to assume it’s Themis and also goes out of her way to define him as “only a friend”. True, she says, she has to admit that she can see why someone might think or assume there’s something between her and Themis — because she’s in the Cornucopia Diner till 3, 4 in the morning almost every night. Hangs out there, but not just because of Themis. If anything, she hardly hangs out with Themis at all because he’s always in the kitchen! She spends just as much time with the owner, Christos, as she does with Themis — and she’d say of him in exactly the same way that he’s “just a friend”. For her the Cornucopia Diner is — at least late at night — a community. How can she explain? It’s a long story if you tell it one way and a very short story (or not even a story) if you tell it another way. The short-short version is that, because she lived and worked on Aruba for so many years (how many not noted), when she came back to the States and to New York she couldn’t live in Manhattan (where it should have made sense for her to live) because that kind of anonymity was not for her. She’d gotten too used to island life or village life or whatever the right term is for that scale of existence. So she moved into a neighborhood she thought would be like that, a sort of self-contained town or village: the community of the street, everyone recognizable, everyone knowing you by sight and saying hello, a village-like neighborhood where you could establish yourself as a “regular” in a café and a bar, etc., etc. But her neighborhood is not Aruba — there is no community. She’s not old enough, she’s not young enough, she’s not married, she has no children, she has no idea what category she belongs to — so there is no community and she felt totally isolated until she stumbled into the Cornucopia Diner late one night. Got talking to Christos and Themis may have wandered out from the kitchen, the cashier was nice and she probably chatted with someone at the counter – and then she tried it again another night, started to get to know the late night regulars and began to feel at home. A weird thing to say, but the Cornucopia Diner has made living around here bearable. She’s sorry she took that stupid job with the plastic surgeon in Forest Hills because she has to get up early and it’s ruining her nights. . . .

What else?

Let’s see: Cousin Jo Ellen says that she weighs exactly one-hundred-and-thirty-nine pounds and her height is 5’ 6” so she’s supposedly just the right weight for her height, but it doesn’t feel that way to her and starting tomorrow she’s limiting herself to five hundred calories a day.

“From now on it’s black coffee and cigarettes for me. . . !”

Not perfectly clear in Monica’s notes: Does Cousin Jo Ellen add this before driving away down Coast Boulevard (east) in the direction of AAF Street or beyond? Despite the community of the diner, despite Christos and Themis and the cashier and the late-night customers she now considers friends, despite her dumb new job and the fact that she no longer feels so horribly isolated, it’s always in her mind to disappear one day: just pull herself up by her shallow roots and look for another island. . . .

On what undated day in late March, while working at her typewriter or eating breakfast at her tremendous oak-desk-and-breakfast-table under the west-facing windows of the green room, is this what Monica sees?:

Her favorite vase, given to her by a childhood friend, a smoky tower of heavy Czechoslovakian crystal tapering up in polished blocks from a narrow base, with forsythias in it for the first time. First flowers clipped for Monica by David this year (therefore first time vase has water in it)? Vase must already have been there, empty, dark, gleaming and beautiful in another way, because Monica’s notes say that yellow flowers floating on water and long, forsythia wands “bring it to life”.

Long yellow forsythia wands “brush against” and cross the dark crocodile green of the leaves of Lowell’s avocado plants flanking Monica’s typewriter, but is the darkness of the green changed by the yellow crossing it and, if so, in what way (in what way exactly)?

And, if dark crocodile green and lively chrome yellow change one another, what’s changed in Monica’s view through them toward the complex mutations of light in the bamboo blinds?: light against them, daylight/sunlight through them: on leaves, on glass, on water, on green of leaves, on completely other (chlorophyll?) green of walls, on how many yellows altering to other yellows throughout the day and on not-quite-transparency-not-quite-colorlessness of water and glass.

Things are concentrated or re-organized by other things in so many places that eye and brain have too much work to do and generally don’t bother to sort it out. . . .

Notes also say something about a certain critical moment of light in the green room — when light through bamboo is truly “golden” and all elements of the room are drawn into a fleeting internal resonance of green and gold?

Also: the beauty of the dark, upright pool of water in the Czechoslovakian vase.

On the same day as the “forsythia” day or on another day (just because two events appear side-by-side, one after the other or even tangled together on the same handwritten notebook page of Monica’s Chronicle doesn’t necessarily mean that they happened at the same time or on the same day) Cathy Castle visits Pat Corcoran with stories to tell and stops on the porch to tell her stories to Monica before telling them to Pat.

MISERY (MORE MISERY?) IN SUNLIGHT

Cathy Castle (still looking both blown-up and worn out, a cute but stubby little kirby pickled too long in the brine of a bitter winter) is worried about Scarlet. She doesn’t think Scarlet should be, but still is feeling the effects of the operation: smallest little rough edge of food hurts her throat. Last night, for example, she gave Scarlet some simple broiled chicken cut up into tiny pieces and a small amount of mashed potato whipped real smooth and creamy the way Scarlet likes it, but the potato seemed to hurt her throat even more than the chicken, so she ate practically nothing. All Scarlet can tolerate consistently are chocolate pudding and chicken broth so a) she’s running out of ideas about what to cook and b) she’s worried that there’s more to what’s wrong with Scarlet than the after-effects of the operation. For example: why is it that she can drink milk and apple juice but can’t drink orange juice? Orange juice makes her cough and every time she coughs Cathy’s afraid she’s going to bleed — so she’s still sleeping with Scarlet on the livingroom day bed and just about sleepless. Husband gets in from work at 2 a.m. and wakes everybody up: Debby thinks it’s morning, gets over-excited and wants to play.

What else? Cathy Castle wants Monica’s opinion. Obviously her first concern is Scarlet. She’s been very careful not to cook anything that could injure her throat. But then what does she do with her husband? If her husband goes too long without his favorite meals he gets all cranky and depressed and miserable and he makes life miserable for everyone else. So, over the weekend, she decided to make a roast loin of pork with red cabbage, mashed potatoes and gravy. Scarlet has always liked that dish and she was hungry and she wanted some (she’s sick of chocolate pudding and chicken broth!), but she was afraid that no matter how small she cut up the roast a little dry edge of it could injure Scarlet’s throat — so, while everyone else was eating roast pork and cabbage and mashed potato and gravy and the smell was filling the house, Scarlet was eating some boring goo and there was nothing she could do or say to make it seem alright. What does Monica think: was she wrong for making the roast? for caring whether or not her husband was miserable without his meat and gravy? Is there a solution she’s not seeing. . . ?

Over a number of undated days in late March Monica walks into the green room and is struck first — immediately on entering — by the yellow of the forsythias. Yellow is striking just for being yellow: against green even more so. After a while she’s able to see that morning yellow is entirely different from afternoon yellow and for obvious reasons. In the morning — even on sunny days — at the moment of sun’s freshest, most naked clarity and brilliance — it’s at the exact, diagonally opposite pole from the green room, on the far side of the massive peaked roof, and its indirect light is a kind of daylit shadow that makes blossoms cluster more densely. Light falls on them but doesn’t get through them. Entering the green room Monica sees dense yellow masses without illumination. In the afternoon, lit up from behind, the forsythias are a thin, blazing screen.

Leaning in or sitting back?

Typing March notes in August August always has a chance to drill or talk its way through and pull Monica in a completely physical sense out of the leaning-forward position that’s necessary for her to keep her hand and eye on folded sheets of handwritten scrap paper or on handwritten notebook or pad and at the same time be able to place her fingers on the keys of her typewriter and also keep track of the new, edited version of the handwritten notes that — completing the circuit of handwritten scrawl —› into left hand, through more than one region of Monica’s brain —› into and through right hand —› into typewriter —› onto paper — has to be checked for accuracy.

This leaning-forward state is one of great intensity and focus, but it’s also fragile and easily torn: a voice, a sunspot of music, grinding motors of gardening machinery, blast of weather, even an exiled thought wandering through the frame of March walks through easily, sometimes pulling a long train of digressive note-taking with it. . . .

March in August in March in August and so on. . . .

Pat Corcoran pops out through her front porch door (having had to cork herself up too long? impatiently watching Monica leaning over her typewriter as if she’s doing something that matters) to forewarn Monica that if Lou gives her any mail for Allison Meehan it has to go in their (the Corcorans’) box. Repeats again: not in the general mailbox, but in the separate bin near their front door marked “Corcoran”!

Not clear in Monica’s notes: does Monica ask Pat Corcoran how that’s any different from the way it’s always been? What else would she do with Allison Meehan’s mail, seeing that Allison Meehan (the Corcorans’ niece) lives with the Corcorans? Or: Pat Corcoran’s meaning may be too obvious for Monica to say or write anything: Pat Corcoran went out of her way to say something stupid and meaningless to Monica, snapping her out of her leaning-out-of-August-into-March position, because she wants Monica to know that she see things. Monica may not think she sees, but she does: sees things and knows things because she watches: looks through the wooden slats of her old venetians and sees Monica downstairs sometimes or David downstairs sometimes, waiting for Lou the rolypoly mailman: and sees how Lou sometimes hands them all the house’s mail and she resents it! Bothers her, but she doesn’t want to argue with Monica or maybe not even say out loud that she spies on life in front of the house through the slats of her venetians, because in her mind’s eye she can see that if she were the one listening (Monica) she might find the one babbling and complaining (herself) a little odd and annoying, so she chooses what seems to her the middle ground: just pop out across whatever reality Monica might be leaning into: pop into Monica's March and Monica's August like the big-headed shadow crossing the auditorium — already talking and sounding like Pat Corcoran before Monica can focus and see that it's Pat Corcoran.

Monica wonders: is it true that a sentence can cancel death?

Certainly not just any sentence.

Therefore: what kind of sentence?

Worth spending a lifetime trying to write such a sentence?

Could it be the one endless, horizontal sentence it takes a lifetime to write?

On the spur of the moment Wanda Baer, Monica and David drive to Manhattan to have dinner together. Wanda Baer has nothing in particular to talk about — no urgent story to tell — and isn’t conscious of needing advice about anything: it seems to be the lack of any reason or purpose that inspires them and all three feel it equally.

A MEAL in “LA MANGEOIRE” in the FORM OF A LIST:

1) Following her impulse to do nothing but follow her impulse Monica (as soon as they cross the 59 St. Bridge) drives to a small French restaurant called “La Mangeoire” on Second Avenue between 53 Street and 54 Street. No one thought of going there and, even though Monica remembers having gone there with David, she can’t remember when and the fact that she has no idea why she drove there now makes everyone want to go there.

2) Look through the window at the owner, Gerard, a slender man with a gentle, scholarly appearance, recessively overseeing his cloud-world of food and flowers from his caisse just inside the door and to the left, then stand in the entrance for a while sniffing the permanent aromasphere of Mediterranean spices under the ceiling.

3) Is it because no one craved anything that what’s given by accident seems perfect?

4) Kept afloat on clouds of flowers and whipped cream? (“Heaven” because it’s not ours?)

5) Also just inside the entrance, on an enormous old sideboard (to the right?), a crystal punch bowl of what’s said to be “sabayon sauce”, but seems too puffed and cloud-like, as if the silken yellow custard has been folded with whipped cream; a crystal bowl of perfect strawberries; a crystal bowl of dark “champignons a la grecque”.

6) After they’re seated at a leafy table not far from the entrance David is preoccupied by the sideboard, particularly by the strawberries being spooned into long-stemmed glasses: strawberries (which David loves in any case) are so large and ideal that he can taste their perfect strawberryness from where he’s sitting: from childhood David has had the gift of teleportation: over there while appearing to others not to have moved: and there he is now, in his chair and also right next to the crystal bowl of strawberries being spooned into tall desert glasses, froth of white or just-faintly-egg-yellow-white sabayon sauce spooned over them with great care and deliberation by a waiter dedicated to his task, pausing before spooning again to allow froth, which does have a certain liquid weight to it, to run down between the berries that can’t wait to be tasted. Now their filled-to-the-skin red only shows out at a few points from the whipped-up cloud around and above them.

7) Monica wonders if it’s possible that David — before they’ve even ordered or tasted anything — is already worried that by the time dinner is over there won’t be any strawberries or sabayon sauce left for him.

8) A basket of bread (kind not noted) and small crocks of butter.

9) Only one first course noted and not noted either whether there’s more than one order of it: warm salad of sausage and potato lightly dressed with a garlic dressing of some kind. No memory (no record) of ordering or eating “champignon a la grecque”: therefore, apparently, David is not obsessed with that end of the sideboard.

10) What else? One of the day’s specials for David: roast veal with a white wine and mushroom sauce with seventeen herbs (Monica would like a list of the “seventeen herbs”, but couldn’t get one then (in the restaurant) or later (while writing or typing); steak au poivre for Wanda Baer (“Madagascar green pepper” sauce that’s dense — not a fiery black crust of cracked black pepper — more a real sauce that may have a little cream in it); and for Monica (her favorite?) duck a l’orange: skin crackling, sauce bittersweet with (Monica and David put their heads together and are pretty sure) strong stock made from duck or chicken; something caramelized yet not sweet; orange rind; dark wine with some sweetness to it (could even be port); Grand Marnier, Cointreau or some other orange liqueur or brandy; a few other things they can’t figure out.

11) Everything perfect, everything as it should be. When anticipation and imagination aren’t spoiled by experience, then in what reality are we?

12) Let’s see: perfect pommes frites, broccoli prepared how?, a good bottle of red wine chosen by David (drawn to red wine by instinct even before he knows the first thing about it — type not remembered or recorded).

13) David has no choice: he has to have the strawberries for dessert and his only disappointment is that he can barely manage one overflowing glass of them.

Wanda Baer has also been eying the sideboard, but lusting only for the cloud of sabayon sauce, not the strawberries: therefore orders chocolate mousse cake (moistened with rum) served alongside a dreamlike and towering cumulous cloud of sabayon/whipped cream Wanda Baer can’t wait to get her spoon or finger into — as if tasting and licking it might be the same as traveling across the universe on a raft of it forever.

Monica’s dessert comes last (takes the longest to prepare) and is worth waiting for. Added to her pleasure in having the best dessert: David advised her to change her mind and have the perfect strawberries like him and Wanda Baer is so lost in her whipped cream cloud — not so much in her rum-soaked chocolate mousse cake — that she doesn’t care what Monica orders. Monica’s profiteroles are as large as ostrich eggs: two egg-ovals under darkest dark chocolate that pools around them in the well, up to the inner rim of the decorative border of an oversized platter: cumulous cloud-on-cloud of just faintly eggy-white sabayon/whipped cream upright beside the two dark-chocolate-covered egg-ovals: the bowl of a large spoon brings to the mouth, all in the same moment, several layers of taste: bittersweet chocolate sauce, bit of thin, crisp, somewhat eggy dough, surprising-to-the-tongue taste of cool vanilla custard (released from interior by spoon breaking through crust), little froth of sabayon/whipped cream with its subtle tastes of marsala and orange liqueur: darkest dark and bittersweet chocolate has just a little sweetened crunch of dough hidden in it and the softening contrast of silky vanilla custard and the very slightly sweet and aromatic, melting-away-as-you-taste-it cloud that has to be chased by the tongue to be tasted and chased and tasted again and again to have the slightest reality: depth of chocolate tries to anchor everything but slides away.

Monica wonders: is the compulsion to record experience the same (exactly the same?) as the desire to be completely alive in the instant of experience?

The same question or different: where does experience happen?

While eating, consciousness and its sensory eclipse chase one another’s tail and it’s the dream of each instant to erase the one before it.

Find out what happened by writing?

No knowing without writing?

Or: writing not a way of knowing at all, but of living in a parallel, horizontal universe.

The ambiguous tang of what’s always sliding away from us.

Monica believes this: our truest autobiography happens outside our skin: is us because it isn’t us (yet draws our outline?).

End-of-March days may follow their usual order, but not necessarily in the Chronicle. Day follows day and event follows event, but not one day is dated and no event is matched to one dated day — so the events and days of the end-of-March might as well be laid out side-by-side on a table where they could be shuffled in any order and no one would know the difference.

On a sunny day the air is chilled: sun visible in the air can’t be felt on the skin: skin feels far-away ocean’s cold green currents more than sun that falls directly on it, while “yesterday” skin was warm without sun and without the remote touch of far-away currents.

“Today” a chilled sun falls on everything.

Fresh green grass has sprung up overnight around the far-reaching tangles of the forsythia wands. Not clear to Monica while translating her hard-to-read notes into typewriter: can it already be the edges of these new green grass-blades — green with no color in it but green — nothing but green and the light that helped it out of whatever sheath was containing it — edges of these just-born grass-blades that are at once “sharp” and “resilient” and “fluttering” because of icy ocean currents already coursing through them as south —› north breezes? Grass wasn’t there yesterday around the forsythias, but today it’s tall enough to be shaken by the force of currents going through it: currents that are also “green”, but a more unimaginable one: an iced green drink, nearly frozen, made out of water and salt and strong alcohol with something wild and herbal pounded for centuries there into a refractive crystal powder.

Same day or different? A woman’s one piece black bathing suit and a man’s mustard bathing suit are moving in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window in a more restricted way (stiff and heavy with water?) than the flapping white sheet that caught Monica’s attention how many days earlier? despite the severe southwest angle from the southern end of the porch.

Now that it’s happened by chance Monica’s become conscious that there’s something to observe and record at the endpoint of that angle of looking and she’s curious to see what happens if she keeps cataloguing what’s reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window when she happens to be looking that way. Also makes a note to herself to try and figure out (by calculating the angle from porch or sidewalk?) whose flapping and fluttering sheets, pillow-cases, clothing on whose clothesline have been pictured there for years with no one to notice or record them.

What else? Note about this day or about several days: the colors of end-of-March clothing and bedding reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window are all by-and-large muted pastels: pale pinks, mild greens, faded yellows creased and folded one across the other in patterns that can’t help changing, are often complex and occasionally beautiful.

Monica knows that in the course of a day she does an unusual amount of looking or staring at things and she also knows that the spring sun is deceptive and dangerous: seems cool in cool air (harshness of sun neutralized by cold green ocean currents?), but staring at ocean “earlier” or staring at window reflections “later” or even a bolt of light off a passing car sometimes brings on a painful sun-headache, as it does now.

Double or triple (at least triple) image of forsythias:

1) From the green room, looking down deliberately by separating the fine horizontal rods of the bamboo blinds with the fingers of one hand: a clear view of the long reach of the chrome-yellow wands from the center of the right-hand wing of the lawn all the way across it to the sidewalk.

2) From the far south boardwalk end of ABC Street: a vivid, somewhat horizontal and tangled cloud of yellow on or just off the sidewalk: distance doesn’t matter: vision flies to it, giving an odd sensation of out-of-body travel: yellow the only color other than a few thin washes of green and the dull and muddy anti-colors of brick, shingle, pavement, etc. . . .

3) From inside the green room: Monica is struck by how far the long yellow wands now seem to extend from the smoky Czechoslovakian glass vase, as if they’re growing there. Not noted before (therefore “out of place”?): Monica had loaned her Czechoslovakian crystal vase, one of the few presents from a childhood friend she’s taken with her whenever she’s moved, to her sister Kitty: reason not remembered or recorded: and Kitty returned it when she moved back to Manhattan — out of the ancient yellow brick apartment house where ABC Street meets the boardwalk — just in time for the forsythia wands David had clipped for Monica.

Does the return of the vase “mean” something? sever something? Nothing but what it is? Another way: nothing to be seen in the vase but water, trimmed lower ends of forsythia branches and a few floating yellow petals.

On March 31: a) Monica crosses paths → ← north/south with Lena Coffin, walking quickly (nervously?), carrying two long and heavy cast iron twelve-muffin muffin pans from her house to Grete/Babette’s or from Grete/Babette’s to her house (which way not noted and not noted either whether Monica’s returning from or headed for the beach).

Hardly takes time to pause and say, as if calling out to someone in the distance:

“Baking muffins for Rosa’s birthday!” “’Rosa?’” Monica never heard Rosamond called “Rosa” before, finds it odd but has no way to figure out what it means. Joshua just had his birthday: she baked something for him — so of course she has to bake something for Rosamond and now everything’s happening all at once! — there’s no time — there’s never any time — and she’s beginning to forget her own name. . . . Today is one of those days when she needs someone to remind her who she is. . . .

b) At what time does Pat Corcoran find Monica to tell her this story: earlier this morning (time not said or not noted) she smelled gas: strongest when she approached the entry door to her apartment that opens into the hall just outside the little back studio where that disgusting old man is living. Sniffed around a little to make sure that that’s where the gas was coming from, then called the gas company. How did the man from the gas company get into Lon Gurion’s musty little studio? Monica tries to find out, but can’t, because once Pat Corcoran’s mind and tongue get hooked up together and start racing around their track, two wheels up on the edge of the steep, banked wall, there’s no way for Monica’s voice to break in.

Pat makes this much clear: fire department came: gas was coming from “that repulsive man’s” dark little studio: he has a habit (Pat Corcoran says) of disappearing for days, leaving his door padlocked. This time he left his oven on and the pilot light blew out: next time it will be worse! Pat Corcoran reminds Monica that she’s been saying from the minute he moved in that that weird old man is dangerous — and that, if the landlord didn’t get rid of him, he’d end up killing them all. . . .

Which arrives first: raw green spice of just-cut grass (not sniffed by the nose, arriving through the nose instantly from any distance (demanding a better quantum physics of the senses) straight to the brain and sniffed by the startled brain only) or zzz of lawnmower cutting grass in the deep middle distance?

At about 6 p.m. on March 31 Monica hears the unmistakable sound of Al Szarka’s voice, clogged with anger and anguish. Coming from where to where?

“Where’d you get it?”

(Monica assumes that Al Szarka is talking to Yvonne Wilding, but no answer so can’t say for sure.)

“From Danny, right? You’ve been getting stuff from Danny — you’ve been sneaking it. . . !”

Now Monica clearly hears Yvonne Wilding’s voice: an odd sort of childish whining from this darkly lazy, attractively depressed woman who thinks a lot and says little.

“Sneaking into the bathroom, am I right? Shooting up there! snorting coke in there! am I right or am I wrong? Don’t lie to me, Yvonne!”

More childish whining and wheedling.

“Then what was that funnel I found in the bathroom, Yvonne? We have no funnel. You always think people are stupid, but you always get caught. Why is that, Yvonne? Huh? Can you explain that? Can you explain why someone who’s smarter than me and smarter than everyone else always gets caught — always messed up and trying to weasel her way out. . . . Explain that to me, Yvonne. . . !”

Yes, Yvonne admits, she did snort some coke in the bathroom. But absolutely did not — did not — shoot up. (Slightly less whining, slightly more like Yvonne’s normal voice, even a little irritated?) Snorted some coke, so — big deal. And she did not — repeat again, did not — get anything from Danny! She’s got other ways, her own ways, ways he knows nothing about, to get what she needs. . . .

“You’re so full of shit, Yvonne. . . !”

At intervals from Al, always clogged and anguished, but sometimes a little more anguished, sometimes a little more angry:

“is this what you want?”

“you don’t love me — can’t say you love me! — if this is what you do. . . .”

“if you really loved me, Yvonne, you wouldn’t. . . !”

“want to snort coke in the toilet? is that your idea of living, Yvonne?”

“why do you always do this stuff? You wouldn’t always do this stuff if you. . . .”

On and on like that, for how long?

And a little later it’s Yvonne, whining and wheedling like a little girl again, who says “you don’t care about me, Al — you wouldn’t talk to me this way if you loved me. Everyone says they love everyone but no one loves anyone and everyone’s full of shit. There’s something you want from me or something you need from me and that’s what it’s all about, Al.”

Is it Al Szarka or someone else who later tells Monica that Yvonne’s mother, who died a few years ago, was an alcoholic who beat Yvonne regularly. Also this: as Monica must have noticed, Yvonne has been losing weight rapidly. Losing weight suddenly and quickly, looking tired, looking lousy — drawn, droopy and haggard — and that’s not a good sign. Last time she looked and felt like that, about a year ago, they found her od’d at the Queens Plaza Mall.

March ’76 notes end with Monica and David on the porch together again, adding to their catalogue of those undone by the harsh winter of ’76. (Adding to it or repeating themselves because they don’t remember what they’ve done.)

“The Clock”

Pat Corcoran

Bank teller, with her long complaint about winter.

August in March. Or, more accurately, though it sounds more confusing, August in March in August: that is, working on the porch in August, typing (translating) handwritten March notes, the August-that's-around-her that she's blinded to sometimes intrudes, breaking March’s hold on Monica’s consciousness.

Lean back, away from the typewriter (therefore, out of March).

“Late in the afternoon” (date not noted) Monica is typing March notes behind the Rhinebeck pine, still in the afterglow of an icy swim at 1 p.m. (rough water and strong undertow). She feels compelled to stop her translation of March notes to sketch in a brief encounter with Pam Leary on Coast Boulevard.

Pam Leary’s lip is swollen and there are ugly sores on it but she says that this is nothing: she was out in San Diego visiting her family and she spent too much time in the sun. “Sun poisoning.” Sores were terrible (no one could look at her) and her lower lip swelled up to twice — more than twice? — its normal size.

Let’s see: Rudi is home, living with their parents again after all this time, and he’s gone back to college to finish his degree. She has to admit that she had a hard time with that. Had a hard time accepting Rudi being there, paying no rent, etc.: as Monica knows her parents (their parents) lost their life savings — spent every dime they had to keep Rudi out of prison. And she hates him for that. Can’t hide the fact that she resents him for that. Naturally Donald Green is back in the picture. Somehow Donny got involved with real estate. Had no idea Donny knew anything about real estate, but the story is that he makes a lot of money — goes nuts — goes broke — goes back to real estate and earns more money. Donny can survive his own craziness, but Rudi can’t. So Rudi’s living at home, Donald is buzzing around, stoking him up, filling his head with nutty ideas again and something’s bound to go wrong.

What else? Polly is in San Francisco, keeping her distance from the mess they know is brewing.

APRIL 1976

Monica’s handwritten notes for April 1, 1976 say that the light rain that’s falling has a green cast to it. Later (November?), while typing her notes up, she asks herself what kind of green? Just-born green fresh out of the pod? Not-quite-avocado green of the bushes in the narrow channel between the massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling and the landlord’s ugly pseudo-modern? (And, if avocado, skin of avocado or flesh of avocado?) Nothing she can think of matches the green of the rain she’s seeing.

Internal light in young leaves should be added and also external light able to pass through their thin membranes, but what else? Green mist of rain stirring slowly through the whole globe of space has something of ocean’s mineral green elixir in it too. . . .

This too: “Pine is the green of winter, light through youngest peapods the green of April.”

A question that always interests Monica, though she realizes it may be destined to always be a question: if a string of unrelated events stretches the length of a day (April 1, for example) and in that way measures the day or, more accurately, is the day — and Monica does her best to catalogue the events in the string — is it still a catalogue of “unrelated events”? or are they now related because they happened on the same day or because Monica catalogued them within the frame of the day?

a) Green light, green mist, green rain, etc.

b) Wanda Baer passes under a bright, pie-wedge umbrella of primary colors: wedges of red, blue, yellow form a brilliant pinwheel over her head against the rain that’s barely more than a green mist: while down on the ground Wanda Baer is wearing an earthen brown suede jacket (same jacket Wanda fell in love with in a department store men’s department, then worried a little later that it was a mannish jacket when she caught sight of a car window reflection of herself walking down ABC Street — or is it another brown jacket altogether, also cut to fit a man’s more squared-off frame?); chocolate brown corduroy pants; high caramel brown boots; a white turtleneck for contrast; an oversized brown leather shoulder bag that used to be Kitty’s (given to Wanda when Kitty moved back to Manhattan).

c) Lilacs are trying to flower: buds look edible, small and tight as raspberries, black-purple-violet as blackberries: small, hard and edible buds or berries barely out of their green casings: green skins bursting with the lengthening berry-tips that can’t quite get out and flower. On April 1 is the whole sprouting natural world edible, even here on ABC Street? New “snowball” leaves look like brussels sprout leaves to Monica. Lilac and hydrangea, unidentified bushes in the channel between two houses: peapod, brussels sprout, raspberry and blackberry. Only forsythias (their long wands and their yellow) don’t conjure the impulse to chew on the world to know it.

d) Is Monica’s notation that the morning of April 1 is “windy” out of order?

e) Some more notes on blue: Monica can’t say for sure whether she still has Rilke’s letters (therefore Cezanne) in mind when she struggles for the right word for the day’s mild blue. Action of pen on paper: right word might as well be right brush stroke: writing the word blue she’d love to see a creamy wash of exactly the blue of this day. What softened it to this degree? At about 3 p.m. green mist clears to reveal a sky like a tropical sea: blue of young sky is to blue as newly-minted leaves are to green: the blue and green of an underripe world. These blues and greens exist in Cezanne and in Matisse too, most vividly in Matisse’s “View of Notre Dame” where all of green nature reveals itself as a mysterious green globe in the midst of an extraordinary plane of a blue that may be the blue of April 1, 1976, but on that canvas may be a wall, a window, a sky — or sky, wall and window — though not exactly equal to the vertical plane of brushstrokes that confronts us along with the black, sketched diagram of an architectural shape. Monica’s mild blue ocean of sky can certainly be found in works by both painters, though not necessarily in their skies or their oceans. Or: their skies may not always be where we look for them. Monica wonders: where — where exactly — did they find their blue? and did they name it? This too: she’d love to know what pigments had to be mixed with winter’s cobalt to arrive at the sky that exists when the mist clears on April 1.

f) Monica notes “three blue skies in one”.

g) More notes on forsythias or some notes on the color yellow: in the “heavy wind and rain” of the morning (what time not noted) ABC Street’s forsythias lost a great number of petals: yellow on the ground, sky’s unnamable blue above (each altering the other) and a dry tangle of woody wand-branches with some weak yellow caught in it at or just below eye level. Softest of white clouds have painted themselves in to complete the image of a perfect summery day in spring.

Greg Coffin (inspired by the forsythias that colored ABC Street yellow from one end of March to the other, holding on into April?) is painting the walls of his enclosed porch/ping-pong room a harsh chrome or egg yolk yellow: vivid, saturated wall of yellow through Greg-and-Lena’s side window.

Monica can’t be sure from her angle, looking south from the porch, if the quadrant of dull wall being gradually swabbed with yellow by Greg Coffin, is really in the porch/ping-pong room or in the hall leading out of the ping-pong room and toward the inner stairs and chambers of the massive house.

h) David reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that Mikki called (while Monica was working on the porch) with a tiny fragment of a story to add to a long story already-being-told. Tiny fragment of story splits in two: Mikki’s been enjoying herself, but now she’s not sure whether or not to be revolted by herself: been enjoying herself in a way that, while she was enjoying herself, she told herself Monica and David would think of as sloppy and stupid (but of course went ahead and enjoyed herself anyway): wallowing (the only word for it!) in hot fudge sundaes with her “little cowgirl” Marsha — gorging on cake and pastry with Marsha — having — what other way is there to put it? — simultaneous sugar, cream, chocolate and butter orgasms with Marsha — with the inevitable (horrible?) result that she put on fifteen bloated pounds and looks pretty ugly. So she’s a little guilty, a little disgusted with herself — but she’s addicted to all these sloppy pleasures and doesn’t know how to (doesn’t want to?) cure her addiction. . . .

On April 3 the Corcorans are hanging green-and-white checked curtains in niece Allison Meehan’s bedroom (large room that used to be the bedroom of a tenant named Marian Woolsey, now with a wall thrown up to divide it neatly in two: 1/2 for Allison Meehan, the other shared by Philip Corcoran and blond-blond younger brother, Timothy).

Monica notes (how does she know this?) that Allison Meehan’s bed is a canopy bed, that the canopy is green and white (though not “checked”) and that (obviously) the reason for the green-and-white checked curtains is to complete the look, or the hard-to-define mood, of spring-like sweetness and cheerfulness invoked by the look of crisp green-and-whiteness in Allison Meehan’s bedroom.

What else? Monica wonders if the Corcorans are going to remove the roll-down paper or vinyl shades on Allison’s bedroom windows now that they’ve hung the green-and-white checked curtains. Sometimes, still on the porch after dark and with a lamp lit in Allison’s bedroom, Monica noted with pleasure a hard-to-explain green shadow rippling through the pale, yellowish egg-white of the pulled-down shades.

On April 3 several people pass Monica while she’s writing on the porch and there are others Monica passes when she’s walking along ABC Street and through the neighborhood.

For example: 1) Margaret Brennan has a friend named Wendy who lives in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the ocean end of the block who Monica knows exactly this much about: Wendy is an attractive woman with a solid, shoulder-length block of dark, straight hair who walks or drives by generally in the starched, form-fitting white uniform of a nurse or medical assistant; divorced or has an invisible husband; has two daughters: older, athletic and intelligent, hair a shade darker than blonde, sometimes walks, bicycles or runs by quickly, glancing inquisitively sideways at Monica; younger one, Natasha, pretty but with a dull-eyed look that makes her seem dumber than she is and with an odd impediment to her movements that makes her legs seem heavier than they are — passing now, her beautiful, dark and wavy hair curling against a brown, somewhat mannish suede jacket that looks exactly like the one Wanda Baer walked by in “the other day”. Does Monica wonder then, on April 3, or later, in October, when she’s in her red studio translating April’s handwritten notes into typewriter, if the twinning of “man-tailored” brown suede jackets is a signal that the impediments that make Natasha appear duller and heavier than she is may have something in common with the impediments that frequently make Wanda Baer seem dumber and clumsier than she is?

Twinning of suede jackets, twinning of impediments really = twinning of what?

This too: Monica would like to keep track of the suede jacket into which both Wanda Baer and Natasha fit like two names slipped into the same sentence — but she knows that chances are they’ll never come up together again or, if something accidentally links them again, it will be when Monica’s long-since forgotten about this moment — so Monica will never know if the correspondence of jackets, etc. means less or more than it seems to now and it will be up to someone else to draw a line between distant points.

2) Not noted where Monica meets (or sees from a distance) Lon Gurion, looking even more hideous than usual; wearing an overcoat in April, coat a tattered rag: pulling (or may say “pushing”) a bent-out-of-shape shopping cart overflowing with god-alone-knows-what unidentifiable junk that might draw flies if he was standing still. Looks so ragged and wretched Monica has to look twice or three times to make sure that it is Lon Gurion. As if, however horrible he looked before, complete annihilation has befallen him overnight.

3) Not noted at what time or exactly where on April 3 Monica runs into Leila X and Ma X on their way to the post office: Leila X is wheeling a creaky old baby carriage. Lanky and athletic, now somewhat slow and stooped, Ma X uses the carriage for carting heavy supermarket bags from AAC Street (or is it AAD Street?) back to her apartment in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the ocean end of ABC Street — so Monica wonders if Ma X and Leila X are not on their way to just the post office, but also to the supermarket just another two hundred yards or so further east on Bay Drive.

Monica notes that Leila X — who still sometimes looks as breathtakingly beautiful (golden hair combed in five hundred thousand straight ruled lines down to her waist partly accounts for her beauty, but not completely) as she did when David first met her on a bus over ten years ago — looks dreadful enough to be added to the list of those undone by the bitter winter of ’75-76. “Dreadful” in what precise way not noted, only that Leila X’s fair skin looks dry, skin around the eyes like oddly bleached desert sand marked with shallow furrows that weren’t there before — eyes red with recent weeping.

What else? Leila X says that Kim visited her in Burlington “a few weeks ago” and now he’s here, supposedly visiting relatives in Brooklyn but really here to see her — to try to talk her into marrying him again — and, though she told him not to come, she’s given in, of course, and she’ll go out to Brooklyn later this afternoon. . . . Truth is she’d rather see him in Brooklyn with his relatives than alone in her apartment in Burlington because (as Monica knows) she’s not and never has been sexually attracted to Kim: much too smooth and hairless for her — a shiny, hairless little dog, while she’s attracted to men who are dark and shaggy. But doesn’t Monica agree? When someone is obsessed with you that obsession alone can sometimes be the reason you end up sleeping with him even when there’s no attraction. . . .

Ma X interjects irrelevantly that she’s suggested to Leila several times that she fly over to Korea to visit Kim when he’s there — just to see, you know, whether or not she might like to live there. Seems reasonable to her, but not of course to Leila. Might like the way of life there better than the way of life in Burlington — life in Burlington certainly doesn’t seem to be making Leila any too happy — but Leila refuses to go just because of this silly “fear of flying” people have. . . .

Ma X laughs a laugh that’s dry and whinnying. Or do Monica’s handwritten notes say “dry and unhinged”? Ma X’s somewhat droning way of talking — a voice tone that’s high, strained and boring — suddenly spikes into private laughter: an odd brain laugh that escapes through the mouth as if the ufo of the brain has launched without warning, whizzing off into regions clearly visible to her (to it), invisible to everyone else. Ma X’s brain laughter whizzes off into far-away regions, jerks back into the vibrating throat, leaving only the eyes bemused by the uncomfortable target (daughter Leila). Leila X at first looks a little red and embarrassed, but it doesn’t take long for her brain to catch Ma’s spark and start laughing oddly too. (A once-and-sometimes-still-beautiful-and-intelligent woman laughing at herself just because her mother is.) Moment crystallizes for Monica (not for the first time) the Ma X she hears in Nelly X’s and Leila X’s high, un-modulated voice tones and nutty, disconnected laughter.

4) Little, planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin passes, heading south down ABC Street toward home, holding a bright, ultramarine rabbit balloon bigger than she is. Here comes grandma Babette to meet her, her hair cut shorter than usual around her round, always-suntanned face, calling out in her subtle French accent (which Rosamond may or may not hear) that she has fresh-baked cookies for Rosamond! and Rosamond runs toward her, almost letting her huge blue balloon fly away.

5) “The rough, immeasurable coast of reality”: language that flows into its crannies and crevices doesn’t measure it, but what does it do? Takes on the form of its ragged edges? This too: ragged edges get planed away so that reality can fit into a sentence and into memory.

6) In or out of order? “Around 5 p.m. on April 3” wind is shaking the fading yellow petals of ABC Street’s forsythias: both those made to seem wide awake by lingering sunlight and those already dozing in shadow. Note taken on “April 3 around 5 p.m.” is typed on Friday, October 16 at 9:30 (morning or night not noted) in Monica’s red studio.

Not noted whether still April 3 or already April 4, 5 or even 6 when Laurel Lenehan passes with a friend named “Jean” (who “Jean” is not recorded and therefore absolutely not remembered). Also not recorded: whether or not it’s Laurel Lenehan (beautiful, laughing, happy and apple-faced like younger brother Finnley, not like either older brother: mysteriously burdened eldest brother Ambrose Jr. (burdened by the simple burden of being Ambrose Jr.?) or handsome and ambitious, but ambitious-about-what? next-to-oldest brother, Ryan) or someone else who calls out to Monica, “a perfect day! a perfect spring day! had to get outside and look at all the forsythias!”

Same time exactly (or just a few minutes later) as the time Laurel Lenehan passes, but not necessarily on the same day, Fionnuala Regan strolls by in a kelly green blazer that changes her shape: makes her look as matronly as she may very well be destined to look five, ten or twenty years from now: wheeling a dark cyan blue carriage with shiny chrome hardware. (Does Monica make a note to herself in April or in October to decide at some future date whether or not to insert a comment about the magnetic or clustering principle of events?: how a random event is often (so often it can be seen as one of life’s principles) followed by a related event (“related” only if an observer is there to note the relationship): and how related random events draw more related events into their orbit and then cluster magnetically together within the span of short panoramas. For example: the battered old baby carriage/shopping cart Ma X and Leila X had trouble pushing along Bay Drive and Fionnuala Regan’s new and elegant dark blue cloth and shiny chrome one that rolls by easily on ABC Street. Such occurrences, which may be patterns (the similarities and differences between baby carriages — and those wheeling them — that pass Monica within a short span of time, for example) interest Monica whether they’re patterns or not.)

Monica notes this too: she spots the forceful head of little Matthew Regan sitting up and peering around from the same blue carriage where Fionnuala’s new baby is dozing as she rolls through the world, beginning to tell herself life's horizontal story.

Monica wonders: who exactly is “the Clock” and does she call him the Clock because of the precise regularity of the hours when he passes north —› (heading toward work?) passes south <— hurrying or dragging himself home? or because he has a clock face? Knows (without knowing how she knows) that the Clock’s name is “Dave” and that she’s been seeing him pass long enough not to give it a thought when he waves and mouths “hello” (as he does today) from the west (facing) side of ABC Street.

Later Monica tells David that they need to add the Clock to their list of those destroyed by the terrible winter of ’76: at first she thought his face was oddly “creased”; then (as he turned toward her to say hello?) it seemed oddly “folded”; then (turned full-face toward her from across the way) the face was a nightmare-face in the cool sunlight of a perfect April day: seemed to her that half the Clock’s skull was missing!: or, not actually the skull, half the face covering the skull: left half (what looked oddly creased or folded before he turned) ordinary face-surface, right half exposed skull! skull with peculiarly pointed teeth (some teeth missing too?) facing her, mouthing a friendly “hello” while waving with one hand (briefcase in the other?).

Warmth and sunlight = return of spring and return of spring = return of strollers in the street. (For Monica to take a walk is a kind of writing-before-writing. Might as well take pen and paper with her. Or: might as well be paper. . . .) Those she’s been seeing and running into are joined by those she hasn’t laid eyes on for months. . . . Wonders if this is true also: warm, early spring makes the phone ring. For example her friend Howard calls from a neighborhood at the boundary between New York City and Long Island to tell her that Anthony spent the afternoon getting the grill and the outdoor furniture ready so they could eat in the garden under the trees and that made him think of Monica. . . and David too, of course, if she wants to bring him.

Let’s see: who else? Mikki calls from Manhattan to say that she’s been thinking about Monica for days — not sure why, but hard-to-define thoughts of Monica keep drifting through her mind — and then today there’s something in the air — cool spring day hidden in warm spring day hidden in etc. — and the smell and feel of the air in Manhattan (doesn’t say the smell and feel of the air below 14 St., probably somewhere near her walkup on East 10 St.) made her want to get out of Manhattan. And that feeling, together with her thoughts about Monica, compelled her to call and ask if she can come out to ABC Street. Wants to come out today! Right now! This minute, if possible! Adds that Marsha thought a day at the beach and a day talking to Monica might help clear up the terrible cold she can’t seem to get rid of — a cold that Marsha thinks is an emotional or spiritual cold — and the idea of Marsha encouraging Mikki to come to ABC Street to cure her cold turns Monica’s yes to a no.

This too: Monica’s cousin Yma calls, but nothing about it is recorded.

Monica comes across this handwritten April note while typing in October and trying to list everyone she spoke to, saw or ran into on April 6 solely because it’s a perfect day (without being 100% certain it is all on one day in early spring)) and no longer knows what it means: “it seems to get more intense every year.” The beginning of a thought that doesn’t complete itself, so Monica adds (in October, typing in her red studio), without having any idea if it’s what she had in mind in April: “every year there seems to be more to observe: the density of life increases and along with it my sense of obligation to record it and (therefore) my concentration is bound to grow more intense”. Not sure what this means either so she tries again: “the thicket of the world (ABC Street) gets thicker or thinner depending on when and how I look into it. Are ‘focus’ or ‘concentration’ the right words for it or is it something else? Wonder if it’s true that it (ABC Street) seems to have grown thicker over the years because I’ve taught myself to pay attention to it in a different way. . . .”

Monica meets Nancy St. Cloud on Coast Boulevard (assumes it’s on April 6, but date, time and cross street are not noted), wheeling nine-month-old Tristan in a carriage (mental note made when? to link it with two other baby carriages) that’s undoubtedly handsome but not described. Monica can’t helping looking (staring) at Nancy St. Cloud to see if the terrible winter of ’76 did her any damage and it’s clear that the bitterly dark lead and tin winter months of January, February and March have turned Nancy St. Cloud’s long, straight and beautifully glossy chestnut-and-caramel hair a lusterless pewter streaked with shining silver.

1) Nancy says that she’s sure that Monica remembers her good friend Georgia: while Georgia was trying to lose weight, she gained weight and now she’s up to nearly three hundred pounds!

2) She finds it interesting (and thinks Monica will too) that Georgia's weight-gain doesn’t seem to have affected her relationship with Andre’s friend Fabien. Fabien’s the purser on a ship that’s sailing to Barcelona next month — so Georgia’s going on still one more cruise. . . .

3) What else? Not really a different mini-story: a couple of even smaller fragments of the same mini-story, bits of a corner of it that crumbled off and now are trying to drift back into place in time for Nancy St. Cloud to re-attach them for Monica. There are one or two things, Nancy says, that she knows about Georgia’s relationship with Fabien that trouble her, but they don’t trouble Georgia — and for that reason she’d value Monica’s opinion. Are they the danger signs they seem to her or, as usual, is it her own life, own memories, bad experiences with men and so on, that are poisoning her judgment?

a) According to Georgia her relationship with Fabien is both passionate and “platonic”. What can that possibly mean? Literally of course it has to mean that there’s been no sex. But what there has been is less clear. Hasn’t been able to pin her down. Doesn’t Monica find that contradiction strange and troubling?

b) Fabien keeps warning Georgia that, no matter what, no matter how intense their feeling for each other may be, he meant it when he told her that he’s engaged to someone back home in France, a girl he’s known forever and intends to marry. Georgia is sure that the story is false and that it’s just his way of slowing things down. . . . But, to her way of thinking, if you put that together with the fact that there’s no sex. . . . Does Monica see the potential disaster waiting for Georgia that she does?

4) Andre’s parents are coming from Grenoble for a long visit this summer. The way she understands it his father’s the first person in France to survive a catheterization and it’s not completely clear to her (or it’s clear to Nancy, but not clear in Monica’s handwritten April notes) if, when Andre’s father arrives, all he’s going to want to do is rest and recuperate.

5) Andre’s parents are bringing Andre’s son with them. Monica notes that Andre’s son and Andre’s best friend are both named Fabien, but son’s age is not noted.

6) Monica has the feeling that Nancy St. Cloud — who Monica sees rarely and is always beautiful and wistful, with brown eyes that may be darkened by the same emotions as those of an actress whose profoundly rippling shallows we can’t stop diving into — is looking for ways to prolong the conversation by searching out the tiniest free-floating fragment of her mini-story.

7) Let’s see, she says, what else? Oh yes: Tristan resembles Pam and Ted Leary’s little Caitlin: blue eyes and red-blonde hair: so her mother, Nora — who, as Monica knows, is in love with Pam and Ted and spends a thousand more hours a week there than she does at her place — doesn’t seem too sure if she’s Tristan’s grandmother or Caitlin’s. The other day Nora got her two families completely mixed up and called Tristan “Teddy” and she (Nancy) lost it and told Nora to leave and not come back until she could remember her grandson’s name. She needs Monica to tell her the truth: was she justified in throwing her mother out? Is it as unforgivable as it seems to her for her mother to love an acquaintance’s family more than she loves her own? did she over-react because she has her reasons (which she’s not ready to talk about) for having to stop herself from socking her mother. . . ?

Yellow forsythia petals are sprinkled in the new grass (exact shade of fresh green not noted).

The same breeze blowing through the fading forsythias or a different breeze on a different day?

Same April day or another April day?

Best buddies and band-mates Greg Coffin and Andy Forest seem happy to be playing ping-pong together in Greg-and-Lena’s enclosed porch room that they’ve just painted yellow (whether a wide-awake forsythia chrome yellow or a somewhat harsher corn yellow or an even harsher and brighter chemical yellow is hard to say).

Greg-and-Andy contentedly playing ping-pong in sunlight in a yellow room.

While hearing the tock-tocking of the ping-pong balls next door and trying not to be distracted by the flashes of yellow sunlight off glossy yellow walls, Monica is reviewing some pages of her 1975 Chronicle and finds a lost card from Ralph Waldo Rice. Mailed in July ’75, lost since August ’75. (Lost but not lost? since here it is where it belongs — “out of order”, but somewhere in Monica’s thick folder of 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” folded-in-half sheets of lavender scrap paper that Monica’s ’75 Chronicle was written on.)

“Dear Monica — Dear David, good to hear from you. I ran to the Postcard Show at NYU on Saturday after we talked and found it gone. I missed it by one day which is typical of the rotten things that happen when one has employment. Glad you’re on to the Floyd Bennet Festival and hope your work goes well, there and elsewhere. It’s been a funny summer for me. I am waiting to hear about my baseball book. Will talk to Pocketbooks today. Otherwise working on a small book of cartoons with Billy Cullen. And some small fictions just to keep my hand in. Best to both of you and yourselves together, Ralph.”

Card is a slightly over-sized postcard, a left-over advertising card for Ralph Waldo Rice’s last book (how many years ago not noted) and Ralph has managed to neatly letter all his sentences around THE FLOATING PRINCIPLE by RALPH WALDO RICE in large dark letters in the center.

Each letter of each word has no more depth than the shadows cast by trees caught between a sheet of Monica’s white typing paper and sun that (today) has its whole existence along the plane of tile or shingle roofs of three-story, one-family frame houses and massive multiple dwellings the whole length of ABC Street. A plane of brilliance it’s impossible to look at: can’t look there, but it arrives here, next to Monica, on the uppermost, blinding surface of her sheets of white typing paper.

Cover it with shadows as fast as possible.

April wind below roof-level and without sufficient weight to sink down to the plane of human activity on the ground.

Two cars pull up in front of Enos and Sylvia Greengrasses’ little brick fortress: daughter Leslie arrives alone in one car (color, make or model not noted), neighbor to the left (south), Al Regan, behind the wheel of the other (also not described), Enos and Sylvia in the back seat.

Now Monica has a clear view of Enos: Al on one side, Sylvia on the other, helping the feeble, shrunken creature who must be Enos, barely taller than he must have been when he was eight or ten years old, through the rarely-used iron front gate, up the 3, 4 or 5 brick front steps to the rarely-used front door — not down the driveway to the side door, as usual.

As if he’d been taken to the hospital to give birth to the hideously shrunken child who resembles him.

Why up the front steps? Makes Monica speculate about the internal structure of the Greengrass house: what sort of steps would have to be climbed inside the side door — up to the level of livingroom, bedrooms, etc.

Barely supporting himself: legs as weak and flexible as if they have no bones. Climbs up front steps or lifted by still-vigorous Al Regan, dark and wrinkled Sylvia balancing Enos just enough from the other side to keep him from tipping that way.

Leslie’s parked, wrestled with something in the trunk, and now she follows, carrying a walker that must have some weight. . . .

What else? Seeing Enos disappear inside makes Monica think of the Sloths, the Greengrasses’ neighbors to the north (right): identically designed house, sheathed in purest white shingle. Monica’s reminded that she hasn’t seen Mr. Sloth, who had been visible on his small front porch in wheelchair and lap robe, for months. Long months of the deadly winter of ’76 only, or longer?

This too: as far as Monica knows the Sloths and Greengrasses haven’t been on speaking terms since Enos blocked the Sloth’s access to the shared driveway with an illegal fence and gate.

Monica asks David to check if Enos Greengrass is already on their list of those undone by the terrible winter of ’76.

At 10 a.m. on an April day (next April day?) — day of pale sunlight and weak breezes — Andy Forest is helping Greg and Lena Coffin polish the dull, un-polishable surface of Greg-and-Lena’s old coffee-colored stationwagon.

Same April day or another (not noted).

A van that’s an ambulance but doesn’t look like an ambulance is parked in front of the Greengrasses’ house. In a hurry to sketch in events as they’re occurring Monica doesn’t have time to do the kind of sorting through the mind’s obscure catalogues of names, resemblances, associations, Crayola crayons, paints, etc. it takes to come up with anything close to the right term for the van’s odd, ambiguous color: writes “bronze” on one line, “gold-orange” on another, and also “weird orangey gold”: “TUFARO’S NORTH SHORE AMBULANCE AND WHEEL CHAIR TRANSPORTATION” stencilled on the side.

Two blue-coated attendants (exactly what shade of blue not noted) wheel Enos Greengrass from house to van. Left out of Monica’s hurried sketch whether out rarely-used front door or more commonly used side door, but Monica is careful to note that the wooly blanket Enos is wrapped in is exactly (exactly) the same ambiguous bronze or gold-orange or orangey-gold as the van-ambulance, therefore the color was consciously chosen and is meant to have meaning/tap into an emotion that’s lost on Monica.

Notes say: “a chilly day with brilliant sunlight not on the plane of ABC Street’s roof tiles only”: therefore must be a different April day?

Sylvia Greengrass hurries out of her rarely-used front door, down the short flight of brick steps, through the rarely-used iron gate into sunlight so dazzling it’s bleaching the Rhinebeck pine’s needle-leaves of all their odd off-green: no color, nothing but light blazing there in short dashes. Birds seem too dizzy in the crisp, overly-bright air to manage their usual sequences of notes.

“New light” and also “early light”.

Sylvia seems desperate. Desperately down her stairs and even more desperately up the stairs of the Regans’ three story white shingle next door (a right turn for Sylvia, left to Monica across the way, south for both). Regans’ front door must be open: seems to Monica that Sylvia enters through it. Out again quickly. Door open but found no one home? In and out and in again, looking crazed enough to call something out to Monica in the other realm across the street. Though they’ve never spoken (and though Monica knows it’s possible that Sylvia’s never noticed her writing on the porch or steps) Sylvia may have considered for an instant (before wheeling around and re-entering the Regans’) asking the near-distant young woman with dark, wavy hair for help. Or it could be that, half-crazed, she had an impulse to call out to Monica, “oh! how yellow! how very yellow your forsythias are today!”

Now some of the pine’s ashen green returns to it, slashes of light-that’s-only-light cutting through it not randomly but according to the sun’s relation to the un-mapped angles and crevices of the houses at the north-west end of ABC Street.

Sylvia Greengrass must come out of the Regans’ house again, but Monica doesn’t see it.

Tufaro’s ambulance-that-doesn’t-look-like-an-ambulance is idling impatiently.

While Monica is wondering why it’s more important for Sylvia to find Al Regan than it is to get Enos to the hospital she’s also getting lost in the recesses of the sky’s blue: an “early morning” blue sometimes called “baby” blue that may just be a blue with not quite enough blue in it: mind swims into it, hungry for more blue.

On what April day in the Salem Avenue backyard is Monica noting (having trouble writing in too-bright sunlight) that the tiny, undeveloped leaves of the hedges — which should be but aren’t walling-off this large, unpaved and wild yard from neighbor Blanche’s beautifully groomed and flowery yard to the west and other paved or messy yards south and east — are providing no shade: sunlit neighboring world passes easily through them.

Porous but not porous enough? Nothing’s kept out, but very little of interest gets through.

Having trouble writing not because of the backyard’s ambiguous permeability, but because she doesn’t feel like sketching in what needs to be sketched in. For example: she has no trouble writing that, on the way over from ABC Street to the Salem Avenue backyard, she walked through a world of new green and a world of shadows and often a world of green shadows that lent space a powdered softness, as if rubbed on with the side of a soft green pencil and then possibly spread and softened even more with a fingertip. But she does have trouble writing that Lowell called to tell her a) that he went through hell talking Alyosha into going to the hospital. Not sure how it all came about, but this is how he remembers it: he picked up on something not-quite-right in the way Alyosha looked or the way he was behaving. He seemed irritable and uncomfortable. Wouldn’t admit to anything, of course, but after a lot of badgering he confessed that he was in pain and had been experiencing terrible stomach pain for days (means that it could be weeks). Tried to ignore it by working twice as hard, but Lowell suspects that Alyosha remembered exactly how he felt two years ago and knew that it was probably another heart attack. So Monica can imagine how horrible it was for him to have to lead Alyosha to the point not only of acknowledging what he knew-but-kept-himself-from-knowing, but of actually being in the reality of the hospital!

(N.B.: While translating her April notes into typewriter in October Monica comes across another version of her conversation with Lowell scribbled on another sheet of folded 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” lavender scrap paper: in this version as well Lowell says that he went through hell etc., but adds that the hospital is the Long Island hospital where he’s an intern and that, when he didn’t like what he read on Alyosha’s EKG, he rushed him to a senior cardiologist, who thought that Alyosha had probably had his heart attack no less than one week ago, possibly two, and that only Alyosha’s unbelievably strong constitution and will power made it possible for him to continue living (and working!) through all that. When he heard that Alyosha went into shock: he turned white and was barely conscious when they wheeled him over to ICU for tests.)

Monica also has trouble writing that Lowell said that b) he went through a different kind of hell when Kitty called to say that her plane had just landed: said that she was calling the second she got back from California because she needed to see Alyosha tonight — as soon as possible! He wanted to say no, that would be bad for Alyosha, but he knew what Kitty would think and how she’d react and he was too exhausted to deal with the storm. While he was deciding what to say (he couldn’t just say ok) Kitty surprised him by weeping. Voice became her warm and mushy voice, the squishy baby-talk, talking-to-an-idiot-child voice he’s hated and that’s made him sick since childhood. And for whatever reason that made it easier for him to be honest or to want to be honest to the point of cruelty. He said that his first instinct was to refuse to tell her the name of the hospital. He didn’t want her to visit Alyosha and certainly not tonight. In his opinion seeing her would be harmful. Thinks he may have blamed her for both his heart attacks. . . .

All hell broke loose, of course. Through it all he thinks he took some pleasure in the fact that he was able to make Kitty stop talking baby talk. Cut her off just when she was in the middle of talking about how much she missed hearing his voice — so happy to feel that he was talking to her again — that she hadn’t lost her little brother — how much she loved him. . . etc. etc. He couldn’t take it. Had to end it.

She hung up and he had enough sense to know that he’d better call Monica to tell her what happened and to figure out what to do next. But, by the time he called Monica, Kitty had already called Betty and Betty had gone nuts and called Monica, convinced that Kitty was going to commit suicide because he (Lowell) had said something unforgivable. Monica gave Lowell the advice that he didn’t want to hear: that he needed to call Kitty back and tell her where Alyosha was. “No matter what you feel,” she said, “you can’t prevent Kitty from seeing her father.”

Ten minutes later Lowell called again: isn’t it amazing, he said, that ten minutes ago Kitty was weeping and sentimental and happy that he was talking to her again and gushing about how much she loved him — and now she’s in a fury not because of what he said or because he refused to tell her where Alyosha is — but because he tried to stop her from going to the hospital after she’d already cancelled her patients. She’d cleared that time because that was the only convenient time for her to visit! Furious too because he told her that the time that was convenient for her was exactly the time when Monica was already scheduled to be there. And then more fury because they told her that Happy would not be allowed to enter Alyosha’s room. Visits from non-essential people like Happy were absolutely forbidden. They didn’t care that as the grieving daughter she needed to have Happy with her. She made this argument: how could Happy bother Alyosha when Alyosha hardly knows who he is?! He probably wouldn’t even know he was there — so what difference could it make? Happy would be coming for her. But none of that interested them and she seemed to be just as angry at them as she was at him. She tried to explain how she felt: “we don’t visit people in the hospital for their benefit; we visit them for our benefit. We go for our own peace of mind, for our own consolation: most of the time the person who’s seriously ill or dying doesn’t want to be seen or doesn’t have a clue who’s there. . . .” So seeing Alyosha is something she needs and she needs to have Happy’s support. . . .

“So you’re the one we should all be concerned about. You should get into bed and we should all visit you.”

Naturally they had another bitter argument.

It’s not clear to Monica when taking her notes (or not clear later when typing her notes) how she knows what Kitty said: straight from Kitty?, from Lowell, reporting on his conversations and arguments with Kitty (and therefore suspect in terms of shading, tone, inflection and accuracy)? or from Betty, who also spoke to Kitty more than once and called Monica for reassurance and for other reasons that aren’t always easy to sort out. For example: Monica thinks but isn’t sure that it’s Betty who told her that Hap’s (Happy’s) father, who lives in California, wanted them to remain in California and get married there before returning to New York. And that it was Kitty who put her foot down and said no, that’s impossible, she has so many calls on her machine, so many patients who need her, that she must, absolutely must, return to New York on Monday. This too, clearly from Lowell: “same old thing”, Kitty is reported to say. “You know that my feelings about Monica are confused: they’ve always been confused and probably always will be confused. In the rest of my life I’m the one who gives directions, but, for all the obvious reasons, with Monica I’m the one who takes directions. With her — only with her — I slip back into the self that welcomes being the one who isn’t responsible for giving directions and I hate the fact that I welcome it. There’s nothing either one of us can do about our natures, so there’s no solution. I have to admit this: when it comes to Monica I get a little crazy and there are things that I’ve done — things you know about and dislike me for and things you don’t know about — that were wrong.”

Lowell also says that Kitty reproached him for saying terrible things to her — things she’s never heard from anyone else. “You’re saying things”, she said, “that I’ve never thought about myself and that no one else thinks either.” “But that’s not fair,” he remembers answering, “I’m just repeating back stuff that you confided. You’re the one who said to me — and you may have been crying when you said it — that it tortures you that you have so much trouble feeling any real warmth toward anyone. That the feelings that others talk about and seem to feel so easily may be lost to you entirely. . . . You said that to me and now I’m saying back to you that you may be right: there’s nothing we can do about it: you’re cold and selfish and not very trustworthy either.” And, Lowell says, he added this: “If you say that you can’t feel warmth like other people, how does Hap or ‘Happy’ fit into that? You’re about to marry him so you must feel ‘warmth’ toward him. . . .” Her answer was like a shrug. The truth is that she hardly knows him. Knows him less than ten weeks. Something between them clicked but is that the same thing as the conventional idea of warmth?

Same April day or another April day Monica’s notes say:

a) “Red brick chimney isolated against a perfect blue sky. Or, blue of sky ‘perfect’, blue of sky bluer, because of brick red oblong that interrupts it.”

b) Inside softening outline of April hedges darker hedges bristle. And when light falls at certain angles there are branches that still look frozen and silvery: in the dark and thorny core of dark hedge or through the dark hedge. (Light that angles backward in time?)

c) Two dogs in what nearby backyards can’t stop barking? Not the intelligent barking of a dog that has a list of real complaints — just a low-grade argument between two dogs who have to have the last word. More bored and irritated by each other or by the neighboring world?

What else?

d) or something other than “d”? Days after her conversation with Lowell about Kitty a tiny fragment of the same conversation tries to re-attach itself to the whole that’s already drifted away. Notes say that “last night” it was impossible to separate the breeze flowing through the grass from the light (moonlight?) flowing through the grass and then (how much later not noted) both light and breeze moving along the edge of the water. Notes also say that the same breeze and same light return “tonight” and that it’s uncommon for such events and sensations to repeat themselves one day after the other. Not clear in her notes if it’s on the first or second similar night of moonlight and breezes that Lowell re-enters the Chronicle to add that Kitty couldn’t stop talking about Monica. Went on about Monica for twenty minutes or more — and he wasn’t sure if it was an obsession or if she was trying to plant an idea in his head. She wishes Monica would stop trying to inspire her, she said. It isn’t realistic. She underlined that word. She wanted Lowell to learn to be realistic about his capabilities. To want more than you’re capable of is not a path to happiness. Just because she feels a bit stalled right now, just because she feels she’s hit a plateau, doesn’t mean that Monica is right. If things feel a little stale and unsatisfying is that because she’s compromising before anyone asked her to? Does it prove that she’s capable of something greater? Doesn’t Lowell agree that that logic is ridiculous? She looks at it this way: Life without sufficient definition is a mess and her life is finally starting to take on the definition it needs: career on track, relationship with someone solid, etc. She wants Lowell’s honest opinion: if Monica would just leave them both alone wouldn’t they be free of the horrible nagging feeling that their lives are not good enough?!

Lowell says that he can’t be sure that he answered the way he thinks he answered: that if either one of them is bothered by what Monica says there must be a reason. If Kitty is not attracted to it. . . . But of course she’s attracted to it! That’s the whole point! That’s why it’s dangerous! That’s why she’s taking the time to try and get Lowell to be more realistic. She realizes how seductive Monica’s view of life is when you’re young. Who wouldn’t want to believe that life can be lived doing something “great” or “important”? But what if it doesn’t come naturally? Has Lowell thought about that? If it doesn’t come naturally and you try to do more than nature meant for you then you’re doomed to a life of struggle. . . a haunted life of unsuccessful striving. That’s a sure path to unhappiness. And, more than anything, she wants to be happy — and she wants Lowell to be happy too. . . .

It seemed to him that Kitty’s long speech about Monica and her (Kitty’s) own conflicts and what she wanted for him (Lowell) put her in a strange mood. Hard to put a finger on it, but he didn’t like her posture or the expression on her face standing next to Alyosha, half-conscious in his hospital bed. After she stopped talking she stood there, peering down at him with a grief-stricken expression, as if he were dead. Kitty’s expression didn’t change for so long it looked like she’d slipped on the mask of Tragedy. Freaked him out and he left the room.

e) On what day in early April is Bah-Wah curled up in thin, new grass and damp earth in the shade of the Salem Avenue backyard’s bare hedges, sniffing (even while dreaming?) the mild perfume of the flowers-that-may-not-even-be-flowers in Blanche’s (neighbor-to-the-west’s) garden? Bah-Wah is dozing and dreaming of flowers not far from where Monica is sitting, editing February notes about early budding and snow-on-the-ground in exactly the same spot.

f) On still one more un-dated day muted dark shadow of hedges lies right up against irregular sunlight through hedges.

David is sitting in the Salem Avenue backyard, addressing envelopes (reason not noted). Distracted by 1) birds (what kind?) resting on the first story roof of what house? 2) a wrinkled blue window curtain and bottles of different shapes and sizes — too many to count, though he does start counting left to right — 1, 3, 7 — loses track after 10, 11 or 13 — lined up behind the window glass and against the wrinkled blue curtain. 3) the unstable beauty of someone’s clothesline: so many sleeves and legs swimming between bay and ocean in blue air (colors, patterns and types of clothing not catalogued, as both David and Monica sometimes like to do).

David and Bah-Wah soak up the last warmth of the sun together.

It rains the whole morning of April 9, then clears into an afternoon of cold sunlight. Warm enough for Monica to head downstairs and work on the front porch. First thing she notes is the dipping and rebounding of forsythia wands as the weight of unseen birds (unseen, therefore kind not noted) settles and hops through them.

Also on April 9: Greg and Lena’s coffee-colored stationwagon is washed clean and shiny by the morning’s rain. Right now, before sun dries it back to its usual dullness, its shiny skin looks as alive as a crab shell with its living creature still inside and crawling under its own weight and the weight of the ocean too.

Let’s see: little Rosamond Coffin waves as she passes and Monica and David (what time David joined Monica on the porch not noted) remark to each other that Rosamond’s spectacular melon-head or planetarium-dome-head has been shrinking down to normal, uninteresting proportions. But Monica sees in her notes (as she’s preparing them for translation into typewriter) that Rosamond Coffin’s head is a subject that comes up again later in Lin’s Garden with Wanda Baer, and she stops short of adding details that she may be sketching in backward from a later event.

Monica feels compelled to write about Rosamond Coffin’s head because it makes her think of the perfectly smooth egg-oval of Alyosha’s head with its rough grey stubble or close-cropped soft fuzz haircut, which she does not want to think about. Monica would prefer any subject to the sunny afternoons spent with her father in his hospital room. Alone with her he expresses anguish that she doesn’t know how to deal with. Should she write it down or not? Write about something when you don’t know the meaning of it? Beloved Alyosha, the soul of kindness, crying in anguish about his harshness to others. In his hospital bed on sunny April afternoons he can’t help thinking about the times he was angry, unsympathetic or mocking. (Toward whom not remembered or not noted.) Causes him grief now, when he has time to think about how much he disappointed himself, but even then — when it was happening — life had ways of telling him that it knew what he’d done. In the middle of a job a hammer would suddenly take aim at the back of his hand or a finger or fingernail and hit it as hard as it could. Pain would be unbearable, but he’d welcome it. He remembers thanking the hammer. “Good! good that you did that! I deserve it!” Monica finds it hard to remember or to write about this emotion. His grief fills her with grief and makes her look for something else to write about.

Also on April 9: Molly M calls from the Paris Review to ask if it’s alright with Monica and David if they get together at George’s a little later on Tuesday than they’d planned. He doesn’t want to delay THE BLUE HANGAR portfolio any longer, but he finally agreed to do the Saab ad and of course they’re insisting that that has to happen exactly at lunch hour on Tuesday.

“That night” Monica and David have dinner with Wanda Baer in Lin’s Garden and it’s there, over snails in black bean sauce, roast duck and clams (done how?), that Wanda brings up the subject of Rosamond Coffin’s head. Wants to know if either of them has noticed how it’s changing. Used to be incredible, as they know, as big and round — as monumental — as a Central American stone head you see in National Geographic, but now it’s getting to be just about like any other pretty little girl’s head! What could have happened? Should she ask Lena if she has Rosamond on some sort of stupid diet? The stupid diet of normalcy every odd child ends up on. . . .

What else? Wanda Baer says that she had a horrible, exhausting week — so can’t figure out why she’s feeling good. In a good mood for no good reason just the same way she’s sometimes in a bad mood for no good reason. What happened is this: a few days ago she knew that no one would be home so she went over to her parents’ apartment. Can’t even remember what reason she gave herself. Might have been about taxes. That sounds logical. Knows that she needs to start getting her papers together — but can’t think what could possibly be at her parents’ apartment that — at this point — has anything to do with her! She was there, trying to think of a reason for being there, and found herself fishing through her mother’s bedroom bureau drawers — looking for the mysterious secret something she always felt was there. Everything so false, so concealed, there had to be something — or a zillion secret somethings — and she found it! (Or at least a part of it.) Made her dizzy and exhausted and she wonders why. Maybe Monica or David can figure it out. Could it be this?: even though you’ve always known that your parents are lying — have always lied and are telling the same disgusting lie right now — you’re never one thousand percent certain. Even though you know for sure, you question your own instincts and your own experience. Know for a fact and have known for a fact forever what both your parents separately and especially together are capable of — yet you doubt what you know. Is that it? So then, when the truth of the truth that they’ve always denied clicks into place before your eyes, it’s actually nauseating. Does that make any sense?

This is what happened: she found a little wooden box under her mother’s nightgowns and inside the box little scraps of paper she recognized immediately as her mother’s little reminder slips or “to do” lists, scribbled little strips of cut or torn paper she’s always found around the house with her mother’s handwriting. The slips in the box didn’t resemble any of the others in this way: they were lists of bank account numbers and amounts of money! How could that be? From the beginning of the universe until yesterday there’s been no time when she’s asked her father or her mother for as little as five dollars when both of them haven’t answered with pretty much the same words that they had nothing — no savings, no pocket money, no dollar to spare, nothing — probably not even any loose change. But here, under her mother’s nightgowns in her bedroom bureau, was a list of secret bank accounts that she was too sweaty and dizzy to add up accurately — $50,000, $100,000, $200,000. . . she couldn’t handle it and stopped adding and just started to copy it all down for Monica so Monica could tell her if she’d lost her mind. . . .

Wanda Baer, Monica and David start to go over Wanda’s scribbled notes while still nibbling at their snails, etc.: Monica can see clearly $178,000 in a savings account in Harriet Kurtz’s (Wanda’s mother’s) name; a $150,000 account in both Oscar and Harriet Kurtz’s names with an ambiguous notation about a trust for the three children, Wanda Baer (birth name “Joyce Kurtz”), Libby and Cindy Kurtz; $11,000 in a checking account for daily spending money; muddled figures that neither Monica nor David can figure out but which seem to add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash hidden in safe deposit boxes plus other accounts in Oscar Kurtz’s name alone (Wanda Baer’s handwriting too scrawled and shaky to read).

Wanda Baer says that when she got home that night she couldn’t concentrate on her taxes and still hasn’t been able to do them — that’s how messed up her head is!

She says sheepishly that she knows that she should be sharing these thoughts with Dr. DaVinci — knows that it’s a stupid waste of time to hide everything important (everything that makes you nuts!) from your psychiatrist — but she’s had a couple of sessions with Dr. DaVinci and for some reason she still hasn’t told him anything. . . !

Also in Lin’s Garden: Wanda Baer starts to tell a story about a “bizarre experience” she had while dancing in The Duchess: a well-dressed woman, attractive but clearly in her mid-sixties, approached her and said. . . . . Story never gets told by Wanda or recording of story by Monica in April or retelling of it by Monica in August is interrupted by events in August or April and the story is erased from Monica’s memory. Or, though the continuity of the fabric of Wanda’s story is torn by events in April or August, Monica manages to scribble down enough marginal notes, key words or private codes so that she may be able to piece it together later, out of view of the present instant.

Monica isn’t sure if she can honestly ask herself “why here and not somewhere else?” While writing about Wanda Baer she comes across a detached fragment of the same bitter argument between Lowell and Kitty she translated from handwritten notes to typewriter before or a fragment of some other bitter argument that wants to rejoin the whole but can’t unless Monica agrees to it. She’s sick of writing about their arguments and can’t make up her mind whether she has a responsibility to the Chronicle to let it re-attach itself. Or is it the Chronicle that spit it out in the first place? She decides to include it and let others (or the pressure of the extreme length of the Chronicle, which may be the same thing as talking about the slow sifting, the natural decision-making, of time) decide for her.

Little length of bitter sparring to this effect: Kitty warns Lowell that he’s just a little too hostile — too aggressive toward her — for her to think of re-establishing a relationship with him and admits that she miscalculated the degree of his aggression and hostility. Lowell answers that she also miscalculated the degree of his desire to have a relationship with her at all! His definition of life is not her definition of life. She wants to be “normal” and wants him to want to be normal, but that’s exactly what he doesn’t want and doesn’t even want to want! He knows that she thinks that she is normal and that Monica and David aren’t, but, whatever you call it, he likes the flavor of their world and hopes that in ten years, when he really is leading his own life, he’ll be living among people like that and that he won’t have become normal like her without even having a clue how it happened. Kitty says with maddening certainty: “you only think that because you’re twenty-two.” By the time he’s thirty-two all his ideas will have changed. Things are just never the same when you’re thirty-two as they are when you’re twenty-two. Yes, Lowell says, he knows that she believes that when you’re in your thirties you’ve started to make your peace with the idea that your most ambitious ideal for yourself, your dream-outline of your life, is already nothing but a nostalgic memory. Or an absurd second life in your brain only. Or it’s completely dead. And the dead dream-ideals of the twenty-year-old are the building blocks of normalcy. . . .

More along the same lines. The argument escalates and ends in near-violence.

How does Monica know this? From Wanda Baer (therefore still in Lin’s Garden)? Might also be directly from Lena Coffin during one of the mini-conversations Lena seems to like to strike up with David while she brooms dry, dusty earth into the air in the cracked and weedy shared driveway, but Monica doesn’t think so.

Lena told Greg (exactly when not told or not noted) that lately, when she’s alone in the enormous multiple dwelling during the day (everyone out working or playing), she sometimes finds the house frightening. Might be a sound and no way to know where in all those empty rooms it’s coming from. At night, when you’d think it would be more frightening, it isn’t, because so many people are home and the sounds of life being lived are ordinary and explainable. No idea why the feeling has only come over her lately. So she asked Greg to make the front door more secure and today he’s changing the lock.

Another note makes it clear that Wanda Baer is the source of information about Lena Coffin, but it’s not certain if it’s a continuation of the first conversation or a different conversation entirely.

Wanda Baer says that lately Lena’s eyes have been large and staring, as if always in a state of terror. Terror of what she has no clue, but she thinks Lena’s terror is the reason for the crazy decision to paint the enclosed front porch “ping-pong” room such a hideously over-bright shade of yellow — as if the phony cheeriness of that nauseating yellow could burn away all the shadows and all the creaking in all the house’s million little hidden corners and cubbyholes.

On Sunday April 11 Monica hears the sharp, lightweight tok-toking of ping-pong balls being struck, struck again, struck back, back again, then bouncing off table, floor or wall on the other side of Greg-and-Lena’s porch room’s striped curtains.

Monica often has this debate with herself: if a note is fragmented (or not even “fragmented” because it was never whole): if one event is recorded in little bits on widely separated pages for all the usual reasons, should these bits of separated note-taking be left as they are, as fragments that may never cohere — on paper or in the reader’s mind — even as the tiniest of mini-narratives? Or should she make some effort (for the reader’s sake) to sweep them together in one spot? Sometimes (because of her argument with herself) she does sweep or stitch them together, sometimes she lets things fall as they do according to the nature of chronicling.

For example: at some point after Tommy Liman’s March 31 birthday party Vicky Liman runs into Wanda Baer somewhere along the south <—> north track of the beach block of ABC Street and tells her to report to Monica for her Chronicle (or Vicky probably says for her “writing”, for her “journal”, for her “sketchbook”, etc. not for her “Chronicle”) that her brother was ten years old on March 31 and that, at the party, he announced to everyone that he’s been seeing mourning doves in the backyard and that he wished he’d invited Monica from down the block so he could ask her to explain what they were suddenly doing there. Vicky (according to Wanda Baer) thinks that Monica might find it interesting also that Tommy’s finally become friendly with beautiful Martina (Tina) Lima next door. (That is, Tommy’s finally old enough to notice how beautiful Tina Lima is.)

Yellow is the last color of autumn and the first color of spring.

On April 11 (for example) a cold wind is stripping yellow blossoms from the long forsythia wands of ABC Street and turning them green.

Hedges and trees are sprouting and the green of a tree at the corner (North, South, East, West not noted) of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard is so new, so fresh, so mild it’s almost milky. A milky green that, from the middle distance, is just a mist in the branches.

Daffodils are also new and yellow (what yellow exactly?) and are springing up at how many locations along the boulevards and cross streets?

An undated note about Alyosha that belongs here or doesn’t: belongs here because it is here, but is also separated from the hard-to-write note of what date? about Alyosha’s time in the hospital. During one of Monica’s sunny April afternoon visits to the hospital (clearly just after Kitty had been there — with or without Hap (“Happy”) not noted) Alyosha had stories to tell about Kitty and Happy (things he’d observed and stories told to him by Kitty) and needed to re-tell them to Monica.

Let’s see:

1) Kitty and Happy are already having a plumbing problem in their new apartment on the nineteenth floor of a twenty-one story highrise on University in the Village. There seems to be a break in one of the water lines every seventh floor: toilets don’t flush or get stuffed and whoever’s in an apartment just below one of the breaks is in trouble. Kitty and Happy came home after a weekend away and found raw sewage backed up out of the toilet into every room, hundreds of books that hadn’t been shelved yet ruined, etc. Happy told Kitty to stop payment on the rent check and wants to move out, but Kitty says that’s crazy because they just moved in. What else? Alyosha wants Monica’s opinion: is Kitty bragging or complaining (or is it a special kind of bragging-complaining) when she says that the high rent (about seven hundred a month) is a little bit of a burden or could easily become a burden if Happy doesn’t find a way to earn more money (only pulls in twenty to her thirty-two!).

2) Alyosha says that he has no idea what it means, but Kitty says that Happy is “interested in” real estate. Thinks he may have said that to Kitty: what does it mean that he’s “interested” in real estate? Does he own any? Does he have some kind of license? Exactly what does it mean to be interested in it? But he didn’t get an answer.

3) Kitty also says that Happy “likes to take photographs” — but he (Alyosha) doesn’t know what that means either.

4) Happy’s parents live in California, somewhere near San Diego, and seem to have money, but he doesn’t get the feeling that their money has anything to do with Happy.

5) All Happy’s nieces and nephews are lawyers or doctors or the ones that are lawyers and doctors are the only ones Happy talks about.

6) Alyosha calls Happy “a smoothie”: first time they met, before they said two words to each other, Happy threw his arms around him (Alyosha). Some people might find that a beautiful thing — and maybe it is a beautiful thing — and it’s possible that Happy is just a warm and beautiful person — but (he’d like to have Monica’s opinion about this too) for him it’s just a little too quick. What does Monica think: is it wrong to question someone’s warmth and friendliness? should we just accept it for what it seems to be? or is it alright to find it a little weird?

7) This too: (proof that Happy was with Kitty when she visited Alyosha in the hospital — therefore, obviously, someone has to go back and change Monica’s earlier doubt to certainty): Alyosha says that Happy brought zillions of snapshots to the hospital. (Does Alyosha speculate then or is it Monica who speculates later that it’s Happy’s obsessive snapshot-taking — not photography as one of the half-dozen or dozen possible professions Kitty says Happy is “interested in” — that Kitty was talking about when she said that “Happy likes to take photographs”?) Fifty, a hundred or more snapshots of the early days of Kitty-and-Happy’s relationship, though it isn’t clear to Monica what “early days” means when she still doesn't know if Kitty’s known Happy for weeks or months: Kitty and Happy posing together, Kitty alone, Kitty with friends (with or without Happy). Nothing random or “candid”: every shot posed.

While typing (rewriting) her painful April notes about Alyosha’s hospital stay, Monica sees that at a later, undated day in April Lowell spent time with her in the Salem Avenue backyard, talking over a late breakfast of David’s baked pancake.

Lowell has his own stories to tell about Happy’s snapshots and about a dinner he had with Happy and Kitty at Betty-and-Alyosha’s where more of Happy’s snapshots were passed around and he had a chance to verify “in the flesh” what he thought he saw in the snapshots.

Trying to sort out Lowell’s stories from Alyosha’s while re-viewing and typing her April notes (in November?) it seems obvious to Monica that all Alyosha expressed to her in his hospital room on a sunny afternoon in April was the kind of amazement that anyone would take that many snapshots and then bring that many snapshots to the hospital! Also: it’s fair to say that Alyosha seemed to find Happy hard to figure out and that it bothers him that Kitty doesn’t seem to be able to figure Happy out either. All other opinions and analysis are probably Lowell’s.

Let’s see: Lowell thinks that there’s a distinct difference in the way Kitty’s face looks in the earlier snapshots compared to the more recent ones (and there are so insanely many of them — so many alternate views and angles — it’s easy to reach some conclusions).

In the earlier shots Kitty looks — he’s not sure how to say it — can he say “sexual”? She looks hyper-excited, charged by something that’s either already gone on just before the picture was snapped or that she knows is going to go on just after the picture is snapped. Caught in the act of thinking about it — and he’s tempted to say that what she’s thinking about seems a little decadent (if that’s the right word): face shows that Kitty’s anticipating or savoring the memory of something sexual that she thinks would shock the people sitting near her if they knew about it. . . .

In the recent snapshots Kitty looks dull, fat and puffy. No sexual charge at all. If anything she looks uncomfortable — reluctant to be photographed — maybe even sick of being photographed, possibly depressed by something she’s discovered. In some of the shots (even the early ones, but certainly lately) she’s trying to conceal her discomfort and unhappiness by making stupid faces.

Something else: when he was with Kitty and Happy at Alyosha-and-Betty’s he didn’t like the way Kitty’s eyes looked. She seemed exhausted and her eyes were horribly dark. And she was silent. She let Happy do all the talking and you could tell right away that he’s a performer: a showboat and a windbag who likes to take center stage and has a way of talking that’s grand and nasal. Demands your attention, needs your attention — as if it’s his mission in life to bore as large an audience as possible. He went on and on (playing up to Betty and Alyosha?) about how he’s tried to get Kitty to stop smoking. He’s tried everything! He knows hypnosis and even tried that, but it didn’t work because she was resistant — and now he’s trying to get her to go through a full course of EST training (as if Alyosha or Betty had a clue what he was talking about!).

It’s clear to him (does anyone else see it? does Monica see it?) that Kitty is trying to let Happy — because he’s tall and talks a lot and likes to be the center of attention — play the role of someone strong she can lean on (allow her to not be the loud and strong one for a change). But something’s wrong. It’s false and it’s not working and Kitty is beginning to let herself know it.

On what undated April day does Ambrose Lenehan Sr. pass, heading south toward his house (1, 2, 3 or is it 4? houses from boardwalk, beach and ocean) with Kitty’s ex-lover, Owen. Monica knows that Kitty met him through Nora Lenehan and went to a lot of bars and dances with him while she lived on ABC Street. Here he is now, passing quickly, a short, no-longer-quite-so-young-but-still-young-seeming man (dwarfed by Ambrose Lenehan) in a slightly too-large royal blue suit: not bad-looking, but not pleasant-looking either: a small man with a cruel face and a nose that looks a bit bent out of shape from fighting.

Monica wishes someone would catalogue everyone who passes on ABC Street wearing royal blue.

One handwritten note says something about spending April “shuttling back and forth between ABC Street and Salem Avenue”, but why the Salem Avenue house with its spacious farmhouse kitchen and big, densely leafy backyard is available to Monica and David isn’t noted. (Monica could fill this information in later (while typing) or later still, but chooses not to.)

On the way to Salem Avenue on what April day? Monica finds Xylon’s tree bare: pale green fuzz balls (seed pods?) around it on earth that should be a lawn but isn’t: not a hint of the early washes of green being colored in everywhere, but Monica is unable to interpret what the dropping of the green fuzz-balls signals. Must have some relationship to the subtle but unmistakable fragrance of new green plant life and new flower life on the spring-like breezes, but what? what exactly?

The silence of the spacious Salem Avenue kitchen seems to Monica related to the long, rectangular fluorescent ceiling fixture: a silence that’s an audible hum that tunes itself out the longer you listen to it.

At 3:20 on another undated April day sunlight in the Salem Avenue backyard is a property of the day’s breeziness: it breathes through April’s pages. Both sunlight and breezes are chilly — so it’s a chilled sunlight that passes across Monica’s skin and then through every sentence. Monica is spending the afternoon outside with Bah-Wah (dozing in sun or in shadow?), numbering April pages and trying to index earlier handwritten notes up to March ’74 (remainder of handwritten ’74 notes — on folded-in-half 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” sheets of lavender scrap paper or 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” thin and glossy white paper with one green stripe — are stored in a carton with other cartons in the damp basement of a friend’s house). So Monica’s forced to skip indexing months of the Chronicle, pick up indexing again with June of ’75, then is cut off again when she reaches July.

On the same or another cold and windy, sunlit April day in the Salem Avenue backyard Monica spots tiny pink flowers already emerging on neighbor-to-the-west Blanche’s one flowering tree — a low tree that seems to want to branch out horizontally but has no interest in climbing vertically. Monica sees this too: a reddish glow in cold sunlight blowing through the tiny, not-quite-olive-green leaves of the hedges.

On “Sunday April 14” Wanda Baer wants Monica’s opinion. Hands Monica a picture postcard addressed to “The happy gang!” at Greg-and-Lena’s massive multiple dwelling and wants to know if Monica interprets the card in the same way she does. Lou the rolypoly mailman handed her the mail for the house so she’s the only one who’s read it.

“To the happy gang! —

“Dear Lena, Greg, Josh, Jo-Jo, Rosalita, Grete, Andy F, Tina, Babette, Hank, Allison, Jackie, Ralph, Michelle, Leo, Lily, Wanda and of course Grendel.

“We’re on our way back from 9 beautiful, rainless days on Ibiza — where this was our view from the balcony (almost like ABC Street!). Happy Easter to you all and we’ll see you in a month.

“Love, Andy and Nadja.”

While Wanda Baer is asking Monica if she thinks it’s wrong — if she thinks it’s dumb — to resent Andy and Nadja’s stupid card, Monica is looking closely at the printed text at the upper left corner of the back:

“San Jose (Ibiza)

“Es Vedra Puerta de Sol

“ ‘Es Vedra Goucher de Soleil’

“ ‘Es Vedra sunset’

“ ‘Es Vedra Sonnenuntergeng’. ”

Wanda Baer says (and she wishes Monica would tell her if it’s ridiculous!) that she doesn’t think she’ll ever think about Andy and Nadja the same way again. She always thought that Andy and Nadja were just two unusually relaxed, suntanned and athletic people who traveled just so they could always be in summer — maybe not always on the beach, but always outside. You could even say: two completely outside people — people with no inside — therefore not neurotic. No room in their physical, summery life for stupid emotions (the kind of stupid emotions she has, for example). But now she knows that can’t be true. You have to have an inside life and that inside life has to be as stupid as everyone else’s if you can sit on a terrace on Ibiza and write a card naming every single person you supposedly like and respect back home just to let each and every one of them know that he or she (even her, named just before the dog!) is just one more dull jerk stuck on ABC Street — which does not — repeat, does not — for one single second resemble the view from a terrace on Ibiza!

Monica’s notes can at rare moments be difficult to situate in time, even for Monica. And exactly how much after the fact she’s rereading (re-writing) them isn’t noted either.

For example: an April note begins: “there are fresh green leaves on the overgrown hedges surrounding the Salem Avenue house, front and back. The green of these fresh April leaves is pale — lacking the deep green blood of summer.” But then it goes on: “And something similar can be said about the dying green of the hedge rows of November: also pale and with summer’s blood drained away. Is it surprising that last green and first green have something so vitally important in common?” Monica also wonders if as much needs to be said about the effect of April and November light on leaves as about April and November leaves themselves.

If the next paragraph on the same typewritten page begins: “November 1 is cold and windy”: does that fact alone prove that her handwritten April notes were typed in November? This too has to be taken into account: the next line on the same page begins to record an event in July of ’76, therefore what?

On what day in July not noted and not noted either exactly where on Coast Boulevard Monica (walking west toward nothing in particular instead of east in the direction of. the Salem Avenue house and the local shopping street beyond), who hasn’t made a plan to meet Nancy St. Cloud for a long time, is happy to run into her by chance. Nancy is in a hurry but has a story to tell and lingers to tell it.

Nancy St. Cloud says that she can’t remember what she told Monica about her friend Georgia the last time she and Monica spoke. Can’t recall: aside from the fact that just about every story about Georgia is a story about weight, did Georgia’s story leave off at a point where Georgia had put on or taken off a huge amount of weight? Up or down? And for what reason? Elated or depressed? The eternal soap opera of the waist line and all its orbiting mini-dramas, each one with its own cast of characters.

This is the question: Georgia is going on still one more cruise (her third this year!) and she wants to know if Monica thinks that all this cruising has more to do with the depressing weirdness of Georgia’s relationship with Fabien in general or with the specific fact that Georgia met Fabien because Fabien was the Entertainment Director on the very first cruise she took.

There’s more: Fabien is supposedly getting married, but not to any of the women he usually tortures Georgia with: not to the “wealthy older woman” and not to the “pretty blonde” girl who’s more-or-less Georgia’s age. According to Fabien he’s marrying a twenty-one-year-old girl he hardly knows (met a couple of months ago on her first cruise!).

Georgia doesn’t believe it and she (Nancy) isn’t sure if she does either. Wants to know if Monica agrees that this is one of those times when it’s impossible to know what’s true.

There are one or two other hard-to-answer questions: Georgia has gained nearly fifty pounds since last summer and right now probably weighs around three hundred. What — exactly what — is the equation between weight gain/weight loss and the ups and downs of her relationship with Fabien? Are there actually ups and downs? What (and how can anyone tell, since the relationship exists essentially in the stories Georgia tells her about it) is the reality of that relationship? For example: has there ever been any sex there at all? Georgia has always claimed that sex was not an important part of their relationship — but what does that mean? At times she suspected that Georgia was shading the truth and that there was sex in some sense of the word, at least occasionally. And at other times she believed that both Fabien and Georgia could take sex or leave it — that the intensity of the emotion might actually make up for it — or that intense emotion might be sex for them.

Now that Fabien is saying that he’s getting married Georgia is insisting that the relationship was “platonic”: no sex at all (no matter how you define it)! Therefore certainly never any intercourse or anything resembling it. She finds that unbelievable and wants to know if Monica does too.

And then there’s the other side of it: if Georgia is telling the truth, then what kind of game could Fabien have been playing? Certainly no delusion of a grand, sexless love (like an opera with no singing) for him. So — what did Fabien get out of it? Sex for him just the thrill of playing with her? Enough for him to manipulate her and watch her pathetic reactions? Enough pleasure in that for him? Like the swarms of flies you see sometimes that seem to be feeding off the smell of something?

No way (is there?) to get to the bottom of a story that is just a story someone’s been telling you in bits and pieces for months or years. . . .

Continuing her random walk west along Coast Boulevard (left turn from ABC Street) after parting with Nancy St. Cloud, Monica can’t help thinking that when we talk about love and sex the assumption of a common language is built on complete ignorance. That is to say: not knowing what we’re talking about and not really knowing who we’re talking to makes communication possible.

Noted in April (typed in November) east <—> west breezes along the one-and-three-quarter mile length of Salem Avenue are blowing through cherry blossoms “today” and have already been thinning them out for a week or more: wherever Monica walks in the neighborhood lawns now have little drifts and washes of petals.

Same time or another: unmistakable fragrance of lilacs and then the hard little cone-tips of lilacs, fat and dark as darkest grape or even darker blackberry, in front of the Salem Avenue house. Passersby stop to sniff and touch. Touch is loving and tender: the upturned face and the extended hand.

April and November are not only linked, but penetrate and flavor one another — but only on the 8 1/2” x 11” typed white sheets and/or folded 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” handwritten lavender scrap paper notes of Monica’s Chronicle. In November Monica is typing (not noted if she’s in the red room, blue room or green room of her attic apartment and studio) about two months or seasons. Icy winds are rattling the windows (let’s see: two sets of casement swing-arm, nine panel dormer windows facing south and one deep and tiny dovecote window facing east in the red room bedroom/studio; two sets of casement swing-arm, nine panel dormer windows facing east in the blue room; two sets of casement swing-arm, nine panel dormer windows facing west (also north <—> south if Monica leans out and cranes her neck in the direction of ocean or bay) and one deep and tiny dovecote window facing north in the green room studio) and Monica can’t help thinking with some dread about the steep slide into the nearly aromaless, nearly colorless months of winter that seems to be starting right now, at the instant of typing: streets either scraped bare, down to their grey bone, or one continuous plane of harsh, unmodulated light. And at the same time/on the same page as she’s typing about what she sees through blue, green or red room windows she’s transcribing handwritten April notes that say that she’s in the Salem Avenue backyard: lifts her face to the sun, therefore has to close her eyes: with eyes closed sees amethyst shadows that remain when she opens them — only now they’re inside the new green of the tiny hedge-leaves and, even more deeply, in the shallow plane of grass that borders them.

This is the mulberry shadow of afternoon.

Mulberry shadow of late afternoon in April.

Around five p.m., to be exact.

Presence of night already on the roofs.

Dozing there half-asleep — and when it wakes up will roll off easily and all the backyards of the neighborhood will be dark.

While night dozes on the roof Bah-Wah dozes in mild April breezes and in shadows under the hedges whose exact shade of purple changes with every twitch of Bah-Wah's eyebrows.

Still in the Salem Avenue backyard? And on what day, at what hour? David says that he’s been thinking about a children’s book for a long time. It has something to do with the overheard voices of children, the parallel story-world of the children on a street like ABC Street and of course it would be dedicated to the children of ABC Street (that is: only the children of ABC Street Monica’s chronicled). And of course a little bubble of experience surrounds each fraction of an overheard story that’s always exactly as long and as complete as it needs to be. Monica and David are both aware — while they’re discussing David’s kernel of an idea for a book — how seldom such “kernels of ideas” become books. Books accumulate from the habit of writing, not from ideas about writing. One day you’re surprised that you’ve accumulated something that might be a book. In one sense it’s a symphony of problems and in another you can hear the buzz of an internal resonance inside the knots and tangles of recorded events, ideas, little flights of narration and language you like the sound of.

On April 15 Monica doesn’t see children on ABC Street. She sees two old women walking slowly together in the heat that spreads as a powder through the light of a summer’s day in April. From a distance (which amounts to the same thing as not looking or recording carefully the true details of what’s seen) there are two old women, similarly dressed in black, walking slowly through the powdery light of summer-in-April. But of course the two old women don’t resemble one another and one is wearing a coat that’s made of slick, black seal and the other’s wearing a black wool coat with a seal collar.

Every observation raises questions.

For example: if the fine powder that changes the light on April 15 isn’t heat, what is it?

This too: tiny insects, more like swarming particles than anything else, are creating another kind of cloud or powder in the powdery air, but only around the forsythias. Swarming around the shedding petals? Swarming around the color yellow? Swarming around or in the aroma rising from the yellow petals? Aroma of shedding forsythia petals substantial enough for the tiny, swarming insects to feed on? Therefore: aroma of forsythia and other flowering plants another kind of atomized powder of particles spreading through the air and light of April 15.

Notes offer two possibilities: blades of new grass thread green or shoot green through broken yellow plane of forsythia petals: yellow on green and green through yellow.

Cherry blossoms (particularly along Salem Avenue and here and there on north/south cross-streets) are also shedding petals with every breeze — so that Monica would love to diagram the neighborhood, mapping the frequency and distribution of pink and yellow zones on fresh green grass. (Dreams of doing it, but doesn’t do it: why?)

Surprised (as always) to see a block of blue water at the distant southmost endpoints of all north <—> south cross streets.

Another kind of blue — a bright line of silver blue? — on first blue (and what blue, what blue exactly, is that?): silver blue of ship on darker-but-hard-to-name blue of water and against a white sky that also seems to have a very small amount of blue blended unevenly through it with a fingertip.

All on April 15 or distributed through how many uncounted and undated days in the second half of April:

1) For the first time: there are screens on the Corcorans’ front porch windows.

2) Fred Rosenwasser waves to Monica from a short diagonal across the way. It’s a persistent and overly friendly wave from someone who rarely waves or is friendly. Even worse: a determined, smiling expression signals that he has a story to tell — has a story he’s determined to tell — and that if Monica doesn’t descend and cross to him he’ll cross and join her on the porch. Story is short, but still manages to be as boring as she dreaded it would be. Every boring story Monica’s ever heard from Fred Rosenwasser is about his son or his daughter, daughter’s husband, son’s wife, or son’s or daughter’s children, etc.. Could still be a good-looking, even a handsome, man — always darkly tanned and with a strong profile like something stamped on the face of a small coin — but he isn’t good-looking because he’s so boring. An educated mind, but a dull one. An educated bore that can’t imagine he’s a bore because he’s educated. A handsome profile that isn’t handsome because he’s such a dull story-teller. An oddly clogged voice thickens the soup.

What is it this time? He and his wife, Naomi, are leaving for Guelph tomorrow to visit their son Warren. It’s the last chance they’ll have to visit Warren and his family in Guelph because all the articles Warren’s been publishing and the fact that a principle of particle physics has been named after Warren — the Rosenwasser Principle! —has led to Warren’s first permanent teaching position — so Warren and his family will be moving to Tallahassee at the end of the semester.

What else? Fred Rosenwasser seems to feel that he hasn’t bored Monica long enough and is casting around in his darkly suntanned, could-have-been-handsome profile for another tidbit of family news. How could he forget?! Daughter Annie is coming in for a visit this summer! He’s sure that Monica remembers — or maybe she doesn’t? — that Annie has been living and teaching in Copenhagen for two years so he and Naomi haven’t seen her for exactly that length of time — etc. etc. etc. for how much longer?

Monica has to perpetually wrestle with this issue: choosing to work outside — deliberately putting herself in the path of the local universe walking through her writing — it isn’t always easy to determine which intrusions can/cannot be excluded from the Chronicle.

Monica asks herself this: to what extent is she the one who decides and to what extent does the nature of the Chronicle decide for her? Are there boundaries, principles, reasons for leaving in and leaving out that can be expressed? Is she unconsciously or half-consciously following a set of rules or laws? Or — if no rules, laws, principles or reasons — is the Chronicle a self-determining plasma that accepts into itself only what already resembles or resonates with it and spits out what doesn’t? What internal forces shape it and in response to what? There are other questions, but she can’t think of them.

3 (or not-3) Same day or another? Should there be only two items in her list or more? Seems to Monica that it can’t be the same day that Fred Rosenwasser made it his mission to bore her with family tales because all the curtains are drawn inside the Rosenwassers’ second floor apartment above the apartment shared by the three Arlington sisters (in the house owned by the Arlington sisters). Therefore it must be the next day or even the day after that, when the Rosenwassers are already in Guelph with their son, Warren, that Monica is pre-occupied by reflections in the Rosenwassers’ picture window. Do the Rosenwassers’ drawn curtains make their picture window more or less reflective? Interfere with or enhance the moving image of white sheets being projected there?

Thin, dull wash of green lawn below the shining plane of white sheets with their creases.

Sunlight on white sheets would make them blinding if they were seen without the absorbent transfer from the window glass.

Rosenwassers’ drawn curtains are also white, but duller: boring and tasteful off-white whose pleats fold in a complicated way into the flat and creased white-white brilliance of the sheets that have as much reality there as the curtains do.

Figure of a woman passes in front of the sheets: stops there: testing to see if they’re dry? straightening out the creases and trying to smooth them flat? Must still be damp, because she leaves them there and disappears.

As usual, Monica is trying to figure out whose wash, whose clothesline, whose backyard it is that’s reflected in the Rosenwassers’ picture window, but (also as usual) can’t do it. Backyard remains invisible — has no life in the window — unless wash is hanging there. The second life of the Rosenwassers’ picture window depends entirely on the washing schedule of the neighbor who lives at an angle Monica hasn’t been able to calculate.

Woman’s figure returns to check the sheets for dryness. This time she’s wheeling a baby carriage: bringing a baby out to feel the mild sun and mild breezes of a spring day. Monica wonders what memories-that-won't-be-memories the baby is forming: resonates with her own memory-before-memory, but of course she can't put a finger on it any more than the baby can or will.

Monica tries to concentrate: get the mind to tighten a screw and narrow its focus. Woman resembles Joan Regan! Reflection on Rosenwassers’ window angles backward (northwest) into the Regans’ yard? Joan Regan wheeling daughter Fionnuala’s baby carriage? Therefore sunning Fionnuala’s baby in the Regan backyard. That would mean that the laundry that brings the Rosenwassers’ second floor picture window to life is always Joan Regan’s laundry. But Monica isn’t 100% certain that the figure checking the wash is Joan Regan. . . .

4) David starts to talk about a Michael Snow film they’ve seen recently (title of film and date and location seen not noted): says that he sees some parallel between Snow’s attempt to pick apart strands of perceived reality assumed to be an integrated whole in consciousness and some aspects of Monica’s Chronicle (or of their joint work in general). Something about Snow’s use of a candle and melting candle wax and competing representations of reality or realities of representation, but Monica’s notes are incomplete and unclear — and, in any case, Monica isn’t sure that David is right that what Snow cares about has anything to do with the Chronicle’s obsessive need to pay attention to the laundry reflected in the Rosenwassers’ picture window.

Probably not on the same day (date not noted) Monica, David and Bah-Wah are having breakfast in the Salem Avenue backyard. Breakfast is simple: iced A & P “Bokar” coffee, crusty bread (from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street?), nutty and buttery and uniquely “woodsy” Vacherin-type cheese (not the real, un-pasteurized Vacherin from France or Switzerland that’s impossible to find in the United States) and bitter orange marmalade (brand not noted). Bah-Wah lies alertly on her stomach in the new grass, facing their chairs and whatever they’re using as a makeshift table: not asking, begging or demanding, not calm or patient either. Impatiently, confidently expectant? Focus as sharp as if she’s hunting, though she knows that breakfast is as much hers as theirs: ears erect and rotating this way and that way, nose quivering, eyes tracking movements that are about to happen. Monica holds out a small wedge of “Vacherin” and Bah-Wah regards it skeptically. Sniffs it as if offended. Sneezes violently, returns for more serious sniffing. Mouth opens to accept not-quite-Vacherin reluctantly, disappointed in what breakfast amounts to: grips it very lightly and gingerly with front teeth — trying to prevent lips, tongue and palate from having to taste it. Disappointed, but why? Aromas must have told her a long time ago that David wasn’t making her favorite baked pancake, buttery and eggy yet with a lot of crunch and sweetness. . . . Bah-Wah likes a cheese breakfast, but doesn’t like having to adjust to new and strange flavors: no foil boursin wrapper it’s an inexhaustible pleasure to try to lick clean, no snowy or not-quite brown rind of Brie or Camembert to chew on, trying to gnaw her way with back molars through the complicated problem of flavor and texture as if mouth-and-jaw were a particularly powerful tool for thinking. Not familiar Edam or Emmenthaler either. . . . By now she’s tasted and swallowed the small wedge of “Vacherin” and she looks dreamy and unfocused. Has trouble standing up. Legs seem weak and wobbly. Smacks her lips and barks plaintively for another taste. Forehead is creased with troubled thought, as if she can’t decide whether to call the flavor “buttery” or “woodsy”, some combination of the two or if these words are just lazy clichés and she needs to make up a brand-new word that can’t be spoken. . . .

Monica runs into third floor (attic) tenant, Pat Czorny, on the sidewalk in front of the Salem Avenue house’s solid frontyard hedgerow. They seldom see each other, but, when they bump into each other like this, Pat Czorny — who has a middleweight’s or even a light-heavyweight’s shoulders and arms and a boxer’s flattened features and who seems ready to sock anyone who offends her — always greets Monica warmly, as if they have good reason to see life from the same angle.

Pat Czorny is with her eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Lorelle: eighteen but looks thirty-five. Good-looking or not Monica can never decide, but certainly better-looking than Pat Czorny, whose face and thick, guarded way of talking both could have accumulated drip by drip over galactic centuries.

What’s up? Not much: they’re on their way to the hospital. Lorelle’s baby is seven months old already! Wants to know if Monica remembers (she does, because she chronicled it) that the last time Monica saw Lorelle — in February — Lorelle was pregnant. Well, now the baby’s back in the hospital — with viral pneumonia. Sounds bad, but no big deal according to the doctor. Just picked up a cough somewhere. Of course Lorelle says no, but it could be — could very well be — from Lorelle’s stupid smoking night and day!

Monica wants to know if her memory’s correct: doesn’t Lorelle live on ABH Street, the same block as Pat’s sister Janey? Pat can’t believe that Monica remembers that! She loves that about Monica and says to Lorelle: “see, I told you how smart she is! she’s got a memory that remembers every single thing you ever told her and everything she ever saw you do!”

No longer on Salem Avenue.

Eighty-two degrees on Saturday, April 17 and John Corcoran is as red as a mid-summer cherry. His face is often red for other reasons, but today Monica can see the sun in it. Seeing that she’s noticed his burning color he explains that he’s been on the beach all morning (hour not noted) with Pat and Timmy. John Corcoran never has much to say — hardly ever or never has a story to tell — and seems to be trying to think of something to add to his tiny sentence now. What does Monica think?: can this mean that the horrible winter is finally over?! It’s not just him! The whole family’s been going nuts waiting for warm weather! Must have felt the warm air in their sleep, because he and Pat were up at five-thirty, out in the backyard by six-thirty. . . . What else? He’s been transferred to Brooklyn — so couldn’t wait to get to the beach to soak in some sun and warm sea breezes before he has to head inland. . . . Everyone else is enjoying the day, but he has no idea where Philip is, as usual. In his own world and whatever stupid world that is he won’t know whether it’s spring or summer or if it’s snowing. . . !

Eighty-nine degrees at two p.m. and at three-thirty Monica writes the words “summer curtains”. She doesn’t explain what summer curtains she’s talking about, but later (typing April notes in fall or winter) assumes that she meant the lightweight green-and-white checked cotton curtains visibly moving through the screens in Allison Meehan’s bedroom window. (Reminds Monica that it’s time to put screens in her windows.)

Monica notes this too:

A large charcoal bird with a long, quivering tail (“earlier”).

Leaves of her avocado plants quivering in breezes through un-screened west-facing green room windows.

Iced coffee and a cigarette (not noted whether on the shaded front porch or in the sun-and-shadow of her green room studio/breakfast room) in the coolness pulsing irregularly in off the ocean.

Beautiful little tadpole-faced Johanna Coffin is “on the porch” (not noted whether raft-like second story porch outside the Coffins’ loftlike front kitchen-breakfastroom-diningroom-parlor-and-piano-practice-room or tiny ground floor orange brick and iron railing front porch under a deteriorating orange plastic awning, just a small platform at the head of the orange brick stairs leading to the street) with her tall, graceful and musical father, Greg. Greg’s in a bathing suit (color and type not noted), but Johanna’s in street clothes.

It sometimes happens that events that seem simultaneous to Monica have to be written as if they’re occurring one after the other (even if only seconds apart). For example:

Greg Coffin in his what-color-and-style bathing suit strolling with long, easy strides toward the beach;

Johanna Coffin in front of her house, hopping and making faces with her best friend, delicate and mermaid-like Daisy Brennan;

And, not far away from Daisy and Johanna, a huge bee, fat and swollen from what?, barely able to fly, is hovering in a delirium of stationary velocity over buds on a tiny bush — green and red and fat as fruits far too large and heavy for the green stems they’re on. (Whose lawn not noted.)

It’s not clear in Monica’s notes if she observes and sketches in these next-door events herself or if some of them are reported to her by David, who’s gone all the way up to Wanda Baer’s narrow little elbow of an apartment in the Coffins’ attic for a jar of strawberry jam Wanda had picked up for them and forgotten to drop off.

Monica neglects to record in what old black-and-white film seen on television a woman longs for sunlight. Winter has lasted so long and she’s so profoundly cold that she can’t get close enough to the fire. Can’t warm up and can’t even bear it when the sun passes behind a cloud and casts a quick, cold shadow.

“Gloria” (also known as “Agnes”?) passes: beautiful legs and a tired, aging face: always walks with unstable speed on pencil-thin high heels: today in a form-fitting pink waitress’s uniform that Monica doesn’t find familiar.

“Gloria’s” husband Dave’s face (not noted if he passes at the same time as Gloria/Agnes or later) is neither turned toward Monica nor away from Monica, but, while facing rigidly forward, gives a strong impression of having become strangely tanned and leathery and at the same time (hard to picture later) horribly blotched and with a sharp crease in it, so that its skin can, if necessary, fold over neatly and close like a leather book cover.

Not noted on what day Monica and David keep their appointment with George Plimpton in his E. 72 Street townhouse to iron out details for the planned Paris Review THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL portfolio.

Glancing ahead through her sketchy notes (while getting them ready for typing) Monica is surprised that she wrote so little about it and wonders if more will pop up later, detached, far away and “out of place”.

Let’s see:

Fayette Hickox greets Monica and David at the front door and ushers them into George Plimpton’s first floor office: walls of bookshelves (of course) and a tall window with a direct, bright view of the street from a slight elevation. (Exactly the same elevation that gives Monica a view down into the Salem Avenue backyard from the tall back bedroom windows?) It’s a quiet, pleasant street and Monica finds herself wondering if there are enough random passersby and/or regularly appearing residents to work their way into the visual life and writing life of someone writing daily at the desk where Molly McKaughan is sitting now, facing the window while taking care of Paris Review business.

George Plimpton is on the phone, slouched deep in an office chair that doesn’t have much depth to it. Monica discovers later, when she and David compare notes, that David was as stunned as she was by Plimpton’s look of exhaustion: talking wearily as if to someone resistant or uncomprehending, skin an unnatural grey, drained of blood. Fayette Hickox seems to notice Monica’s look of dismay because he goes out of his way to explain (whispering in the office or in an ordinary tone later) that George took a glucose tolerance test earlier and for whatever reason they drew an extraordinary quantity of blood and it seems that the doctor wants him back again this afternoon — so George probably won’t be able to take as much time to figure out the portfolio as he planned and isn’t even certain if he’ll be allowed to eat. . . .

What else?

While George is on the phone Monica and David have a few minutes to talk to Molly McKaughan, but don’t have time to learn much more than that she also lives in the 70’s: only it’s on the west side, not the east side, nowhere near the park and definitely not with anything like these wonderful views of the river. . . all the way across town and in the middle of nowhere. . . . Fayette chimes in that they all seem to be clustered around the 70’s: he’s much closer to the park than Molly, around Madison and 71st. . . .

Monica is trying to sketch in Fayette and Molly quickly in her mind: to write about them before writing about them so memory will have as little to do with it as possible: but she’s finding it hard to sum them up with a few strokes that satisfy her because she knows so little or not quite little enough. (A few minutes’ conversation can hopelessly stain the truth of a purely visual impression.) So she’s left with this: Molly leaves a too-uncomplicated image of a good-natured and fresh-faced young woman (late twenties?), efficient and unpretentious, and Fayette is pale and slight to the point of delicacy, with a quick wit and a pleasant manner. . . .

Now George is off the phone and he and Fayette lead the way upstairs to a large livingroom. Oversized posters of George Plimpton fighting Archie Moore, George Plimpton playing tennis with Pancho Gonzales, others lost to memory — along with several posters of blown-up Paris Review covers. If there’s any art on the walls Monica doesn’t pay attention to it (why?), therefore doesn’t sketch it in mentally or “memorize” it, therefore can’t note it down later. She does pay attention to the things that dominate the room as if they were works of art: powerful, immediate views of the East River and 59th Street Bridge; hidden source of light lighting up the beautiful green surface of a pool table in an adjoining room, making it stand up vertically near her like the solid-seeming surface of a green painting; black spiral staircase drilling through a circular opening toward one corner of the ceiling, drawing Monica’s attention like a sculpture that’s also the real, corkscrew path up and down between public and private existence.

They get down to business, but where are the preliminary conversations? No exchanges with George are noted, only the general observation that “George Plimpton seems to have very little understanding of THE BLUE HANGAR”. It interests him, it intrigues him, he wants to publish it and to feature it — he suspects that it’s important — but confesses that he’s “not sure what to make of it or how to do it”. . . .

Not noted how Monica knows (on what undated April day) that Kitty’s car breaks down on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn. (Not noted either what Kitty is doing on Cropsey Avenue or even in Brooklyn.) The story (told directly to Monica by Kitty or arriving by way of Betty (if Kitty called Betty from Cropsey Avenue so she could hear what she needed to hear in her mother’s voice) or told to Monica some other way she can’t think of) gets more puzzling with every added detail. Somehow Kitty makes her way to a garage where the mechanic can’t figure out what’s wrong with her car; Kitty calls Happy who, for reasons not given or noted, is all the way out on Long Island, not too far from Stony Brook. Happy tells Kitty to stay where she is, he’s on his way as fast as he can with a Long Island mechanic he’s known for years. Kitty finds Happy’s advice loony and does not stay put, waiting for Happy to ride to her rescue all the way from the nether end of Long Island, but leaves her car in the garage and accepts a life from a guy who strikes up a conversation with her while her car is on the lift. (Not told to Monica or not noted if Happy drives to Brooklyn even though Kitty won’t be there or whether or not Kitty told him she was hitching a ride with a stranger.) All the questions come to Monica’s mind that are likely to come to the mind of anyone listening to Kitty’s puzzling story (why, for example, a man Kitty meets by accident in a random garage on or near Cropsey Avenue would, through sheer chance, be headed exactly where Kitty needs to go) but Monica’s only concern is getting the puzzling story down as accurately as possible and, working quickly, she doesn’t have time to figure anything out.

Let’s see: while they’re driving each finds the other strangely familiar. Or it’s only Kitty who has that slightly creepy sensation while the man already knew who she was when he spotted her in the garage. It’s not clear, but he may confess that he recognized her (is he therefore definitely the one who approached her and offered her a lift rather than Kitty approaching him and asking for a lift?): she won’t remember him but he definitely remembers her! She was very young then — really just a kid — probably still a student or an intern — but she was definitely there when he was hospitalized at Pilgrim State. . . . Of course he was completely nuts then, but always thought she was nice — not like the others, who he could have gladly killed — and always hoped to see her again — and now here they are. . . !

Monica hesitates to talk about the Chronicle in a general way (that is: every work of art should in its own form and expression be a model of what it wants a work of art to be and in that sense be its own best argument), but sometimes (often?) sentences insist on being written. Less often they “write themselves”, whether or not they need re-writing later. Monica and David both love, but don’t often find, the sentence that arrives complete and unchangeable, like a pebble found on the road and carried around as a charm.

One day in April (date not noted), in the middle of taking notes about Kitty and Happy and the Salem Avenue backyard, Monica finds herself writing about the yearning that expresses itself in writing as a kind of persistent stammering: this day happened and is happening: the Chronicle attests to the existence of the moment and of itself and of the chronicler: of life being lived exactly this odd way and no other: chronicler chronicling the life of this day existed through and in this process if nothing else: it happened and will continue to happen, but only if what?

It seems logical to Monica that it’s on the same undated April day that she writes “summer days in April” that she also writes “record-breaking temperature on Saturday (ninety-one degrees)” and notes that it should be the same “today” (Easter Sunday, “around 10 am”). But there’s no way to tell for sure if either Saturday or Sunday or both days are the days she notes, toward evening, that it’s “cooler now, with strong ocean breezes” and that the weight of the sun going down can’t be overestimated: draws all the day’s warmth down with it as abruptly as a human hand tugs a warm bedsheet off the line and into the laundry basket.

The parking lot outside the Long Island hospital where Alyosha is recuperating is hot (no temperature recorded) on the undated April afternoon (same afternoon that Monica writes “summer days in April”?) when Monica visits. Alyosha is beginning to look more like himself: allowed to walk the corridors with her and to visit together in the overly warm and sunny lounge.

Just before or just after “Easter Sunday” someone (most likely Wanda Baer) passing Greg and Lena Coffin’s open bedroom door in the low-ceilinged attic of their massive orange brick and white stucco multiple dwelling (where Wanda Baer has her own narrow little elbow of an apartment) — her attention drawn sideways by the breathing in or breathing out of thin, yellow summer curtains — glances into the room. Sees that Greg and Lena are asleep and stops in the doorway to deliberately stare (telling herself that she should try to memorize her experience so she can report it to Monica later for the Chronicle). Greg and Lena are sleeping side by side: Greg’s long form is curled up on its side into a broken and tangled S-curve, Lena is face-up on her back: both under the shared weight of one unseasonably heavy yellow blanket. Not a sound. Absence of the intimate, private sound of sleeping-breathing strikes her as noteworthy, but she doesn’t know how to interpret it. She also wonders why their bedroom door is open and can’t tell herself with certainty if that’s a common or uncommon occurrence. Reasons (then or later) that it must be uncommon because she’s noticing it. Could be this simple: to encourage warm breezes to breathe in and breathe out from window to door and door to window. But then why not every warm night with weak breezes?

What else?:

Monica’s notes seem to say something about being told that the light in the bedroom is yellow — and that the one (definitely Wanda Baer?) lingering in the doorway to watch Greg and Lena sleeping is acutely conscious of the yellow curtains, yellow blanket, air that also (because of blanket and curtains?) seems yellow, light that has the weight of air with yellow pollen in it.

Slight oscillation of what?

Hard not to pay attention to the slight movement of the side-by-side breathing bodies under the too-heavy yellow blanket. Asks herself if sleeping side by side (even more so sharing one blanket?) alters the inner life of the sleepers. Or does sleep angle them completely away from one another so that they only appear to be side by side. . . ?

A slight movement by one of the sleepers makes Wanda Baer hurry downstairs (on her way out of the house in the middle of the night?). She’s surprised to find that the door of a ground floor apartment is open as well: lights are on, rugs and furniture pushed to the margins, bare floorboards — exposed in the center of the room — almost brown with age.

Beautiful, palest pale blonde Lily Romero is in the center of the bare wood floor (light reflecting there from overhead fixture or floor lamps) in a forest green polo and yellow (word unreadable in handwritten notes), hair bound up with what not noted: cleaning or painting or sanding.

Light seems dusty, because of cleaning, sanding, etc.? Room strikes Wanda Baer as warm at the cluttered margins, cool around Lily’s green, yellow and pale blonde figure at the center of the brown wood floor — doing exactly what not certain — and not certain either whether Lily and Wanda see each other or talk.

On an April day that feels like summer (Easter Sunday or another day):

a) The Corcorans are setting out for the beach again and their happiness about going to the beach makes the atmosphere feel more summery than it is.

Handwritten notes say: “Pat Corcoran, John Corcoran and Timothy Corcoran are headed for the beach.”

Then: "Now they’re headed back from the beach”.

At another point “they’re on the beach”.

In order, out of order or in the horizontal order of events as they naturally occur on a street or anywhere horizontally across the surface of the earth that can make things appear “out of order” only because the order they’re in has nothing to do with the order of turning pages.

Monica asks herself this: is the person referred to (mistakenly?) in her handwritten April notes as “Dave” — and who’s said to be carrying two instruments (“a guitar and a mandolin”) toward the beach — actually Philip Corcoran? She can’t imagine who else “Dave” could be. The only Dave who comes to mind is Agnes/Gloria’s husband Dave (“the Clock”), who passes regularly on the other (west) side of the street — to and from work — with a briefcase and a badly disfigured face. That makes no sense, while Philip Corcoran does. Therefore, she concludes, she must have been sketching events in quickly (too quickly) and scribbled the wrong name down.

Notes say that a small flock of “friends and their children” are headed toward the beach just after the Corcorans, but does that mean (is it logical to conclude?) that “friends” was meant to be shorthand for “friends of the Corcorans”? Sentence occurs in the middle of sentences about the Corcorans, but Monica is well aware that the order of chronicling and the order of events are not necessarily the same order and that neither order invalidates the other.

Let’s see: Pat Corcoran says that she doesn’t mind walking barefoot on hot pavement. Others flinch — others have to put on sandals or sneakers or flip-flops — but the burning touch of pavement doesn’t bother her at all. Speculates that it’s her “Indian blood”. Seems to realize that her tone — always rapid and slippery and without any gravity to it — makes it hard to take her seriously, because she adds that she’s serious: she really does have “Indian blood”: grandmother on her mother’s side was “a full-blooded Indian”! (Can’t remember what tribe.) Wants Monica’s opinion: does it make sense to Monica that her Indian ancestry — for some reason “Cherokee” comes to mind, but on the other hand it might be “Cheyenne” or “Choctaw” or even “Chippewa” or “Chicasaw” — explains her lifelong desire — her unfulfilled longing — for Hawaii?

John Corcoran runs out of the water almost as soon as he dives into it. “That water is ice. . . !” Clearly desperate for a towel or robe to wrap himself in, yet no one hurries toward him: has to scurry all the way up across a slope of wet sand and an uneven plane of dry sand to the blanket. Monica can’t tell if it’s sun or exertion that’s making his red face stand out against his white skin from shoulders to ankles.

Philip Corcoran has to leave for work, but doesn’t have to head inland to Brooklyn like his father. Reminds someone that he’s working in Boggiano’s Clam Bar for the season — down on what is it?: can’t remember exactly what street: IA Street? or could be IB or C Street — one of those three, it doesn’t really matter — but the one thing that does matter for sure is that he’s got to be there no later than two! Wants to know if anyone knows what time it is. . . .

“Out of order” Monica’s notes say that the flock of friends and their children headed for the beach just after the Corcorans are carrying with them sandwiches (Monica doesn’t, but would love to know what kind), lots of Pepsi, giant thermos of what? and a small cooler loaded with ice.

In the cool sun and cool shadow of Monica’s green room studio the curling lines of two avocado plants and of the flowers just cut by David stand out against the lime-and-avocado green of the walls in an un-designed way Monica finds beautiful. Flowers sprang up overnight around the north and east perimeters of the massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling, but the flowers in her vases don’t exactly match those ABC Street flowers. For example: Monica doesn’t record and can’t think of any lawn or garden on ABC Street where lilacs are growing, but she’s getting a whiff of lilacs and there are some dark branches of unripe lilac buds in one or two of her vases. She wonders if David cut flowers all the way over in front of the Salem Avenue house where lilacs are blooming: tall bush with a wide, irregular wingspan that spreads out from its essential sphere over the cement walk from a narrow strip of lawn to the left and a smaller, less wildly spreading bush all the way in the far (west) corner of the broad oblong of lawn to the right of the cement walk: and not only in front of the Salem Avenue house: scattered lilacs are blooming at so many points along Salem Avenue that Monica isn’t tempted to catalogue them.

Unripe lilacs have the fragrance of tea with lemon in it. A sweet bar-of-soap or perfume floweriness is cut by the spray from a knife slicing citrus. Nose a too-short tunnel to the brain: brain sniffs lilac scent directly and isn’t sure it has its feet on the ground. Tart sweetness brain is tasting doesn’t quite match the deep, jammy blackberry of the lilac buds, darker and darker, almost beyond purple or any combination of purple, blue and black, because they refuse to open.

What else?: long green stems are beautiful in water through clear glass, even without thinking about the white flowers with egg-yolk orange centers above the rim. These, Monica assumes, are the flowers David found in the narrow between-house space along the northern perimeter of the ABC Street house or in the paved and usually barren east-facing backyard.

One more April note about flowers on ABC Street: Yvonne Wilding arrives carrying a potted, flowering plant that she pauses to talk to Monica about: traveled all the way out near Windy Pass to buy it because Easter lilies are only five dollars out there. Doesn’t know it for a fact, but thinks they’re called that not only because they bloom in early spring, but because of their impossibly pure white color.

Monica notes the trouble Yvonne Wilding took to get her Easter lilies (not noted how many buses she had to take to and from Windy Pass) and the tenderness with which she’s carrying them upstairs.

A father with a small head and athletic but over-muscled body is teaching his daughter to ride a two wheeler. A wavering, wobbly back-and-forth S <—> N path along the middle section of ABC Street between Coast Boulevard and the ocean. Many details are missing (age of daughter, color of bicycle, etc.), but the father’s small head, overly-muscled arms and torso in a tight (blue-and-white?) striped sleeveless “muscle shirt” imprint themselves vividly into the fibers of the printer’s discarded, off-size scrap paper Monica sketches her notes on — as if etched there with a sharp-pointed tool. Also etched there are a pair of unusually tight, sky blue pants and a short neck to go with the small head. David thinks Monica should call him “Alley Oop” if he continues to run horizontally across her Chronicle as he is now (keeping up easily with his daughter’s dashes forward and near-topples sideways), but Monica wonders if she can call him “Alley Oop” because — by the time anyone reads an edited and published version of her notes for April ’76 — no one may remember who “Alley Oop” was. . . .

Odds and ends on ABC Street on the same April day:

1) because a) Greg and Lena are spending the weekend at Lena’s parents’ in New Jersey (a vacation?) and b) Wanda Baer’s parents (Oscar and Harriet Kurtz) are away (where not reported or not noted) Wanda Baer is able to “borrow” the Kurtz’s grey Pinto and park it in Greg and Lena’s driveway.

1a) Who is it that tells Monica (anyone possible other than Wanda Baer?) that Jojo sleeps with Lena, not in the same room as Rosamond and Joshua. One of the reasons given is that Jojo and Joshua fight so much that they have to be separated at night if there’s going to be any peace, but it’s not clear in Monica’s notes if Jojo always sleeps with Lena or only on the nights when she and Joshua have to be separated.

2) “On Easter Sunday” (same April day or another?) Fionnuala Regan is visiting her parents: visible on and off all afternoon in a flowered Easter slack set: on the Regans’ porch or walking back and forth in front of the clean white shingle three story house across the street from Monica at a very slight southwest diagonal

Regans

Monica

and pretty much staying within the South <—> North poles of the Arlington/Rosenwasser deep, but narrow and attached, two family brick-and-shingle pseudo-modern shoebox and the Greengrass’s brick fortress, pushing baby (no-name-noted) in his elegant dark cyan blue carriage with shiny chrome hardware, little Matthew walking alongside, one hand on the carriage.

3) An orange frisbee is sailing in flat, wobbly arcs without much force a short distance down the middle of ABC Street (not even the span of Fionnuala Regan’s strolling) from the small, pink hand of Monica’s landlord’s squat son Kenny to the weak and bony hand of his thin and awkward best friend, Huey.

Monica isn’t certain if it’s on the same day (“Friday”) that she and David are in Manhattan to see Louis Malle’s adaptation of Queneau’s Zazie dans le Metro and they’re looking forward to the film for reasons that have to do with Queneau (a narrow pleasure), with Malle (an uneven director, dropping off severely after Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (“Elevator to the Gallows”) and Le Feu Follet (“Will-o’-the-Wisp” or “The Fire Within”)) and with the relation of Malle and Queneau to an idea about the nature of comedy Monica and David have been discussing since thinking and arguing about Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies in graduate school. Idea they’ve hatched between them is roughly this: comedy depends on wordplay or wordplay = comedy and, conversely, wordplay can lead to nothing but comedy. And, corollary to that, in the theater the figures on stage may be “characters”, but are really dancing figures of the language-play in the written text (specific flesh and voice of the actor disguise language as much as they embody it). Queneau’s breakneck pace, ecstatic wordplay, game-playing and near-nonsense invention bring all their ideas about comedy back to mind and they’re curious to see what visual language Malle will find to suggest Queneau’s tone and pace. Another idea about comedy and tragedy from that earlier time — that a comedy is a tragedy that happens to fools — may not hold true for all comedies and doesn’t come into play in Queneau, so Monica doesn’t think there’s any point to dwelling on it.

What else? Monica isn’t sure if it’s on the same day they see Zazie that, “at night”, she and David have a dinner of moules remoulade (according to David, not the simple “mustard sauce” blend of homemade mayonnaise and best Dijon mustard some cookbook authors say it is, but a more complex mix — spicy and with varied textures — of homemade mayonnaise, best Dijon mustard, capers, anchovies (optional), cornichons, celery (optional) and herbs like the one served at Larrés with poached mussels and elsewhere tossed with grated celeriac (celery root); rillettes (a relatively uncommon pork pate Monica and David are addicted to — coarse strands through a smooth, somewhat creamy body and with a characteristic flavor that depends on what?); ris de veau (veal sweetbreads prepared how not noted); beef Wellington (fillet of beef spread with a layer of (if you’re lucky) foie gras, more likely chicken liver pate, baked in a buttery and flaky pastry envelope and served in a pool of what’s often called “Madeira Sauce” (profound and complex wine and “brown” sauce that involves veal bones and a dozen other things); coupe au marrons (candied chestnuts and chestnut or simple syrup over vanilla ice cream); Monica’s favorite profiteroles (coffee or vanilla ice cream in puff pastry in a puddle of darkest dark chocolate sauce); coffee. What else? Monica isn’t sure if it’s on the same day as Larrés or Zazie, same day as Larrés and Zazie or on a day that has nothing to with either that Wanda Baer is in Manhattan (at least in the afternoon), playing softball in an un-named park on the Lower East Side with “Betty” (Monica has no idea who Betty is, though Wanda Baer reports it as if she should) and “a few other friends”.

On Monday, April 19, there are signs that a few neighbors who’d been traveling or visiting relatives out-of-state over the Easter weekend are back on ABC Street. For example: the shades that had been lowered in the Rosenwassers’ picture window, intensifying reflections of neighboring yards at odd angles, are up. Reflections don’t disappear, but are far thinner and more confused, some of them finding hiding places in the shaded interior darkness of the Rosenwassers’ livingroom. Back home with boring stories to tell after visiting their son in Guelph, a married professor with two children. Stories about the brilliant son, stories about the brilliant grandchildren, seldom about the daughter-in-law (who Monica finds the most interesting of the lot): Fred Rosenwasser has fresh ammunition and tomorrow or later today he’ll plant himself stoically on the sidewalk in front of his (actually the Arlington sisters’) house, suntanned, a little bow-legged, with a powerful profile a little like an “Indian head” nickel, scanning the street for someone too innocent or sleepy to think of avoiding his gaze or for someone ready to accept a premature death-by-listening. Monica remarks to herself — not for the first time — on the narcissistic opacity that doesn’t mind peppering the ionosphere with its boring mini-tales of children, grandchildren, ailments and grievances that can’t be kept in, they have to be told. Fred Rosenwasser (and every other Fred Rosenwasser) plants himself on the sidewalk, an amiable death ray of all that’s boring, trivial and irrelevant in life, scanning the local horizon for an easy or reluctant target, he doesn’t care which. . . . Monica knows that this is the time (even more than usual) to avoid all eye contact with Fred, who’s probably already craning his impressive head to see if she’s working outside. . . .

Another tell-tale sign of a neighbor’s return to ABC Street: hiding behind the dense boughs of the Rhinebeck pine, Monica hears the pleasant sound of Greg practicing his piano in the Coffins’ second story front (west-facing) kitchen-diningroom-breakfast-nook-music room. (Whether scales or melodies, the sound of Greg playing never bothers her — but it seems to her that for weeks or months she’s heard more ping-pong balls being struck by Greg than piano keys.)

On the same April day or another (notes only say that it’s “a heat wave” in April: “96^o yesterday, supposed to be ninety today”) Leslie Greengrass is carrying clothing (Monica’s not able to tell from across the way whether they’re a man’s, therefore father Enos’) down the front steps and out through the iron gate of her parents’ house. (Is it logical to assume that the little boy with Leslie Greengrass is her son, even though this would be the first time Monica’s seen any sign of a son and there are, obviously, all sorts of other possible (and logical) explanations for who the little boy might be?)

Cherry and dogwood are both blossoming on “another 90^o day” (date not noted), but there are strong winds in the Salem Avenue backyard. (Only in the Salem Avenue backyard?)

Tiny leaves, pink buds not much larger than pink peppercorns “in the peach tree”. (Location not noted and, when it’s time to type up her handwritten notes, Monica can’t even remember what “peach tree” she was talking about.)

Pink becomes a color that pops up here and there across the local universe only at this moment in April. And everywhere pink is visible the blossoms are delicate and feathery, never assertive.

Lilacs have opened from darkest through merely dark purple into a soft lavender that Monica (though lilacs are the flowers she feels were born with her from pre-being into being and then into the mysterious consciousness of infancy, the fragrance of memory-before-memory) is beginning to find washed out, yet with a repulsive, dying sweetness.

Monica would like to know: what flowers can these be: bright pink/rose pink/fuchsia all layered in one flower.

Riley Liman needs to tell Monica that he was wrong! He gave her the wrong information and feels terrible that by now she must have put that wrong information into the story she’s writing! Mr. and Mrs. Coffin did not go to Mrs. Coffin’s parents’ in New Jersey; they did something they never do: they drove all the way up to Downsville to visit Mr. Coffin’s father — who no one calls “Mr. Coffin” — he (Riley) knows for a fact that no one in the family likes him, so no one says “Dad” or “Granpa”, they say “Dean” or even “Dean Coffin”. He’s 100% sure that all this is true and that Monica can write it down.

When days aren’t dated in Monica’s handwritten, scrap paper notes (often the case) it’s impossible to be certain of the order of days within a week or even of events within a day. Sometimes things explain themselves as they go along and sometimes they don’t and then that disorder becomes another idea of order, perhaps the most natural one.

For example: day in Manhattan first or arrival first (before the day in Manhattan) of the April or May or April/May issue of the Poets & Writers newsletter (Coda volume 3 #4 ) impossible to know.

Notes say “hot in Manhattan/cool on porch steps”. And that the “same sun” agitating not only every molecule but every atom and every unit smaller than an atom of every surface in Manhattan is also agitating the molecules, atoms, particles, etc. of auto hoods, roof tiles, street signs, etc. on ABC Street, but that here they’re isolated as burning points within the cool and level plane of south —> north ocean breezes.

Another note adds that Mikki calls from Manhattan and complains about the heat.

On p. 27 of volume 3 #4 Coda, in the interior of an article about “visual poetry” and taking up the bottom third of the page from spine to edge, there’s a large, horizontal photo of two men (David and Lowell) — shot from behind (by whom?) and from the near-to-middle-distance — crossing a spacious, open area of monumental cement slabs bounded by irregular black tar lines: crossing from a “here” that must have started behind the photographer, the no-man’s-land between photographer and reader, toward a “there” hidden inside the Blue Hangar (dark opening — where the massive door has been rolled back a little — about one fifth of the way from the left edge of the structure: upper torsos and heads of both men stand out against the angled length of the enormous Blue Hangar. Figure on right (Lowell), in black t shirt and black jeans, stands out more vividly against the sunlit panels of the hangar doors: bushy hair, long body, long arms. Photo suggests the physical adventure that reading THE BLUE HANGAR is meant to be.

Caption at left of photo reads “THE BLUE HANGAR: A SPACE NOVEL/TO BE READ WHILE WALKING consisted of brief fictions to be read while walking around the site and a number of instructions, diagrams, and ‘scores’ generally in visual poetry format. The piece concerned language as a material inscribed among other naturally occurring materials — as sculpture, architecture, etc.”

Monica and David find the Coda caption true as far as it goes, but also limited as a summary of the idea of THE BLUE HANGAR and of the Space Novel in general. Idea is to make the novel develop as an event in the world. The fiction event would still be a book, but the book would be bound by an existing structure in the physical world (an airport, an art gallery, a museum, a bank, etc.): book would use the physical properties of the structure as a frame to give it its shape and the nature of the events that ordinarily happen in the existing structure would help determine the content. Because the Space Novel is an event happening in the world and readers have to come to it and participate in it physically in order for it to exist as a book, it has an inevitable time limit and its inevitable time limit (along with the pre-existing structure that binds it) helps determine its nature and shape. Meant to be temporary and to disappear, but there’s always a cultural vibration and sooner or later, one way or another, the culture demands documentation, repetition, preservation, collection and even re-enactment, etc. etc. (George Plimpton and the Paris Review, Dorothy Dorm and So What? , etc.). The most radical gesture is too easily understood and what was meant to be indigestible is now a popular snack food. Incomprehensible yesterday, a cliché today. Therefore: the more excerpts and descriptions and photo documentation of the SPACE NOVELS begin to pop up here and there the more Monica and David are troubled by the ease with which they could make a career out of making more polished or spectacular variations of it.

Let’s see: belongs here because it is here? or “out of order” with no explanation — having drifted here on currents that should come as no surprise, but do because we never see them.

The “scraps of paper” that Wanda Baer talked about with urgency in Lin’s Garden — torn strips that Harriet Kurtz uses for scribbling down shopping lists, “to do” lists and secret financial records later hidden away in one of her lingerie drawers as if forbidden and exciting — are now (date not noted) in Monica’s hands. Handwriting is dense but orderly (if not hastily scribbled, why on such roughly torn strips of paper?): an extraordinary amount of information on 1, 2, 3 long strips (no measurement): first strip lists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 account numbers in one Manhattan bank (amount of money in each account not listed and in whose name not listed either); strip of paper no. 2 lists an account in Oscar Kurtz’s name in a savings bank in Brooklyn, another account in the same bank in trust for Libby Kurtz, another in trust for Cindy Kurtz in a different Brooklyn bank and another four accounts in two other Brooklyn banks. Names and addresses of banks are carefully documented, but identity of account holders and dollar amounts are not. Let’s see: third strip is a bit different: all accounts seem to be in one bank in Queens: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 accounts in that one bank! and every one of them in Harriet Kurtz’s name, three with Cindy’s name added, three with Libby’s name added, two with both Libby and Wanda, two with only Harriet and Wanda and one with Harriet’s mother.

No way to know what it all adds up to, but Wanda Baer (driven a little crazy by the discovery of the Kurtz’s hidden money) has stayed up nights obsessively trying to make calculations based solely on the interest listed next to several of the accounts. Comes up with a rough estimate of 194,000 but can see at once how little information she had to go on and feels the needs to start re-calculating. Wants to know what Monica thinks and Monica has to agree that it’s shocking to discover that the Kurtzs have anything, when for all these years they’ve claimed to have nothing.

On another late April day (not necessarily the next day) Monica finds herself wondering to what extent Wanda Baer is right about her mother, Harriet. Of course she’s right that her mother hides her scribbled-but-compulsively-orderly financial notes from the children — but is it from the children only? For example: is it possible that some of Harriet Kurtz’s financial records are hidden from Oscar Kurtz also? And isn’t this possible too?: the act of hiding the record of secretly accumulating money and keeping that knowledge to herself (the only one able to sneak a look at them when the family’s asleep or she’s alone in the house) in itself a private pleasure (therefore the lingerie-drawer hiding place). It seems to Monica that it’s true that Harriet and Oscar Kurtz do not want Wanda (or Libby or Cindy) to know that they have any savings, but it may also be true that the act of hiding her scribbled records may be complex in ways that are unknowable to Wanda, just as unknowable to Monica and maybe to Harriet Kurtz as well.

On April 20 heat from a white sky arrives on Earth as sunlight. And the harshness of this hot, white-sky sunlight is not distributed evenly. For example: sunlight seems to build up in one white shingle house in a monumental way (which one and at what exact angle to Monica’s front porch not noted: Garveys’ tall white shingle across the way to her right, Sloths’ smaller white shingle directly across the way, Regans’ tall and pure white shingle across the way to her left or one or two more she can’t think of at the instant of typing her notes) to such a degree of white heat that clusters of flowers that weren’t there earlier are now blossoming behind the white shingle house (but not so far behind that Monica can’t see them).

White-sky sunlight on white flowers makes them look just as harsh as the white-painted surface of the shingle. Vegetable, mineral, synthetic — the white sunlight of April 20 has no trouble making them all look the same.

From the coolness of her front porch Monica finds color to be a soothing antidote to the harshness of every white surface. There’s summer heat in the too-red red, red-orange, orange popsicle colors of the tulips that have suddenly popped up on Greg-and-Lena’s miserable front lawn, but whatever is corrosive in the light of April 20 seems to be absorbed there and converted into something childishly pleasing: only certain colors or all colors? — color itself?

Are the colors of all tulips everywhere this concentrated? An impossibly bright cherry so tart to the mind’s tongue it’s almost orange — orange with some cherry in it — yet bleeding over to others as a darker cherry syrup. And others that are a ridiculously childish cupcake pink.

What else?

Here and there along the whole length of Salem Avenue and Coast Boulevard and all possible cross-streets: flowering cherry blossom and dogwood: no great clusters of them, but enough to change the flavor of the neighborhood for anyone walking or driving slowly with windows down to sniff the air of the new season.

Lilacs: aroma only? Flowers beginning to be absorbed into the invisible background.

The world spreads out horizontally, as always, to the driver or walker — in broad, thin washes of new green lawn broken by low vertical blocks of dark green hedge — here and there the injections, the eruptions, the fountains of impossible color.

This too: a line of green (from a distance? from Coast Boulevard?) bursts into life at the boardwalk end of every side street: yellow wildflowers — not gardened into fixed tableaux — are (even from a distance) a buzzing, tangled, developing hive of yellow in the bright green line along the boardwalk. (Impossible to know: yellow dazzling only because it’s tangled in bright new green?)

There’s a relationship between heat-and-sunlight trapped in a white sky and the excessive red of the tulip, but what is it?

Cold flows into April 21 without warning: that is, without Monica having paid enough attention to it. For example: it’s only now that she has an irritating cold that she finds herself writing about the chill she felt “the other night” when she sat out late with Mikki, talking on the front porch. (Lengthy conversation not recorded.)

“Now” (on April 21) she has a cold and hates having experience filtered through it.

Twins pass twinning: untranslatable grumbling and growling from one (something like a dog when its sharp bark cooks down into a stew of snarling), aggressive silence from the other (as usual). Pair of aging, eternally grumbling men in old suits: pair of voices: pair of voice tones: pair of sounds and rhythms: periodically make their way down ABC Street, cross the open length of the sidewalk between Rhinebeck pine and holly bush — loud only for that length — and gradually diminish with an unmistakable rhythm: seemingly stoical silence of one doesn’t seem like stoicism or silence to Monica and perpetual rumbling complaint of the other seems to her to have something else even more deeply rumbling in it. For example:

                                                    twins twinning April 21

OH!        (give it to him)

                                                                                                        what'y'a say

____________________

                                                                                                             1

WHAT!

                                                                                                             | | |

KNOW WHAT TO SAY!

                                                                                                             /

HE KNOWS WHAT

I GOT TO SAY!

                                                                                                             | | | | |

WHAT I GOT TO SAY

HE KNOWS ALREADY

BUT WILL HE SAY

IT TO ME BEFORE

I SAY IT TO HIM!

                                                                                                                 +

SO!!

                                                                                                                 |

WHAT CAN I SAY!

                                                                                                             ______________

“Late last night” (before or after experience began to be filtered through a terrible head cold?) Monica was in the twenty-four-hour Cornucopia Diner with Mikki and David having an un-recorded conversation while eating: both Monica and David are having Rueben sandwiches and coffee ice cream sodas, while Mikki, in the mood for breakfast, has French toast. (David loves French toast, but never orders French toast in the Cornucopia Diner or anyplace else because he knows how to make French toast the way it should be made but never is — with the usual, simple ingredients in slightly different proportions):

Beat egg in wide, low bowl (wide enough to accommodate a slice of best quality white bread).

To lightly beaten egg add whole milk in sufficient quantity (more than is customary) to create a thin enough mixture to penetrate and saturate the bread, not lie on the surface as an egg coating that will turn leathery in the pan: trial and error will be necessary to find a balance that’s liquid enough but still retains some body and a somewhat yolk-colored look to the milk. David finds it impossible to give precise measurements because this is a case of look and feel, rather than of measurement. Results will force adjustments.

Using a fork, make sure egg and milk are well combined. Soak one slice of bread at a time in milk-egg mixture, turning over once. (Can lay the weight of a spatula blade on bread to help it sink into liquid.)

Sauté over medium-high heat in generous butter to desired degree of golden-brown-ness on both sides. (Exterior should have some snap and crispness, while interior, because of increased milk, should be tender and moist: so heat may have to be adjusted higher to achieve goal of crisp, golden-brown exterior/soft interior, depending on heat source.)

Sometimes David likes his French toast with strawberry preserves, sometimes with butter and maple syrup, and he’s even used both.

The Cornucopia Diner — neon-trimmed swept-wing airline terminal — is situated on a triangular island at the triple intersection of Salem Avenue, AAF Street and Bay Drive and faces the dark, quietly heaving waters of the bay through the panoramic windows of its longest (north-facing) side. When Monica and/or David occasionally eat there late at night it’s always in a booth at this north end that they position themselves for a view of the small, laterally traveling blood red, amber-yellow, lime or emerald lights of night-time water traffic, more mysterious and beautiful because they’re purely visual — isolated in dark water and in silence, as if no streets existed on the other side of the diner.

This too: Monica sees in a later sentence that “last night” a tug could be seen pulling (or may say “pushing”) a black and heavy (nearly sunken) line dotted with bright lights that seems to dock “across from the diner”, but she can’t figure out what that means — because across from the diner a small, uninhabited island called “Waffle Bar” is far away and invisible in the darkness. She’s puzzled by this too: the later sentence also says that the reflections of tug, barge and fishing-boat lights are “yellow, green and purple”, but the lights of the boats that slide through these waters at night are always red, green and/or yellow-amber, never “purple”.

Lou, the rolypoly mailman, takes a two week vacation and his replacement (who doesn’t know the route or anyone along it) delivers Monica’s mail to the parallel house on ABB Street.

Shades of lavender, white, cupcake pink closing up into a dark cherry seem to match lilac, cherry blossoms and a flowering tree Monica can’t identify when she’s typing (in November?) — though the match between color and flower or tree isn’t made clearly in Monica’s handwritten notes.

What is noted clearly is that “on November 29” Monica is typing (re-writing) her handwritten April notes on Lowell’s old manual typewriter (manufacturer not noted), that Lowell left “yesterday” for Kansas by train and that Monica calculates that he should have arrived “by now” (no time noted). Also says: “first snowflakes fell earlier today”.

A tiny note about Mikki’s visit that’s drifted away from the rest and landed here: Mikki’s brought David a bag of breakfast coffee that she loves and neither Monica nor David can figure out why. Monica’s best guess is that it’s because Mikki knows that it’s David’s coffee-obsession that’s spread to her. He used to be addicted (to find out exactly how long ago Monica would have to find the carton where her pre-Chronicle notes are buried) to the heady Mocha-Java-ish aroma of A&P Bokar coffee — an aroma that actually translated exactly into a taste and then into an aroma-memory that he finds it impossible to reproduce. Monica thinks that part of his impossible aroma-memory has to do with the old A&P store on Bay Drive and the sacks of coffee in the coffee aisle where he used to grind Bokar coffee beans (no grinder of his own). After that he became influenced by the coffee drinking notes of the Dutch amateur chef and (again Monica isn’t sure) journalist and/or broadcaster, Roy Andries de Groot, in his somewhat rambling and highly personal cookbook, Feasts for All Seasons, that David borrowed from the local library and pretty much made his own for two, three or more years.

What else?: Mikki says that it took her a long time to figure out her blend, adding and subtracting different types of beans before arriving at something that she loves and is addicted to: “a blend of ten or twelve different types of beans”, rich and complex yet oddly syrupy and soothing. (Names of varieties of beans not told or not noted.)

Monica’s lingering cold continues to cloud experience: she takes notes even though she isn’t convinced that she’s there in the way she’s used to being there. Notes say, for example, that “today”, determined not to give in to her cold, Monica spends time on the beach, though cold winds are whipping up a rough ocean. Roughness of wind and ocean may make it impossible not to know that she's experiencing the day: whips through it, whips through her. From her perspective on the shore a fishing boat seems to be having a hard time: can’t tell if it’s making any forward progress, chopping through bottle-green waves that foam over its decks: every wave cut through means a sudden plunge into a dark vacuum that immediately fills up and heaves the boat nose-up where, at once, it cuts downward through another foaming wave, etc.

Seems to Monica that all this strenuous plunging down into/up through cold water — chilled green bottle and swallow after swallow of the salted ale of the ocean — has begun to cure her cold.

Only one day (April 22) is dated, but that one dated day is adrift in undated paragraphs and it’s hard, if not impossible, to tell which of these paragraphs attach to it. (For example: is April 22 the day when Monica is so tired (after a day on the beach) that she can’t go down to the front porch to work?)

Rare for Monica to be in bed in daylight. It’s as if, no matter where the bed is located and at what point in her life she might be horizontal in it, to find herself there in the afternoon is to re-enter a realm that’s too familiar and too specific to be what’s called a "memory". Has to do with childhood illness. Childhood illness changes the meaning of childhood and that different meaning is always there as an alternate reality that can be slipped back into along the horizontal chute of a tired afternoon: sun is warm and she feels it, yet she’s also sensitive to the coolness, the absence of weight or pressure that = shade. Can’t say for sure if sun is in shade, shade is in sun, if they’re side by side or what, if anything, cool shade and warm sun have to do with the very specific childhood sensation of the far-awayness of the world.

Bed is not too far from the window, but infinitely far from the street.

Window view down into the street from the third floor attic on ABC Street can’t correspond to her childhood room's view down into a far more urban street, yet something else slips together perfectly.

Home from school, therefore already distant from the complex and busy daily world: absence of that busy world quietly present in this room as the glass of water on the bedside table.

Because the moment is a pathway back into childhood doesn’t mean that there’s anything “nostalgic” about it, but it may prove that time has a network in us that resembles the network of veins and arteries in the body and that something's always sloshing through it in any direction it pleases.

Slip into bed while the sun's still shining, too exhausted to do anything else. Also slipping into bed there, inside that remoteness?

Radio voices have something to do with it and the remote voices of children playing in the street are not the voices of living children.

It’s not clear in Monica’s handwritten notes when (and where) she experiences a moment of peculiar clarity: a strange, panoramic sense of time: where she was passing through where she is into where she’ll be. Writes only that she has the moment of panoramic clarity, but says nothing about the content of her vision. Must have something to do with her lingering, terrible cold, with lying in bed in the afternoon, etc., but nothing is spelled out so she can’t (at the instant of typing) say more. (She has to consider the possibility that the terrible cold is in and of itself the channel backward <—> forward, but she isn’t convinced and wonders what else it could be.)

She feels that it’s hard to disagree with the idea that the days of a life are connected — in the sense that, while each day may seem to be its own freshly cracked egg frying alone in a buttered pan or, the way stories are bound into books may give the brain the idea of an unfolding narrative, days and events flipping one after the other (because we fall asleep and wake up it all seems broken into units and these units seem to succeed each other), but the truth is far more horizontal and undivided, like the dream where your gaze into the distance is equivalent to being there.

Slip a horizontal plane under it all, just like a table top. . . .

Her moment of clarity has something to do with this horizontal vision across the surface of life, but she can’t take it any further.

This is puzzling too: Monica can’t figure out where she and Mikki could have run into Monica’s mother, Betty. It sounds more like a dream than reality, but Monica’s notes talk about it as something that happened.

Let’s see: notes say that the accidental meeting happens in a post office. Betty is already there when Monica and Mikki walk in. She’s just torn open a letter from Kitty and something about the way Kitty looks in a photograph seems to be bothering her. Betty greets Monica and Mikki normally. Face shows involuntary pleasure at seeing Monica, but nothing that could be taken as surprise. Monica, on the other hand, can’t understand what Betty is doing here (or “there”), why she’s opening a letter from Kitty, etc. Betty is in a hurry, therefore Monica and Mikki only have a few seconds to examine the photograph of Kitty: long enough for Mikki to have opinions to express to Monica that she can barely contain until Betty hurries off. Did Monica notice, she says, that Kitty was wearing the blue ski jacket — weak shade of blue she can’t stand — that used to belong to Wanda Baer!? Mikki knows for a fact that Wanda Baer doesn’t own that jacket any more, but how could it possibly have ended up on Kitty? Not the same jacket, just identical to it? Seems to her there were a couple of smudges on Wanda’s jacket that she spotted in the few seconds she had to look at the photograph. This too, and much more important than the fact that Kitty seems to be wearing Wanda Baer’s old ski jacket that’s not only a weak and ugly blue but looks much too girlish on Kitty, therefore makes her look old: Kitty’s face is in no way the face she remembers. Does Monica know enough to know if the change in Kitty’s face has something to do with Happy? Looks this odd way because she’s on vacation with Happy? One face when Hap or Happy’s around, another when he’s not? Does Kitty’s old face (her “real” face) come back when he’s not there? Do the people in our lives change us permanently or only superficially? How deep does it go? This is her first glimpse of Happy and all she can say for sure is that he’s not what she would have predicted. Struck most by how tall and droopy he looks. Face to match, in the sense that it’s as long and droopy as the body, but also sad. A sad and droopy face that’s long but might have a collapsible bottom: chin like a collapsible drinking cup you take on a camping trip. Collapse into what from what it would be ridiculous to guess just from looking at Betty’s vacation photo of Kitty and Happy for twenty seconds, but a trembling sort of depression — “fear and trembling”? — wouldn’t surprise her. . . .

“I think I have to cry, not you!”

Not noted where Monica is, though it’s logical that she’s on the porch, probably hidden behind the holly bush screening the porch’s right (northern) wing, when she hears her squat landlord bargaining with a house painter or contractor. Laughs while singing his tale of woe. Good-natured laughter meant to be disarming, therefore a bargaining tool? or just the landlord’s nature: lots of cracked pebbles and other sharp bits of stuff worked into the essentially good-natured dough. Complaints, jokes, money worries, charm and self-pity are all stirred into the confusing mix that also includes the suspicious gaze of a survivor and a short man’s darting way of moving across the ground.

The two men seem to be debating the urgency of re-shingling and possibly painting the massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling, probably unrenovated for decades. Could also be talking about the landlord’s ugly, no-longer-modern two-family brick and shingle shoebox next door.

“I know I have to do it,” the landlord is saying with three or four different tones and emotions woven together. “You don’t need to convince me. I tell you the truth: I don’t have the money! I’d do it right now if I have the money!” And so on, mixed with laughter that might in some way be genuine.

“So the answer is that you know you should do it and I shouldn’t bother explaining to you why you really have to do it, but you’re not going to do it because you don’t have the money and you knew you didn’t have the money when you called me.”

Monica wonders if she’s the only one who thinks that p. 138 might read better without these two sentences:

“Mulberry shadow of late afternoon in April.

“And five p.m., to be exact.”

Without them the page would read like this:

“This is the mulberry shadow of afternoon.

“Presence of night already on the roofs.”

She likes this more economical version better, but she’s not certain enough to go back and change it.

There’s this problem too: it seems to her that there’s no time to go back: world keeps passing horizontally and keeps pushing sentences onto the page: so the law for the Chronicle has to be: keep going forward and don’t look back.

This strikes Monica as an important fact: forsythias are losing their yellow. But does the vanishing yellow of the forsythias have anything to do with the spring breezes that are shaking the lilac bushes? Notes say lilacs are fully grown, but not fully opened: both green leaves and conical lilac clusters are as large as they’re going to get and some of the conical, blackberry-like clusters are so dark and clenched that the spring breezes that are blowing through an open world of unripe green and first flushes of color can’t get through: redirected to the forsythias, where they strip away any last thread of yellow?

World looks as light and open as it does on this breezy day because moving trees are still as bare as if they’ll never sprout leaves again. This too: hedgerows are washed with green, but the green may only be a thin, vine-like covering, not the internal, interwoven green of sprouted leaf buds.

Monica’s handwritten notes say that today is the day Alyosha is leaving the hospital.

May be on the same almost-perfect spring day that Alyosha is scheduled to leave the hospital that someone reports to Monica (“for the Chronicle”) that Nora Lenehan passed with “an unfamiliar man” (age not reported or not noted) in a red-and-white-striped long-sleeved shirt.

On one more un-dated day in late April Lowell has a nightmare, tries to recount the narrative element of it to Monica and (in accordance with the “magnetic principle”) events related to the nightmare are inevitably drawn to it, so that a cluster of similar events ends up forming.

Let’s see: to begin with, it isn’t clear if Lowell talks to Monica about his nightmare alone and in person; to her alone, but over the telephone: or during the scene of no more than three sentences on folded-in-half handwritten scrap paper when Monica, Lowell, Kitty and David have breakfast together in the Salem Avenue backyard.

a) Lowell dreamed that he had a fatal illness. He knows (from Monica) that he should have forced himself to write the dream down immediately, but he was lazy (didn’t want to re-live it) and that’s why the dream has no narrative and no images, no compressed narrative whose infinite geometry unfolds as you scribble it down. All he came away with was the awareness that he has a rare and fatal illness and that it’s called “Agammaglobulinemia”.

He doesn’t believe that the cliché that medical students are always sure they have the disease they’re studying explains this nightmare — because Agammaglobulinemia is an extremely rare disease and he hasn’t studied it. On the other hand, since the name popped up in his nightmare, it had to at some time have become embedded in his consciousness: read it, heard it, knew it for a second, then forgot it. But that’s still no reason to dream about it! Whatever he knows about it now he knows because the nightmare terrified him and he ran to look it up.

It’s often referred to as an auto-immune disease, but that’s not strictly accurate: to a great extent it seems to be an inherited immune abnormality that affects men more than women: the abnormality interferes with the development of immune cells resulting in low levels of cortical immunoglobulins: therefore children afflicted with Agammaglobulinemia have little or no immune defense and are subject to constant bacterial infections that can become fatal if untreated. Serious lung and other respiratory tract infections are common. . . .

b) Monica’s notes record matter-of-factly that she, David, Kitty and Lowell are talking in the Salem Avenue backyard (reason not given). Lowell is telling a story (very well may be the story of his medical nightmare, but notes don’t say so) and Kitty interrupts and contradicts him. Lowell is clearly enraged, but has trouble answering. May be because he’s unprepared (always has to get himself ready to do battle with Kitty) or his problems with Kitty go much deeper than the need to rehearse what he’s going to say: either way, his voice trembles and comes close to taking on a little boy’s lisp. Monica is dismayed for him (knows that when Lowell is with Kitty there’s no neutral ground between eye-popping rage and humiliating passivity and that the struggle to solve it is going to be a difficult mess) and can’t help saying something to Kitty, though she knows that that only makes matters worse.

c) Not noted when Lowell finishes telling Monica his Agammaglobulinemia nightmare: something like this: “the next night” in the St. Vincent’s emergency room an attractive young woman in a wheelchair caught his eye. No visible signs of an emergency. The fact that she was in a wheelchair meant nothing: just standard procedure. Her pallor and (he knows it sounds odd) her beautiful look of exhaustion interested him and the suitcase by her side was interesting too. That was unusual. A good-looking, pale and exhausted young woman with a suitcase. He had to talk to her and hear her story, which goes something like this: she’s a nurse in Philadelphia, in New York on vacation (may have said “to celebrate Easter”, but that’s not certain). “That morning” she became violently ill: started throwing up and couldn’t stop. Didn’t take a genius to know that that could be symptomatic of a thousand things, so he started asking questions and taking notes (really taking notes or only taking notes to make an impression). She said that this was not the first time she’d unexpectedly started throwing up, but never so violently. If only someone in Washington had warned her that throwing up is a symptom of her illness she probably wouldn’t have been alarmed. Her illness is considered so rare that they’re studying her at the National Institute of Health and treating her for nothing. . . .

He can’t remember if he even bothered asking her what she’s being treated for: he knew what she was going to say. When she said “National Institute of Health” he started to become dizzy and nauseated and when she said “Agammaglobulinemia” his brain became paralyzed.

“On Tuesday” Lowell has a session with Dr. DaVinci and tries to tell him the story of what happened in the Salem Avenue backyard — he said this, Kitty said that, he felt this or that — but Dr. DaVinci cuts him off sharply. “I don’t want to hear about Kitty! At least not the way you tell it!” Monica can’t say with any certainty if there’s an adjective before “way”, such as “flabby” or “mushy” or “nauseating”, deleted by Lowell.

Dr. DaVinci commands Lowell to stop babbling and move his eyes (sitting up or lying down not noted): “move your eyes from side to side”. He’s able to do that with no problem. It stirs up nothing: just a matter of looking back and forth at the familiar walls and objects of Dr. DaVinci’s smallish basement office. “Look behind you!” The command terrifies him. What does Dr. DaVinci mean? Twist his neck and head and look all the way around like that. . . ? That would probably be the normal thing, but, instead, he starts to try to look behind himself by tilting his head back as far as it can go — chin toward ceiling — rolling his eyes in their sockets so that he can see a few wisps of hair at the edge of his forehead. . . . He can’t do it! Terror overcomes him completely. He doesn’t know if he’s made a conscious effort to jerk himself out of that state — stop himself from falling into the abyss — tell himself (as if talking to himself) to stop feeling anything — or if in some unclear way he’s lost consciousness and can’t feel his own presence in the room. Had fallen into the abyss without knowing it. . . . And that ends the session. He wanted to ask Dr. DaVinci (and he may be asking Monica now) if it’s just that the hidden, empty space behind us is always a frightening place, but by then he was out on the very nice suburban street of Dr. DaVinci’s leafy neighborhood.

On another undated day in mid-or-just-past-mid-April Mikki travels out by subway and bus from E. 10 Street in Manhattan to visit Monica. She has all sorts of things on her mind to share, but Monica doesn’t think any of them add up to a “story”. Let’s see:

a) Mikki wants Monica to help her figure out why what sometimes happens to her (as Monica knows) is happening now: suddenly and for no apparent reason eight pounds of blubbery weight have wadded themselves around her middle! Hasn’t been making a pig of herself, so where did it come from? And who is this big bowl of mush walking around in her shoes?

Monica has to agree: Mikki’s one-hundred-and-forty-seven pounds looks like more: her famous “bloated” look: and not just around her middle: her throat gets fat and swollen too. . . ! It’s not clear in Monica’s notes, but she seems to make a conscious decision not to enter into the psychological conversation that Mikki’s inviting, beginning with memories that may have welled up (not for the first time) that Mikki doesn’t want to face up to. Dark problem that may have already been solved, that’s now become un-solved and needs to be solved again. Therefore harder to solve than before? And there’s this too: Monica has no way of knowing if it’s exactly at these times of having to re-solve dark problems already believed to be solved that Mikki starts stuffing herself. . . .

b) Not long ago (date not noted) Mikki met her sister Patti for lunch. Monica doubts that Mikki traveled (and it’s not noted whether she did or didn’t) all the way up to Brewster to have lunch with Patti, but it isn’t impossible, knowing, as Monica does, that Patti is happy to stay in her own house, neighborhood and town and is reluctant to travel anywhere for anything. A phlegmatic nature or an assertively contented nature? Assertively contented with home, husband, children, job (pharmacist in a Brewster drugstore, if Monica remembers). Therefore: less or more likely that Mikki (who doesn’t like to go above Fourteenth Street) traveled all the way up to Brewster or that Patti traveled from Brewster to Tenth Street in Manhattan for lunch?

Patti has a tiny fragment of a story to tell, photographs to show and little bits of commentary about the photographs that may imply something that could add up to a story. Patti is still friendly with Mikki’s ex-husband, Al, former linebacker and successful soybean executive, therefore sees the two girls that Mikki gave up to Al when she divorced him, while Mikki is not allowed to. Patti has recent photographs of the girls and says that Maureen (the ten year old) has changed much more than Emily (the eight year old). Emily is still the off-center clown Mikki remembers and that Al has a hard time controlling, but Maureen’s embraced Al’s orderly, upper-middle-class life with a vengeance: result is that Maureen’s beginning to look a little like Al — squarish, no longer pretty, face flattened by a kind of angry dullness: main thing driving her (as far as she (Patti) can tell) is the desire to blot out all memory of Mikki and the messy life she lived with her.

c) What else? Mikki says that Monica’s news (that Coda is using one of her (Mikki’s) photographs to illustrate their little feature about Monica-and-David’s use of “visual language” in THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL at Floyd Bennett Airfield) comes at just the right time. She needed something — some evidence that her floundering around in photography has some value in the real world. Despair is never too far away: the dream of life as one long horizontal afternoon of depressed sex and Sunday football. She’s been on the verge of one more slide into it until today. . . .

d) Mikki wants to know if Monica can help her figure out a way to get away from Manhattan and spend the summer at the beach, near Monica. The other day she was trying to do some reading on her front steps, but the stench of un-collected garbage drove her inside where there’s no air-conditioning. True or not true? Stench of garbage is compounded by the fact that, given the right circumstances, heat itself acquires a stench and of course when something stinks enough it gives off heat. But the heat and stench on E. 10 Street are not the main reason she needs to get out of Manhattan. Main reason is that Frederique is having another bout of cosmic depression and Monica knows what an idiot she’s always been about Frederique’s depressions. She’s afraid that she still believes that Frederique’s depression — because it’s a philosophical depression and/or a political depression — is somehow superior to and more attractive than her own or anyone else’s ordinary depression. (There’s a style to Frederique’s depression, but when it’s her (Mikki’s) depression she’s just another blob lying on the couch.)

Let’s see: the story of what depressed Frederique this time is short and goes like this: elated at first about starting up “Downtown Woman” with a like-minded group of radical academic women, a couple of months later Frederique was in despair. No one else is in despair because Frederique (now she admits it, but only to her (Mikki)) is the only one who saw “Downtown Woman” as a money-making, life-changing venture. The others see it for what it is and are having fun, while Frederique had cosmic dreams but saw very quickly that nothing cosmic was going to happen: “Downtown Woman” wasn’t going to keep her from spending the rest of her life as an un-tenured assistant professor making no money: an un-appreciated genius assistant professor and political philosopher always worried about not having a job. Once she saw how nutty her dreams about “Downtown Woman” were she lost all interest in it and began to spiral into despair. Only she knows how much Frederique hates her life and dreads what she sees ahead. All the other radical academic women think that Frederique is like them, but she isn’t. All Frederique’s cosmic misery is reserved for her (Mikki) and now — still one more time! — Frederique is sending out her seductive signals and she (Mikki) can feel something in herself longing to respond. . . . So Monica has to help her get out of Manhattan. . . !

On what mid-April day in ’76 does it take Monica more than a few minutes to figure out why brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle is snapping photos of little, waggle-headed Hank Wattle and younger (also waggle-headed, but less so?) brother Willy Wattle together with all sorts of other ABC Street children, all wearing party hats?

It’s not clear in Monica’s notes if she figures it out before she hears slightly older Jimmy X (mini-Troy-Donahue-look-alike) say (with deliberate cruelty?) to Hank Forest (who’s come all the way down the block S —> N from Babette-Grete-and-Andy’s mother-and-daughter two family at the ocean end of the street just so he can be photographed by Nancy Wattle with all the other ABC Street children): “who told you that you’re six? you don’t look six! I think you’re probably five — or maybe not even five. . . !” Seems to Monica that there are tears in Hank Forest’s voice when he asks Nancy Wattle if she knows how old he is, but Nancy Wattle doesn’t hear him (or acts as if she doesn’t hear him) and keeps on snapping photos.

What else? Monica notes that a child named “Sean” (no idea who he is) and his older brother (not named) are “the first to leave” Hank Forest’s party of the group of children being photographed on the dry lawn in front of the sprawling, hacienda-style yellow stucco and brown-painted stone and wood multiple dwelling across the way, where the Wattles have a ground floor rear apartment (no idea how many rooms).

This too: not recorded how Monica knows what she knows when she hasn’t seen, heard and chronicled an event herself. There are times when someone wants to help out with her-or-his idea of what Monica must be doing, sitting half-hidden or in full view on her porch or porch steps, apparently sketching with words the way an artist might sketch the random life of the street as it passes or stops for a minute to have its portrait drawn. Monica thinks of these helpful people as collaborators, but she doesn’t always record who they are and there are other ways that information can arrive. In this case she has no clear idea how she knows that all the children at Hank Forest’s birthday party were told that the party would end at four so they could let their parents know when to pick them up at Hank Forest’s house at the ocean end of the block. Also doesn’t know how she knows that, at a little after four, the only child not picked up is Jimmy X, whose mother, Nelly, of all the mothers Monica knows on ABC Street and in the neighborhood, is by far the most over-protective, the most paranoid and cracked in at least this one way — to such an embarrassing degree that Jimmy X often pretends not to see or even know her.

A little later, at about four thirty, Jimmy X bounds up the porch steps where Monica is writing, just a step behind blond-blond Timothy Corcoran. Says that his mother forgot all about him. “Your mother has no head,” Timothy Corcoran says. True, his mother has no head. Worries about him and worries about him and then forgets that he’s alive. Timmy was the only one who noticed that he was alone: invited him home and then wanted to race him here, but he can’t do that because there’s something wrong with his leg: acts up when he runs too fast and no one knows why. . . .

Monica can see that Jimmy X is in a strange state: something in him is over-excited and nothing on earth can calm it down. His party hat and gift bag of candy are still in his fist, crumpled and crushed, and at the same time he keeps trying to force Monica to take the crushed bag and hat from him as a present while something dark and disk-like in his eyes is visibly spinning.

Monica notes that all the children at Hank Forest’s party — with the sole exception of Jimmy X — live on ABC Street and then wonders how many of these ABC Street children have recently had a birthday party.

Let’s see:         Rosamond Coffin, two years old, had a birthday party on March 3.

                        Joshua Coffin, nine years old, should be having a birthday party soon (date of Joshua’s birthday never recorded, therefore lost to memory).

                        Riley Liman was ten years old on March 31, but didn’t have a birthday party until sometime in early April. . . .

                        And now of course Hank Forest turns six “today”.

Scarlet and Debby Castle pass, headed which way (toward beach or boulevard)?, carrying pastel balloons (exact shades of blue, pink or green not recorded).

An unfamiliar little girl in a forsythia yellow spring coat and white bonnet passes, trailing a rose balloon on a long string.

Typing her handwritten notes Monica is having trouble sorting out what happened on April 23 from what didn’t. It seems to her that everything happened on April 23, but cut into the events chronicled on (and about) April 23 there are references to events that couldn’t have happened on April 23 and that most likely happened earlier. She may take the time to sort things out (putting herself on the side of the reader) so that the intrusion of events one through the other in the natural course of passing life’s horizontal narrative doesn’t seem chaotic or she may feel that if she stops to straighten out every knot and tangle she’ll never get close to translating all her handwritten notes into typewriter. Consciousness of time sometimes makes her plow ahead, aware that she’s leaving behind tangles she could untangle and hoping that a reader (a curious stranger) will come along not too far down the path to infinity with the passion to figure out the relationship of each thing to the other.

Let’s see: On April 23 Monica’s terrible cold — the same one that had her in bed and orbiting her own life — hasn’t left her entirely. Or her cold’s returned with rainy weather. Rain has left the visible world a deeper black and a deeper green: green plane of suddenly-larger leaves above drawing a darker, juicier green from the sodden blackness of soil and tree bark below. (Of course something black and un-asked-for comes mixed with the dark green syrup being pumped into the swelling leaves.)

Recorded at the same time and intercut with her record of April 23 is a tiny account of how she and David spent some of their time after leaving George Plimpton’s 72 Street townhouse after the aborted Paris Review portfolio planning session for THE BLUE HANGAR SPACE NOVEL. Notes say that the mint green scrap paper she’s writing on “now” is a much lighter shade than the dark green of the leaves in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden “last week”, when she and David walked to 53 Street after their brief encounter with Plimpton. Leaves were darker than her green scrap paper, but just as paper-thin.

This is the knot inside the tangle: if on April 23 “Monica is driving Alyosha home from the hospital” can April 23 also be the day (as noted) that she’s in the MOMA garden café “after her meeting with George Plimpton” etc. (and outside in the sculpture garden also), scribbling notes about the rain, the green and black of leaves and tree bark, shade of green paper she’s writing on, droplets that may or may not lose their green passing from leaf to iron garden chair?

There’s more to this knot or to knot and tangle both:

It’s raining hard on ABC Street at three p.m. (has to be the 23? can’t be the 23?) as Monica begins her circuitous bus trip to Manhattan: skies clear into blinding sunlight in the marshes along the inner edges of Jamaica Bay: from the impossible-to-look-at bits and lengths of water that must be angled at sun, not sky, eyes take respite in the soft brush-strokes of dry, yellow-green grass and rushes.

Skies open again only when the bus reaches Roosevelt Avenue, near the spot where there may still be the same depressing all-night cafeteria visible in The Wrong Man when Henry Fonda descends from the elevated subway platform, exhausted from a long night’s bass-playing in the Stork Club band, eager to get home to Vera Miles — but gets arrested by two plainclothes detectives just as he reaches the front steps of his narrow, attached house . . . .

A short subway ride leads to rain in Manhattan that quickly becomes ambiguous: not dry and not raining: because it already has rained there are puddles everywhere, some of them too profoundly dark and potentially infinite to walk through, others interesting and beautiful abstractions of this or that bright or colored aspect of the street.

Notes talk only a little about the look of the leaves and the chairs in the MOMA garden now that the rain is over and the streets would love to dry out but don’t seem to know how. Notes only say that people have started to come out again, to walk the streets and even to sit in the sculpture garden, ignoring the fact that the chairs need to be toweled off.

A few other things may or may not be knotted or tangled in the knots and tangles that Monica isn’t certain belong to April 23 and that she doesn’t have time to pause and try to disentangle:

“On April 23” the forsythias on ABC Street are green and nothing but green. Monica would like to, but can’t, figure out a way to say that there’s no yellow without including the word “yellow” in any sentence about them. (Only green is there in reality and only green should be in a sentence in her Chronicle.)

What else?

“White towels reflected in the Rosenwassers’ second floor, north-facing picture window.” Monica feels that she may finally have a pretty good idea where the clothesline — which she knows only from its image or reflection in the Rosenwassers’ window — is located.

Breezes that may not be warm themselves, yet have in them unmistakable signs of a warm April day, blow an unusual white butterfly into sunlight in Monica’s immediate field of vision and then whisk it off at once to the side and into shadow. Sunlight in membrane of wings leaves the impression of a butterfly that’s uncommonly large, unusually silken. Breezes also move it like silk. Moves for a second or less in a jumpy, connect-the-dots way from point to point that may have some hidden logic to it, pauses exactly at the X mark where breeze and sunlight intersect and then isn’t seen again.

Breeze carrying the warm day around it continues to pass across Monica’s skin and to shift the position of the white towels in the Rosenwassers’ picture window.

Monica’s terrible head cold is not only lingering, but still bad enough for her to keep noting its effects. For example: on “Friday, around 5 pm,” she notes that she feels the symptoms of her cold far more than any feeling of the world she’s looking at and trying to record. The symptoms of course in and of themselves help keep the world at arm’s length (vision unable to bridge the gap for the weakened other senses), but they’ve also kept her up at night, so the far-away-ness of the world has exhaustion in it too. Even worse: a gland at the right side of her jaw is swollen and painful and the pain forces the self — already too much inside its own head — to concentrate itself further.

Looking at the world is not the same as seeing the world and sometimes even writing can’t wake you up to the fact that you’re alive in an absolutely specific place and moment. (The struggle to feel alive in the moment is familiar to David — it’s his definition of being alive — but it’s alien to Monica and she hates anything that gets in the way of what, for her, is natural and pleasurable.)

She has to force herself to see the golden light arriving in leaves from a hidden source and then rebounding in the same stroke, bypassing distance straight to the eye (interval too fast for the human brain to catch it): glowing, golden and without clear definition.

“Yesterday”, walking on AAF Street (one of two neighborhood North-South commercial streets), Monica is stopped by a woman she doesn’t remember at all, but who remembers her well and (for what reason?) wants to remind Monica who she is and introduce her to her two clumsy daughters. It matters to her that Monica — even if she has to be told what to remember — recognize her as “Leonora Blume’s daughter-in-law”. Therefore these are Leonora Blume’s grand-daughters! Monica remarks on the obvious resemblance between the older of the two granddaughters and Leonora Blume, but doesn’t say what an unlucky thing that is for the girl, whose face and body are just as lumpen as her grandmother’s and still have time to flower into an ugliness as rare as beauty. Monica hasn’t thought of Leonora Blume — hasn’t heard the name “Leonora Blume” — for a long time, probably not since she died (“about one year ago”) and hearing it again conjures up a constellation of unpleasant memories. What she remembers most is the effort of avoiding Leonora Blume when Leonora Blume was a tenant in the same house and after that the always-revolting shock of running into her unexpectedly as if Leonora Blume had been waiting for her in a dark turn of the stairwell or in a blind spot of the downstairs hallway, toward the back, near the door leading to the basement. Monica can see her now not-quite-exactly as then: white and stout in her burgundy-violet velvet dress, cockatoo mane of red-in-black-in-red hair, flesh a waxy rouge-white dough randomly sprouting with hairs, eyes somewhat bulging, face expressionless or deadened by medication. Voice is hard to remember and what she had to say even more so. Not talking but wanting to talk? Always just to the side of some point? Frightening remnant of what exactly. . . ?

While Monica is trying to figure out why Leonora Blume’s daughter-in-law seems so tense, the daughter-in-law is reminding Monica (for the second time?) that Leonora Blume died exactly one year ago and wonders if Monica knew that, among other things, her mother-in-law suffered from extreme high blood pressure. Was her blood pressure a significant factor in what killed her? A significant factor in her behavior? There are long stories to tell about Leonora Blume that might or might not explain everything, but the daughter-in-law doesn’t know them or is too anxious to tell them.

Notes say that the light shining off leaves (nothing golden arriving in them) is now “the last light of the day”.

“On the night of April 23” (hour not noted) Monica is trying to sleep, but can’t because a) swollen gland at right side of throat and jaw is still painfully sensitive to pressure; b) terrible head cold stubbornly persists; c) room is unnaturally over-heated (residual warmth of used-up light?); d) noise from apartment below. Of course a) is related to b) and a) and b) make Monica sensitive to c) and d) and in that sense a), b), c) and d) fuse into one sensation that keeps her from sleeping and muffles the world: what’s near is far away, what’s far-away oddly penetrating. For example: thumping vibration of Artie Tilden’s record player (type of music not noted) is Monica’s most vivid sensation of being alive. Arguing voices arrive with rattling vibration and bass thumping: what started as coherent music has had its melodic and harmonic elements filtered out by the dense weave of old wood. Artie Tilden, always as sour and peevish as an older man so defeated by age and failure he’s beginning to lose his pleasure in complaining, is clearly the male voice crabbing, louder than the young woman’s voice, girlish but angry, both sharply audible against the usual blended aggregate of surging male laughter that may not be as dumb as it sounds, a solitary cry occasionally detaching from the pack as an individual voice speaking a human sentence.

David slips into the hall to listen to the voices that are more distinct and articulate in the stairwell than they are through the floorboards and in the walls (despite all their cracked and porous zones and channels) and returns to report to Monica that Artie Tilden’s girlfriend, Anne Marie, is angry at Artie and his friends. Anne Marie and Artie finally got engaged (on the very same day that Kitty and Hap (Happy) Huntington Blank got married!) and now Artie Tilden’s friends are making fun of the whole idea of marriage and engagement. They’re saying that an engaged Artie Tilden is no longer really Artie Tilden and they can’t believe that any friend of theirs would let himself be led around by the nose by a stupid eighteen-year-old girl with her stupid eighteen-year-old ideas about marriage and engagement. “Can you believe that it was really ‘Artie Tilden’ who went shopping for an engagement ring for this little girl?” one of them says. “No, I can’t picture it,” another one says. “It couldn’t have been our Artie Tilden.” And they all go off on that. Anne Marie’s trying to defend herself, but Artie’s quiet. She’d rather be eighteen and conventional and still have her dreams and ideals than stunted and going on thirty and just as bored and stupid as they were when they were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or twenty. What they don’t know, David thinks she says, is that Artie secretly thinks they’re boring and stunted too: can’t wait to get away from them and start living “like a real person”.

Alyosha remembers (and is able to give Monica thumbnail summaries of) three dreams he’s had while he’s been in the hospital. Most of the details have faded (begin fading while you’re dreaming?), but one odd thing stays with him: all three dreams (which he’s pretty sure he did not have on the same night, one after the other or as scenes in the same dream, but at different times during his stay) took place in the house in Brooklyn where he lived forty years ago, when he was between thirteen and sixteen, definitely no more, probably no less. Every time he began to drift off and his eyes would close he found himself there. His waking time in the hospital, eyes open in daylight, was one thing and his sleeping and half-sleeping time something else altogether. He wants Monica to help him figure out why he spent all his sleeping time and dream time in that house. Why not some other house? Why not some other time in his life? And, if there’s an unhappy mood while you’re in your dream and in that house, why are you even sadder when you wake up and you’re not there. . . ?

Let’s see: in one dream he’s alone in the house with his mother and he’s happy to be under the kitchen sink, fixing a leaky pipe for her. The second dream makes no sense to him. There’s a vampire in it: a complete stranger who doesn’t remind him of anyone he’s ever known. And yet this strange man is able to get very close to him. He’s so close he almost has a smell. And he’s got his lips right up against his (Alyosha’s) chest, about to take a bite — but he doesn’t remember the feeling of the bite ever happening. . . . In the third dream (the truth is that he has no idea what order they come in or — for all he knows — they were like movies showing at the same time on different screens) he was living on the fourth (top) floor of the same house in Brooklyn, sharing a small apartment with his good friend, who never had any name but his nickname, “Sam the Goof”. He remembers looking at “Sam the Goof” and really being surprised and saying “how come you look so young? All these years have gone by and you haven’t changed! I’ve changed — I’m getting older — but you’re not! What is it? What’s the secret? Is the secret being goofy?” He got so upset that it woke him up.

Finnley Lenehan passes and stops to report to Monica that Donald Crosley (who for some reason sometimes calls himself “Alan Ryder”) was caught “having sex” (no one explained to him exactly what that means) with a guy named Lenny — not from ABC Street and not exactly Donald’s (or Alan’s) age — who lives in the neighborhood and works in one of the pizza parlors on AAF Street, so Monica might know him — probably in his twenties, but still hangs out on the beach. Thinks (not sure) Alan (or Donald) and Lenny were caught by Lenny’s snoopy landlady because of all the noise they were making. (No surprise, both of them being cacklers and screamers even when they’re supposedly having a normal conversation, if Monica knows what he means. . . . ) And he thinks Mr. Crosley pretty much grabbed “Alan” or Donald by his mop handle and beat the shit out of him and now they’ve got him “in therapy”, whatever that means, and he’s not even sure if Donald (Alan) is still living with the Crosleys or if they sent him away somewhere to get re-wired.

The lilacs in Monica’s green room studio and along Salem Avenue are at this instant (date not noted) as fragrant as they are when they’re in full flower and the larger, more spherically visible their rose-purple, lavender-pink, chlorophyll green (green plus, green times, green divided by, green root of lavender, rose, purple, etc. in all possible combinations) the more their complex scent travels through the neighborhood along pulsing horizontal breezes that shred and drift up to Monica’s and every other second floor and attic window for a mile or a mile-and-a-half — from AAH or AAI Street all the way west to ADD Street and beyond — into the open green of public parkland.

Not noted who calls Monica to let her know that Kitty’s car broke down again, this time a little closer to home.

Monica’s notes say that she caught sight of Nicole Renard “earlier” in a car (whose not noted) with Babette Coffin, passing slowly south <— down ABC Street toward the ocean end of the block, but notes don’t say where or how Monica and Nicole meet and talk for a few minutes and Nicole Renard’s stories don’t get told as they usually do. Notes only record that Nicole hints that she has all kinds of things to tell Monica and wishes they could figure out a way to get together so she can tell them. She only has time to tell Monica this: all the children — Jojo, Joshua and little Rosamond — are upstate somewhere (thinks someone said that it’s “a farm near Lexington, New York”, in the mountains a little west of the Hudson) with Greg, Andy, Grete and Lena: a nice vacation for the kids, but Greg and Andy have a gig up there (with or without the rest of the band she’s not sure) and they only get to stay in the farmhouse in exchange for painting a tremendous, run-down old barn. . . .

Now that the ABC Street forsythias are green-and-nothing-but-green their green looks different than when it was a background color and the forsythias look just-born and shiny, a different plant altogether.

It’s not spelled out clearly in Monica’s notes what Riley Liman (younger and slighter than older, blond brother Tommy, his fine, milk-chocolate hair combed in a straight, flossy diagonal across his forehead and always-beautifully-tanned skin making him look un-related to any other Liman) is doing on the porch with her: that is, not all the children of ABC Street, but only a certain set stop from time to time in their horizontal South <—> North running, roller-skating, skipping, bicycling paths to take a break on Monica’s porch and share their broken bits of tales that are sometimes complete and factual little stories, sometimes something else, beautiful or senseless as the coded strings of notes of birds that land on the droopy telephone lines over the driveway. There are other ABC Street children she doesn’t think of as a group, certainly not a set, that have never interested her and that seem to have no interest in her either and therefore remain part of the loosely brushed-in background of whatever continues to define itself for Monica as ABC Street’s foreground.

Riley Liman tells no story or story-fragment that Monica records: may be about to tell her something when he thinks he hears a voice calling “Ri-leee!” from a short diagonal across the way, somewhere within the green-and-white sphere of the Regans’ handsome three story shingle (white with green shutters), uncluttered green lawn and splendid old elm: voice could also be coming from the space between the Regans’ and the Arlington sisters’ boring pseudo-modern two family whose only interesting feature is the side (north-facing) picture window in the Rosenwassers’ upstairs apartment.

Riley goes to the head of the stairs to look, but sees no one: nothing but one blinding white surface next to and/or on top of another: hard to even look there. . . !

Let’s see: white (unmarked) truck in the Regans’ driveway (space between Regans and Arlingtons), a tall enough cube to block at least one half of the Rosenwassers’ picture window.

In what’s visible of the Rosenwassers’ picture window above the blinding white truck-cube swimming of white shirt sleeves and white shirt bodies is dazzling to a degree that doesn’t make sense.

White of the shingle of the Regans’ handsome three story house is relatively mild and absorbent.

Puffed-up white clouds over the Regans’ house even milder than white of the Regans’ house and probably more absorbent — with only an oddly burning edge here and there that’s impossible to look at.

What else?

“A little later”, after Riley’s continued north, the white truck is gone from the Regans’ driveway without Monica having seen or heard it go.

This too, but only when Monica gets out of her porch rocker, stands up and changes her angle (it doesn’t take much to alter our relationship to the local universe): a chalky white picket fence is visible in a ghostly way through the white shirts treading water in the Rosenwassers’ picture window, as if separating one interior shadow zone from another: here and there interior darkness seems to gather and get darker and more velvety, as if the Rosenwassers’ furniture is taking this quiet little eternity to think deeply about its problems.

Something else?

Whiteness of the Regans’ front (porch) door is apparent to Monica now only because the light at this hour (and her exact angle in relation to the Regans’) seems to have coated the door with a slightly tacky plastic, something milky in the light that sticks to it.

“Out of order”: now Monica can see little Matthew Regan on his tricycle, rolling and dinging back and forth in a toy-like way within a tiny loop in front of the Regans’: and she wonders: is it possible that the voice calling “Ri-leee!” earlier from some blind slot in the green-and-white space around the Regans’ belonged to little Matthew Regan? Is that possible? a) Monica would have to hear little forsythia-yellow-haired Matthew’s voice call out again to know for sure and b) she has to make an adjustment and allow her mind to drift across the way and look at her side (the east side) of ABC Street as the local universe that’s been forming for Matthew Regan, rolling back and forth — first in a handsome dark cyan blue carriage with shiny chrome hardware, now on his dinging, toy-like tricycle (color not noted).

On what late April day exactly does Pat Corcoran tell Monica that she’s a super’s daughter? The sentences may not be word-for-word in Monica’s notes, but the sense of what Pat says is something like: “I’m a super’s daughter: I grew up surrounded by garbage — so I’m as comfortable around garbage as I am walking barefoot on burning pavement or burning sand.”

The day Alyosha returns from the hospital (a Friday) is described in Monica’s notes as a spring day, while Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday are all called “wintry”, Monday the worst of all. “On Monday”, as Monica is getting ready to leave for a meeting in Manhattan of the “Participation Project Foundation” (an association of dancers, musicians, conceptual, environmental, site-specific, performance and mixed-media artists who in one way or another see audience participation as an essential feature of their work, Monica and David the only members who are writers, largely (but not solely) because of their SPACE NOVELS), Monica tries to quickly chronicle the state of her stubborn cold. Notes that, while it may have reluctantly begun to fade away, the bitter winter hidden in this day is bringing it back to life in a different form.

She feels too weak to travel to Manhattan, yet insists on going and gets ready quickly: first on foot along the cold length of seven avenue blocks and short sections of two cross-streets from ABC Street to AAF Street, then by bus to Woodside, Queens (swinging, tipping, short-stopping, fuming of large volume and weight of body of bus against the action of the tires, which seem to have other ideas about how to get where they’re going, makes Monica sick to her stomach), then on to the connecting subway link (what line?) to Manhattan. Already can’t explain to herself why it seemed important to go to the meeting.

Later (in November?), when it’s time to type her April notes, or looking them over a few days after writing them to see if she left anything out and needs to fill in a detail, Monica sees how scattered her notes are about the night of the meeting: sentences and parts of sentences sprinkled through other April notes, intruding into/intruded on by other events as Monica hurries to sketch them in before they empty out into conventional memory or their color is heightened a little too much by imagination.

Can’t record anything at the meeting and in no shape to get anything down when she’s made it home and can’t wait to get under the covers on a cold and unheated night in her attic apartment. Therefore: experience of the meeting and of the trip to Manhattan comes back coded and condensed for days, competing with the urgency of fresh experience for the region of the mind where the Chronicle is always scrolling.

Out of order.

In its own natural order.

Re-ordered according to principles someone (not Monica) could sift from the Chronicle as a guide to an odd fiction drawn directly from life.

Let’s see: cold enough this April night for Monica to already be wearing her enormous hand-me-down bruiny brown mouton (from which aunt not noted). Bus is heated yet she can’t warm up. Cold because she’s exhausted and the other way around.

Notes say something about traveling by bus across Manhattan and then “down Fifth Avenue” to Twenty-sixth Street. On foot at Fifth and Twenty-sixth and then standing chilled at the corner of Fifth and Twenty-third “at 7:30”: notes (written when?) say that winter in April leaves Monica chilled on the ground (pavement in shadow) while the building tops are glowing warmly over Madison Square Park’s shaded green mass. While standing chilled on the sidewalk at Fifth and Twenty-third or later in the week, quickly dashing down the most vivid flashes of experience as they come back to her, or later still, while typing her notes, Monica debates whether or not the glow of the building-tops is a New York glow — what we think of as “New York light”, which, in general, is a form of Dutch light (light of Dutch interiors furnishing the out-of-doors). On the other hand, Dutch light can’t be the only New York light because here she is in Manhattan and she’s struck — not for the first time — by a light that is in no way the light of Vermeer, Rembrandt, etc.: not an inside-out Dutch interior deep in mahogany shoe leather and sticky licorice varnish, but warm and red-gold, both sunlit and candle lit: the well-worn (and well known) sienna, burnt-sienna, umber and burnt-umber afternoon glow of Umbrian light on Umbrian stone.

Monica’s notes also say (without giving any reason or background) that Monica and David walk down Fifth Avenue to Fifteenth Street with the thought of stopping on the way to the PPF meeting to say hello to Nicole Renard. Looking carefully through pages of notes (hard to disentangle digressions from main threads) and underlining any sentence that seems related to the night of the meeting, Monica underscores a line that says that Nicole Renard isn’t home and that they have to walk back up Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street to look for the apartment of “Jonathan Atkin” (the PPF member — completely unknown to Monica and David — hosting the meeting). Another sentence underscored on another page in the midst of other events talks about Monica’s growing exhaustion, but again explains nothing about the decision to walk so far out of their way to say hello to Nicole Renard on their way to the meeting. This too: from Fifth Avenue they walk toward Seventh Avenue before realizing that “Jonathan Atkin” lives on East Twenty-third: they’d walked west instead of east and therefore have to retrace their steps to Fifth, then continue how far east not noted.

Monica begins to feel stomach pains at the foot of Jonathan Atkin’s stairs. Seems to Monica (then or later?) that there’s a relationship between her sudden stomach pain and the energy used traveling, walking and trying not to feel ill (self’s exhaustion from trying to trick itself into believing the decision to drag itself into Manhattan for this meeting wasn’t an idiotic one). Knowledge of the stupidity of our own actions generally leaves the body, gathers and tightens itself somewhere not too far way and rebounds back into the body as a painful knot or fatal contraction — in this case a small but terrible ache near her bellybutton.

They climb the steep stairs and are greeted (whether by name or not not noted) with exaggerated shock by “Jonathan Atkin”: can’t believe that anyone came up the stairs! no one ever uses the stairs! Everyone else used the elevator!: stairs are only there because the city requires them to be there as what’s the right term for it? a "fail safe”. Is that it? Why doesn’t that sound right to him? In any case, the door to the stairs is supposed to be padlocked and he wonders who could have left it open. On and on in that vein, drawing attention to their late arrival, Monica’s exhaustion, the oddity and stupidity of their having come up by way of the stairs, etc.

It’s not clear whether it’s before or after finding a soft floor-mattress to sink into with others already sunk there reclining or sitting and talking that Monica is able to gather herself sufficiently to take in the fact that Jonathan Atkin’s apartment is a loft similar to the downtown lofts she’s familiar with, possibly a little less square, a little longer than most: a long, clean space that manages to be colorful yet strikingly neat — and she wonders then or later if she’s unfairly contrasting it with Nelson Howe’s and Linda’s mess. For example: dirty dishes piled up in sink, on counter, etc. there, not one dirty dish anywhere here. Monica makes a note to herself that a mess can easily be misinterpreted. Piles of dirty dishes can be a good or a bad sign and absence of dirty dishes as well. (This too: as we step quickly through the puddles in other people’s lives, the mind amuses itself with judgments and observations that are only useful if they fall into place in the never-ending scrolling panorama that requires a special kind of attention.)

Sitting on the soft mattress Monica can hear David, who’s next to her, beginning to get into conversations as if he were at a party, while only a struggle is keeping her from sliding into unconsciousness.

Later (in the isolation of the car (whose car not noted)), heading home, Monica is able to allow herself to feel sick and she finds that in itself a relief. Can it be true (Monica wonders) that illness has to be allowed to express itself like an emotion? That illness (swallowed or suppressed) becomes more serious illness? It’s an odd idea and not thought through while riding home in the back seat of the car, but her exhausted logic seems beautiful to her and she tries to see how her theory arose out of her day. Compelled to feel ill in public (on buses and subways, in the street and among near-strangers for eight hours or more) her illness had to crouch in a corner and hide its face: crouched and kneeling and compressed there, knee or knuckle pressing against the inside of the bellybutton, what started as the remnant of a terrible cold, closeted and ignored, started to become something else. . . .

Body beginning to relax against the back seat’s resistant cushions might feel pleasant if the cushions didn’t also feel like the slope along which the mind is slipping dizzily into unconsciousness. Later she realizes — and notes in a fast scribble — that she has no memories between her long sequence of thoughts about illness and the instant of waking up suddenly in her bed with terrible stomach pain and no idea where she’s been. The terror of having lost time (can a little knot of pain be holding it?) doesn’t begin to subside until David shows her on the clock that it’s only 3:30: therefore she was able to slip through a full day’s oblivion in one, two or three hours at most.

On an undated day in late April (one or two days after the PPF meeting?), when the blue-in-blue of the sky has (ranged side-by-side and stacked and layered as if filed on shelves) huge steel-wool clouds, bright-edged white clouds (a drizzle of syrupy gold at the bottom of them), dark rays scraping through as bright daylight that might be a broad, blinding plane of sunlight if not diffused through clouds.

Less April-as-April than July-in-April or even February-in April.

A little later and out of order Monica adds: not just white and steel-wool clouds, but blues and other blues against them and blues that become other blues because they’re within blues and all of it sculpting itself as it goes along, rapidly shifting and sliding-through in a wispy way as always.

Shifting and deep interior darkening and bluing of cloud ranges parts and there it is: a glowing mountain valley of pure April-as-April: sun “at last”. Falling on earth true April sun seems to instantly wash dull lawn-mounds and dry garden plots with the eternal green light of first grass (again “at last”?).

On the same undated April day and in this light Greg-Coffin's-and-Andy-Forest's band is practicing in the ground floor “ping-pong” room next door, not (as usual) in Babette’s open garage.

Same day or another: Andy and Nadja (no last name ever known by Monica) are there on ABC Street without anyone having seen them arrive: here they are one day in late April sunlight, deeply tanned and happy in a purely physical way — as if the psychological plane of existence has been scorched away by long days on beaches all over the world — not like anyone else on ABC Street Monica can think of. Someone (most likely Wanda Baer) already knows and reports to Monica that after their long stay in Spain Andy and Nadja decided to visit France: length of visit and exact location not reported by (not reported to?) Wanda Baer, but Monica is certain that more detailed information will flow in later. Andy for sure, and probably the easy-going (lazy?) Nadja too, won’t think twice about tormenting their ABC-Street-bound friends from the block’s two outposts of the Coffin/Forest galaxy with tales of their sensuous sojourn in France and Spain.

Notes talk about lilacs, but say nothing about their stage of development (how much cream stirred into their blackberry darkness, for example) on this undated day — only that they’ll arrive at their full, blossoming fragrance “on May 3”. Notes also go backward to paint in (out of order) the special green — externally vibrant and internally glowing, more mineral than vegetable — and the equally electric (but not internally glowing) not-quite-amethyst of the clustered banks of azaleas blooming along the bus route through Queens to Manhattan on the way to the PPF meeting at Jonathan Atkin’s.

A sign that she’s beginning to feel better? Monica notes that the fragrance of cigarette smoke is pleasant with a cup of tea.

The tea-like aroma of unsmoked cigarette tobacco.

Monica takes notes while David reports to her (for the Chronicle) about a telephone conversation he just had with Mikki. Says that he knows he had a reason for calling, but can’t remember what it was: reason may have gone out of his mind when Mikki answered with her mouth full and kept munching noisily while she talked. Munching as if she wanted him to hear her munching and ask about it — so he did. He could tell that Mikki was eager to tell him (using the cute-and-happy child-voice she uses when she wants to make sure you know she’s happy if you’ve missed all other signals) that she and Margo are sharing a delicious salad and that Frederique is there too! — not eating, just didn’t feel like being alone in her apartment while she tried to put together the next issue of Downtown Woman. So she came over and buried herself in paper in a corner the whole time she and Margo were making the salad and now, still, the whole time they’re eating the salad — and missed all the fun of eating out of the same big salad bowl together! What’s in the salad exactly? Let’s see: Boston lettuce and walnuts and tomatoes — David thinks he hears Margo chime in brightly, with meant-to-be-heard (by Frederique?) over-excitement: “oh! and scallions! and blue cheese! avocados? didn’t we put in avocados too?”. And then Mikki adds “cider vinegar and safflower oil”, but thinks they’ve left something out.

While they’re talking (and Mikki continues to disgust David by talking with a mouthful of salad, acting out munching to broadcast pleasure) Mikki reports that Frederique’s pushed away her papers, but still won’t eat! Won’t eat because the idea of eating salad from the same bowl (“the same trough”) she and Margo are eating from revolts her: stopped working only because she has a migraine and needs to lie down in Mikki’s bed.

Frederique’s headache reminds Monica that her own head still aches (therefore she’s not completely well) and every once in a while there’s a sharp pain in her stomach. She finds herself wondering also if there’s more to Frederique’s revulsion than the simple fact that Mikki and Margo are putting forks and fingers into the same bowl. Frederique seems to find something about Mikki when she’s around Margo disgusting in a larger sense. Can’t quite put a finger on it without a few hours alone with pen and paper, but remembers clearly that she’s said to herself more than once that when Mikki spends too much time in Margo’s company she becomes a different, nauseating Mikki: weak, eager-to-please, almost fawning, without self-respect, needy, doggy even — longing for something (what?, for heaven’s sake) from that unresponsive turnip. May be a whole class of people (Frederique reasons) who spend their lives longing for love from unresponsive turnips, but to see someone like Mikki doing it — turning into infantile mush because of it —is so disappointing it makes her ill.

Out of order and detached from what conversation?

Someone says: “it’s chilly — it’s almost wintry — today and I don’t like it! If this were the beginning of winter — if I knew for a fact that winter was coming — I don’t know what I’d do with myself! But, because I know that spring and summer are coming, I can live through just about anything. . . .”

It seems to Monica that the voice she hears saying these words is Pat Corcoran’s fast and slippery one and wonders if it was part of the conversation when Pat said that she’s “good with garbage” or “used to garbage” because she’s “a super’s daughter”.

On what undated day toward the end of April does Monica see and record these things:

A small cloud of lilacs (not “lilac” at all, but oddly darkened just by being removed from outdoor light and whatever gets absorbed from it) in Monica’s smoky Czechoslovakian crystal vase on the dark, scuffed wood of her enormous breakfast table/desk.

Billows of white clouds that can’t stop billowing out of themselves, like sails that sail away from their sailboats which nevertheless keep sailing under fresh white sails.

Sails and clouds bring their own billowing blue sky sailing with them.

Billowing blue and billowing white are seen directly through the small panes of the green room’s west-facing casement windows and at the same time as reflections in the Rosenwassers’ picture window.

Notes also say something about “an empty clothesline”, but Monica (rereading or typing later?) can’t understand how a clothesline with no clothing on it could possibly be visible in the midst of sky reflections, cloud reflections, light reflections, ghostly bulk of interior objects, etc. from across the way and through windows at a steep 45^o angle NE of it, then sees that the Chronicle later comments that the reflected clothesline and everything that happens on it are only visible from her porch and even then only from certain precise locations and angles. Therefore: the note about the empty clothesline had to have been inserted into her notes later and “out of order”: trying to get it all down (as always) before it keeps rotating out of view.

What else on the same undated late April day? Mind can’t tell the scent of lilacs and the color of lilacs apart: approaches the small cloud of lilacs inside the green room windows and could be chewing and tasting a lilac candy wafer or could be atomized with atoms of lilac in the light over the enormous oak desk. No sense is able to keep from crossing and confusing itself with another along an X or ∗ of scent/taste/vision/breathing/thinking and what else?

One more thing: Monica notes that David changes the flowers in her Czechoslovakian crystal vase every two or three weeks: and that during the month of April there have been forsythias, apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, dogwood, un-identified wildflowers and now, near May 3, Monica’s favorite lilacs.

It’s not clear on what day (same un-dated day or a different one) that Lou, the rolypoly mailman, delivers a letter from Martin Tucker of Confrontation.

“Dear Monica and David:

“You’ll simply have to forgive me for the long, long delay. The problem has been that a number of the editors really like your piece (including me), and some demurrals — but there is also the real problem of space. We’re heavily overcommitted both to prose and poetry. What I’d like to do is accept, conditionally that is, “How the Vacation Begins”. That is, I will authorize payment for the story and hopefully we will print it within a year. (The Spring/Summer 1976 issue is coming off the press this week.) If we do not publish it for reasons of space by the time our Spring/Summer 1977 issue comes out, then you will have the option of withdrawing it and publishing it elsewhere. Of course, you can leave it with us until we have the space to print it.

“I hope all of this may be unnecessary and that we can print it in our next issue, or the one immediately following that one. But it is only fair to let you know the situation.

“Please let me know how you feel about this.

“With best wishes, sincerely, Martin Tucker.”

Not noted what Monica and David decide to do.

On what day: clouds covering the sun are as blue as the sky when the moon is out. And some of these longer wavelengths — these delphinium and ultramarine moon-or-sun-in-cloud rays — fall precisely on a strolling woman’s royal blue raincoat and nowhere else, refreshing its blue by adding a dark stroke or a thin, bright wash of another blue to its blue. Nothing else about the woman has even the tiniest dash of blue except possibly in her purple canvas tote bag where, on the chemical level, blue and red are bound together. Let’s see: depending on whether the woman is passing through sun, shadow or an inseparable tangle of sun and shadow her hair is a flaming red or fiery orange or red flaming through orange (Monica would love to, but can’t, take the time to research and name the chemicals that make up the dyes staining the woman’s wild mass of head-hair); synthetic, too-green lime green slack set (slacks and matching jacket) with big white (pure white or “off” white?) polka dots; purple (again, exactly what shade of purple would take too long to research and name) tote bag in left hand; brilliantly reflective black vinyl “leaf pocket book” (Monica’s not sure later if her handwritten notes say shaped like a leaf (what kind of leaf?) or that ugly leaf decals in a bright, contrasting color are glued to the cheap black vinyl) in right hand.

So many things she needs to know and no time to find out about them all: names of colors as they occur in nature, names of natural and synthetic oil pigments, history and chemistry of dyes, physics of color, of vision, etc., and something comparable for the other senses. These are not small things to Monica, but she’s not sure there’s any way to balance the unhurried pleasure of writing, the near-impossibility of trying to get down everything that interests the Chronicle and the imperative of finding language that’s both fresh and true for physical detail.

World always finds ways to express its existence: through color, smell, noise (voice of a child across the way, for example). Notes say that the child’s name is “Christopher” (though Monica isn’t sure when typing who that is) and that “Christopher” is calling “Eddy! — Ed-deee! —Ehh-deeee!!” over and-over. Child he’s calling must be the infant further north on ABC Street, contentedly in his stroller, dressed in bright cardinal red from head to toe and sucking milk from his bottle.

“A little later” Monica can make out Joan Regan’s voice and can locate it in the Regans’ driveway, but can’t make out what she’s saying or if she’s calling “Christopher” or “Eddy”.

Same day, another day or still a different day from “another day” Monica is overjoyed to rediscover tulips. She only notes that they’re here and that their arrival fully-popped with perfect form — colorful, childish, drawn with crayon — is always a surprise and a perfectly simple pleasure at this time of year. She considers it her time of year and it’s populated by her favorite flowers: tulips, lilacs, dogwood, cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, azaleas — and of course the new green that washes behind them all.

To be born in May is to be born into a fragrant world, but not an overly-perfumed one: fragrances of flowers are, in general, still fresh and light, dispersed and thinned by April —> May breezes and are atomized along with green aromas sprayed out for the first time from mower blades.

David interrupts Monica’s chronicling (not noted, but she seems to be writing outdoors) because he’s been reading a softbound book (taken out and renewed so often from the local library it might as well be his own) titled Cubism and written, with thoughtful, reasonably cliché-free language, by an art critic named Paul Waldo Schwartz, a volume in Praeger’s “World of Art Paperbacks” series. The book has started to become one of David’s many long-term companions in writing-and-thinking (pushing aside other books that had pre-occupied him for a while) and, because of it, he and Monica are having their first encounters with Apollinaire’s Calligrammes and Alcools, with Blaise Cendrars, etc. He’s too excited to keep what he’s reading to himself: just now, for example, he’s read a tiny poem by Cendrars called “Je Nage” and has to read it to Monica:

                                   “Je plonge je nage je fais la planche

                                   “Je n’ecris plus

                                   “Il fait bon vivre.”

Schwartz’s translation (“I dive I swim I float

                                   I no longer write

                                   That’s the life.”)

                                                           is hard to improve on, so Monica transcribes French and English versions into the note she was taking when David interrupted her. She also notes that Schwartz says that Cendrars wrote the poem after swimming in a pool on board an ocean liner and he adds that the act of writing the poem is meant to be an ambiguous contradiction of what it seems to propose. He notes also that “it seems hardly likely that any Cubist parallel occurred to Cendrars”, but Schwartz suggests some similarity in thinking to Cubist still lifes with double or ambiguously contradictory images yoked together. Monica and David like the fact that he speaks of a “cubist intelligence” in the air rather than a Cubist “style” or “method” and they feel an exhilarating kinship with this quote from Reverdy: “I write in order to live —that is to say, in order to create myself”.

At the end of April it’s clear to Monica that the terrible winter of ’76 lingers only in people. Human damage and deterioration is visible, while nature refreshes itself all around them. (No memory in nature.)

For example: “a few months ago” Dominick Ianni’s open red and green gardening truck was parked in front of the Greengrasses’ tight little brick fortress: in Monica’s notes the truck blocks Monica’s view of the gardeners working inside the Greengrasses’ low brick and cast iron fence and the whole local sound universe is threshed up by Dominick Ianni’s power mowers and trimmers, while the aroma of earth, grass and water (water in and through cut grass, water mixed with earth) is released and exploded in the atmosphere of ABC Street. Continues to flavor the day even after the truck is gone and Sylvia and Leslie Greengrass pull up. A man is in the car with them, but it isn’t Enos. (Monica hasn’t seen Enos since he was taken away by ambulance at the beginning of April.)

It may or may not be on the same day at the end of April that Agnes (sometimes, in other situations, called “Gloria”) passes, walking quickly, as usual, in her pencil heels and tight pink uniform. Even from across the way (is visibility down at street level particularly good?) Monica can see that Agnes/Gloria looks lousy: she’s lost weight, her body isn’t as voluptuous as it once was and her face seems almost as bony as her husband, the Clock’s, whose face is disfigured and may have some bone showing. Agnes/Gloria’s face is not only bony, but exhausted and it seems to Monica that her exhaustion is the particular exhaustion of anxiety. The Chronicle notes that Monica can’t remember what Agnes/Gloria’s “real” name is, thinks it might be “Joan”, but still feels that “Joan” doesn’t match the woman she sees and that either “Agnes” or “Gloria” are more real than the name Agnes/Gloria’s parents gave her.

Is it Pat Corcoran herself who tells Monica that she spent the day (same end-of-April day or a different one?) on the beach drinking Pepsi after Pepsi with ice? Could also be Allison Meehan, the Corcorans’ live-in niece, who, unlike everyone else Monica’s seen today, looks good, untroubled, even happy talking to Monica about driving out to Gimbels to get herself the beautiful ice blue bicycle that’s on sale for $150.

Notes also say that Monica’s happy to see cousin Linda (healthy again?) and Linda’s pretty blonde friend “Lisa” wave as they roll by slowly in Lisa’s white Fiat convertible. Later (in November?), while translating her hurried notes into typewriter, Monica wonders how she knows that the convertible belongs to “Lisa”, how she knows Lisa’s name, when or if she’s spoken to Lisa, etc.

Now Monica can see that it can’t be the same end-of-April day as the day Dominick Ianni is mowing the Greengrasses’ fenced-in front lawn squares because notes say “the smell of the air on ABC Street is different today” and talk about a smell that = cool breezes in hot sun: that is, cool ocean breezes that pick up the scent of flowers as they pass through hot sun: a fragrant world with a sense of watery movement in the air. This must be the day that Pat Corcoran spends on the beach, etc.

Un-named children carry the feeling of the beach with them, eating chocolate-covered chocolate ice cream pops as they pass.

Monica notes that she sees beautiful Martina (Tina) Lima sitting on her grandma Babette’s lap, as if she were even younger than she is, but doesn’t note where Babette and Tina are or how she happens to see them.

What else?

A child (also un-named) is throwing a ball in the gutter. Stands in the middle of the gutter and keeps throwing the ball straight up with tremendous effort and with a senseless cry of exertion. Heaves the ball up as far as possible and stares after it for a long time while screaming.

Notes say something about “sitting in Dr. X’s ancient dentist chair on Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn last night”. Trees are moving in sunlight on the way there and by the time the dentist is finishing his work Monica sees a star in the black sky through his venetians.

The eternal horizontal continues going by in the eternal present tense.

MAY 1976

May begins with rain and lilacs: May 1 a window looking out on nothing but rain and with rain altering the view through its glass. Even the two swollen cloud-clusters of lilacs David’s put on Monica’s green room desk/breakfast table carry drops of rain indoors with them.

Notes also say that May 1 may be called “May 1”, but it’s really a day in March: wind spends the day rattling Monica’s old casement and dormer windows and is wild enough to tear off fresh cherry blossoms and blow them this way and that way across the thin green lawns of ABC Street.

Blond-blond Timothy Corcoran joins Monica on the porch to tell her that his uncle Jim is coming out on the weekend: he’s big and he’s fat and he lives all the way up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan and his Mom says that it’s too much trouble for him to get out here himself, so either his Dad or Philip will have to drive up there to get him. And he thinks that that’s pretty much why they hardly ever see him.

Still May 1?

Monica and David are on AAF Street (hour not noted): rain’s given them the foolish idea that it’s a good time to go to the laundromat (the one on the beach block of AAF Street — as dismal as the rest, but only a few steps from boardwalk, beach and ocean: even though, on a day like this, AAF Street, boardwalk, beach, even the ocean are as dismal as any laundromat anywhere). Must be late afternoon or early evening because Monica’s notes say that they’re the only ones in the laundromat and that the old man who looks after the place has already locked the front door. Notes don’t say whether it’s light out or dark, but they do say that someone is rapping furiously on the locked glass door. Fury of expression of the thirty-forty-year-old man knocking pretzels age and time in his face. Knocking grows more furious the longer it takes to get the old man’s attention. Filthy old army jacket and coarse and filthy old army pants of someone who’s often too drunk to stand, so that pants and jacket roll themselves up like a bedroll with the man inside as best they can for one, two, three or more nights in the deepest doorway they can find somewhere not too far from the boardwalk and AAF Street, where there’s at least a public toilet to use. Despite the thirty/fortyish man’s obvious fury the old man shuffles over and opens the door so the furious man can punch him in the face. Actual violence to real, living flesh where we can see, hear and smell it comes with the shock of a super-reality we feel as unreal. A half-second’s paralyzing surprise can be fatal, but Monica and David recover in time to keep the younger man from beating the older man to death. Fury does not turn on them. Monica finds that odd: has to mean that the furious man’s violence really was intentional and focused on the old man, that there’s some reason for it. . . . His breath stinks of yesterday’s alcohol and everything else about him stinks too. Eyes are blind except when they focus on the old man curled up on the linoleum that’s not too filthy because the old man’s just swept it. What the furious man is screaming is perfectly clear: he knows that the dirty old bastard’s done something to his boys! Are they hidden here somewhere or did he throw them out in the rain?! He left them here and now he can’t find them! Where are they?!! Dirty old bastard knows where they are! etc. etc.

Handwritten notes don’t make it clear how Monica and David manage to get the furious man to leave, but they do say that before they can get him out the door he tries to attack the old man again. “You’re dead! You’re a dead man! You don’t know it, but you’re already in your grave. . . !”

After he’s gone the old man says he’s not worried. Drunken loonies wander in off AAF Street every day. He’s pretty sure he’s seen this guy on the street before, but he was never in here today and neither were any boys. Guy could’ve dumped them off somewhere before he got drunk and now he hasn’t got a clue what he did with them. . . or it could also be that he’s got no “boys”. . . .

Old man wants to know: “what’s the stupidest thing that any human being on Earth did today?” Stupidest thing anyone on Earth did today has got to be when he opened the stupid door. What made him open the door to a guy who wanted to kill him? Can they explain it? Has anyone ever explained the fatal second of stupidity you sometimes survive and sometimes don’t?

Monica and David have just started walking north on AAF Street, pulling their top-heavy and wobbly shopping cart and still a long way from Coast Boulevard where they have to make a 90^o left (west) turn at the corner, when a police car pulls up sharply against the sidewalk not far ahead, two cops jump out, grab hold of a woman, handcuff her and throw the slumping body toward the patrol car.

All their gestures are violent, but quick and efficient, and their aim is good: the collapsed body sails through the open patrol car door without any audible thud or scream. It could be that the two cops know precisely what spots to press to make the body fold on its hinges or it could be that the woman’s long experience with being handled makes her bundle herself quickly into a package convenient for throwing. The memory of violence may be enough to make the body compliant and self-packaging. . . .

Streets remain damp long after the sun starts shining.

Tv reports call it “a record rain fall” (2.35 inches).

Monica writes that she has things to record and would like to sit with pen and paper and do her recording in the open air of the porch, but the chairs are damp, the porch boards are damp and it isn’t until “late afternoon”, after “long hours of warm sunlight,” that the porch and the world that can be seen from it have begun to visibly dry out.

On May 1 or May 2, at an hour when the porch is dry enough for Monica to write there, sun is out and street is active, green seed pods shoot out from an unknown source on the freshly-green lawn somewhere behind the Rhinebeck pine and into Monica’s line-of-sight, just before Tommy Liman comes out of hiding, climbs the porch steps and sits on the railing to talk to Monica. He has a couple of fragments of a story to tell and Monica is the one he wants to tell them to, hoping that she’ll write some of it down for the endless story she’s always working on.

Tommy says that his family (as far as Monica knows that means his mother, Audrey, two older sisters, Vicky and Minnie, and Tommy’s little brother, Riley, father a mystery because Monica’s never seen him or heard him mentioned) will be going up to Newfoundland in July. At least he’s pretty sure Vicky’s coming along, but she might only go if his mother agrees to drop her off in New Hampshire so she can visit her boyfriend. On the way back they’d stop to pick Vicky up or she might decide to stay in New Hampshire with her boyfriend and go to college there. If she does that she’ll be changing her life completely, because her boyfriend was only able to get a job in a town so tiny you could go nuts in five minutes cause there’s nothing to do there and hardly anybody living there either because everyone born there gets out as soon as they can. He’s noticed this too: Vicky seems a little nervous and jumpy and he wonders if that means that she isn’t sure if moving to New Hampshire is a good idea. . . .

Later (exactly when not noted) dark-haired and dark-faced Riley and blond and red-faced Tommy Liman are laughing and shooting senseless words and parts-of-words at each other at the same time they’re getting each other soaked with high-powered water pistols, chasing each other in wild loops across lawns and through hedges.

How does Wanda Baer enter the day? Here she is in Monica’s handwritten notes for May 1 or 2 without having passed through any visible entry point. Wanda says that she has a little story to tell Monica that seemed like a funny story to her while it was happening, but now she’s not sure if it’s a funny story about Cristalene (what she thought originally!) or if it’s a stupid story about herself — one more stupid thing she’s done to make Cristalene stop confiding in her, to make it impossible for Cristalene to ever feel the kind of love for her she dreams of Cristalene feeling. (Monica has an idea, doesn’t she?, how exquisite, how intelligent and super-sensitive Cristalene is!?) She may have finally, once-and-for-all, forced Cristalene to see the selfish moron that’s always lurking inside her, the gross lust that’s just below the surface of her so-called friendship. . . .

This is what happened, though she’s not sure whose idea it was. One of them —could have been herself, but she doesn’t think so— Lizzy, April, Holly or Sabrina — said, “Let’s go see a porno play!” (one of them had heard about something all the way downtown) — and it sounded like fun to her because they were going as a group of women and could laugh at it together and because, to be honest, she was actually in the mood for something like that. . . . But then, after she parked and they were walking around looking for the theater, just by sheer accident she spotted Cristalene window-shopping! She’s always a little out of her mind when she sees Cristalene, so, without thinking about any possible consequences, she talked Cristalene into coming along (and — she’s not certain — but, knowing herself, she probably lied a little about what kind of play they were going to see). The play turned out to be crude and stupid and not at all funny, unless you could trick yourself into believing there was some entertainment value in watching all the slugs and grubs and mealworms in the audience working themselves into the lather always in them waiting to be lathered. Mildly depressing and disappointing for her, but easy to see that it was sickening for Cristalene. Cristalene ran out of the theater as soon as she could without drawing attention to herself and she (Wanda) of course ran out after her, always-always-always searching for ways to be Cristalene’s knight in armor.

Evening was beginning to feel like a disaster.

Tried to salvage it by talking Cristalene into letting her drive her home (spending time alone in the car with Cristalene is something she loves and dreams about), but Cristalene kept her beautiful face turned away and refused to talk.

She made a feeble attempt to apologize for the vulgar stupidity she’d talked Cristalene into witnessing, but she knew that it was her (Wanda’s) vulgarity, her stupidity, her ugliness that Cristalene had discovered and that was making her ill.

She thinks the evening was fatal and she’s in despair. She thinks she’s finally succeeded in giving Cristalene such a deep look into the shallowness of her inner life that there’s no way to erase or explain it. Even Monica won’t be able to figure out a solution. . . .

There’s this too: thinking later how all of them — as a group, herself situated in that group of women, headed for that disgusting play, yukking it up on the way over — must have looked to Cristalene, makes her wonder what’s happening to her. Lizzy, as Monica knows, is so masculine that her voice is deeper than most men’s and she has to shave every day to keep from looking like a wolfhound and Nikki, a member of the group who wasn’t there that night and who Monica has never met, is so ugly that her ugliness is just as rare and extraordinary as Cristalene’s beauty. So: what’s the meaning of the fact that these are the women she’s been hanging out with? That she’s made herself part of that unhappy group? And now — doesn’t Monica agree? — Cristalene must see her as just one more orbiting lump in that little constellation, one of a zillion depressing constellations of cosmic gas and debris that are always orbiting the internally glowing Cristalenes of the universe.

It was just May 1 and, glancing ahead through her notes while typing in November, Monica sees that it says “May 3” on the next handwritten page, so logic tells her that the notes she’s typing are from (though not necessarily about) May 2 (though notes don’t say so explicitly).

Cousin Linda goes by again (“second time in three days”) with her pretty blonde friend Lisa in Lisa’s white Fiat convertible: a laughing, carefree cousin Linda pried loose from the familiar family context. Cousin Linda honks the horn of Lisa’s Fiat on the return trip down the block, calls out to Monica and makes Lisa pull up so Monica can come over and say hello. Jokes that she couldn’t say no to driving around with Lisa because she has a paper due and can’t even remember what it’s about! Another car (an American sedan: make, color, model not noted) pulls up (by chance?) alongside the Fiat and cousin Linda introduces the lanky brunette driver as her friend, MaryAnn “Macaroni” Monahan. While they’re chatting and cousin Linda is having fun explaining the meaning of “Macaroni” rosy-cheeked Finnley Lenehan walks by, heading north, recognizes “Macaroni” Monahan and stops to say hi. He’s pretty good friends with MaryAnn’s brother, Mickey, and may even be telling a long story about Mickey Monahan when Wanda Baer shows up (having seen Monica, cousin Linda, Lisa, MaryAnn Monahan and Finnley Lenehan gathering around two double-parked cars from one of the windows of Greg-and-Lena’s house) with her deep-voiced friend, Lizzy. Seems over-joyed to see cousin Linda and, even more so, “Macaroni” Monahan, because she remembers hanging out with “Macaroni” ’s younger brother, Billy, or for some other, unstated reason. Wanda Baer tries to introduce her friend, Lizzy, but Lizzy takes one look at the constellation of relaxed, cheerful and friendly people gathering around the two cars and tries to hide herself in open space. What’s worse: just yesterday she lost her pipe and can’t figure out what to do with her mouth and hands.

So many things are in fact at all times unclear and/or disorderly that (it seems to Monica) to clarify them or to straighten them out would be to lie about reality in a fundamental way — something like wanting to iron out the tangles and digressions in her notes rather than keeping an eye out for the same kind of disorderly order the universe likes to live with, taking forever to let anyone taste the food that’s been cooking in its kitchen since before there was a kitchen to cook in.

Monica isn’t sure if this is an example or not: both Lowell and Ryan Lenehan show up on the same page as Wanda Baer, cousin Linda, Linda’s friend Lisa, Lisa’s white Fiat, Wanda’s friend Lizzy, Finnley Lenehan, “Macaroni” Monahan, etc., but Monica’s notes don’t say that either Ryan or Lowell walk across the horizontal path of the Chronicle to stop and join the little constellation forming around the two cars.

Same page, different day is one obvious possibility, but there are other possibilities that Monica isn’t in the mood to stop and catalogue.

Ryan Lenehan and Lowell appear in Monica’s notes on an undated day that may be the same day or not in this way:

Ryan Lenehan passes loaded down with over-sized shopping bags and stops to say hello to Monica: just back from mass at St. Rose and then from a flea market at St. Francis, and he went a little nuts. . . !

Lowell approaches from the direction of Coast Boulevard (loaded down with cake boxes for Monica’s birthday) with his tall and skinny childhood friend, Matthew: hasn’t seen him for aeons and — unbelievably — ran into him just now on the way back from the Peninsula Bake Shop. . . .

Monica is puzzled that the only traces in her notes of the visit from her brother and his childhood friend (who Monica knows well and would have questioned about his life all the while he was out of view) are references to a birthday card from Lowell without its message recorded and to Matthew’s unhappiness about having to move back home and live with his parents after having been where doing what?

Among many possible reasons why Monica didn’t take notes about her conversation with Lowell:

        a conscious decision (nothing worth recording)

        inevitable editing of forgetfulness

        Chronicle’s own laws and forces, its internal reasons for allowing things that cross its path to leave their mark and its reasons for erasing them before they stick.

On May 2 all possible local (coastal?) New York City birds are active or hyper-active on ABC Street: red wing blackbirds, mourning doves, pigeons, robins, towhees, cardinals, seagulls, terns and, of course, no way for Monica to know how many varieties of sparrows, starlings and other blackbirds are perched and hopping in or circling above and around trees, shrubs, flowers, roofs, roof drains, telephone lines and sky: lilacs, azaleas and all other possible local flowers are flowering and doing whatever else they should be doing on May 2, but with an exaggerated amount of energy. Animated by the fact that it is a sunny Sunday in May and by the fact that the local universe seems to need whatever happens in May to be happening today.

True or only seems to be true that the tall, graceful figure of Greg Coffin crystallizes everything around it: tall figure on Greg-and-Lena’s raftlike second-story porch extending out over their barren front garden to the lip of ABC Street, embedded in the sky’s mild blue so tender and yielding that the pressure of Greg’s figure on it (and on the whole buzzing world of ABC Street) provokes blossoming, leafing, gliding, darting, chirping, squeaking etc. This too: Greg and a younger man (unfamiliar to Monica), not as tall as Greg, seem to be surveying the length of ABC Street in the direction of beach and ocean. Gulls and other shore birds cross the local bubble-world 360^o around, pausing in the updrafts in the broad path of the sun’s blue or gliding above the scattered figures on porches scribbling in pads as if sketching or doing nothing but drinking coffee and talking.

An early bath on May 3 seems to Monica a solution to the sultriness of the day: after that it’s pleasant to work at her green room desk for a couple of hours. She can see, through two sets of casement windows (each half of each set of nine small panes on a folding swing-arm operated by a stiff hand crank), bamboo blinds rolled up, so that the day’s penned-up and overheated sun is arriving through thick clouds, here and there white and blazing, but mostly as grey as plowed and dirty snow.

After 11 a.m. the temperature begins to drop sharply, from 90^o plus to no more than 70 — and by 1 p.m. it’s as chilly as a day in September (the narrative of seasons is much more mingled, more intercut and “out of order” than the lazy, chronological story we think we know.)

Let’s see: as soon as the temperature starts dropping and Monica feels like taking a break, she goes out for a walk:

a)       Making a small loop down ABC Street (south) to the boardwalk, left (east) on the boardwalk one block to ABB Street, left on ABB Street (north) to Coast Boulevard, left (west) on Coast Boulevard to ABF Street, left (south) on ABF Street to the boardwalk (where the boardwalk ends), not recorded if left (west) back home to ABC Street and left again (north) on ABC Street to her apartment (smallest possible loop) or left on boardwalk and continuing east on boardwalk indefinitely (or just to the shopping street, AAF Street) or off the boardwalk at ABF Street, down onto the sand, right (west) along the edge of the ocean — a long walk all the way up to ADB Street and beyond, possibly even into public park land: during her short loop around a few streets and then home or spinning out of her intended short loop into a long, wandering trip around the neighborhood or on the beach, Monica runs across Nelly X (who lives on ACA Street), Pat Corcoran, Cathy Castle and Nancy Wattle (all from ABC Street) chatting while waiting together for their children on the ABB Street bus stop and then, two blocks further west on Coast Boulevard (at ABD Street), sees Lena Coffin waiting alone on the bus stop for little tadpole-faced Jojo. No notes on conversations with any of the mothers at either bus stop, but it strikes Monica later (while translating her notes into typewriter) that, if the mothers are waiting for their children to come home from school, it must already be 3 p.m. or even 3:30 p.m. when she (Monica) passes them — therefore at the end of her walk, not at the beginning — and her notes say that “by 3:30 wind has blown a clean blue across the sky”.

b)       At 1 p.m. (location not noted) Monica sees Pam Leary walking toward her with her little daughter, Caitlin. Pam Leary is from California, but (it seems to Monica) could be from just about anywhere west of New York City. Something about Pam Leary is different from others who arrive in New York and don’t necessarily “fit in”, but — just by wanting to be here — help animate New York as a metaphysical terminal of possibility. Pam Leary, on the other hand, is just someone who landed here through the accident of marrying Ted Leary, a very nice, somewhat bland and pink-faced member of an exploded local family. The think-positive perkiness and get-it-done cheeriness of a pie bake-off contestant can’t quite stifle Pam Leary’s eternal homesickness: eternally missing Mom, Dad and kid sister, Polly, she has (for Monica) an irritating way of subtly making sure you know that she’s making the best of a disappointing situation until she can get Ted Leary to move to California.

May or may not be happy to run into Monica, but greets her as if she is. It’s been such a long time!, etc. Last time Monica saw Caitlin. Caitlin was just an infant — and now she’s a “toddler”! Monica has the feeling that Pam — an always-cheerful person with stories to tell that are rarely cheerful — has stories to tell her now (stories she wants to and needs to tell), but isn’t going to tell them for all sorts of reasons easily passed off as lack of time (accidental meeting, on her busy way from here to there, etc.). Permits herself only a few little fragments: 1) now that Caitlin’s “a toddler” she plans to “start trying to get pregnant this summer” and 2) unfortunately, they see a fair amount of Ted’s father because he’s in the neighborhood, but Ted’s mother — as Monica knows — has become strange: still lives in Vegas, but that’s no explanation for the distance she keeps from Ted and everyone else. (May be in hiding from Ted’s awful father, but she doesn’t believe that’s the whole story.) There’s this too: according to Ted his mother never used to drink. Not a drinker and, if anything, fanatically religious, but now she doesn’t seem to be all that religious and her whole life revolves around AA! How can that be? There’s a huge missing piece to Ted’s Mom’s story and no one’s ever going to tell it! Ted says that AA’s his mother’s new religion, but what does that actually mean? It’s just one of those things people say without really thinking, doesn’t Monica agree? The only thing she can say that she knows is true is that having to spend time with Ted’s crazy family and having to listen to stories about Ted’s crazy family is making it unbearable not to be with her own family.

c)      Still May 3?

        Taking a walk around the neighborhood Monica sees in no particular order:

        1) bright yellow little birds in newest of new green: yellow lit from outside, green from inside: yellow underbellies like strokes of fresh paint (eye can feel the ridges of the brush strokes in the thick paste of oil and flavonoid pigment): some, not all, of these yellow birds dashing through new green appear to Monica to have velvety blue-black head-stripes: stripes may in fact be nothing but a velvety black, but — against yellow and against yellow-in-green — look like the luminous blue-black of a night sky to Monica.

        2) the relation between lawn and cherry blossom reverses itself so quickly, in two or three days, that Monica has a hard time sorting it out: the green lawns of yesterday are not pools reflecting the full and completely round pink trees above them like a sky that’s fat and pink from end to end. Lawns that were perfectly, beautifully green are now themselves pink and fluffy almost to their green edges. Each lawn now each tree? densely packed and fluffed with pink blossoms exactly or not exactly the way each tree was more like one enormous blossom than a tree. Trees now nothing but low, shiny posts with dark skin hammered into humped-up ground, supporting horizontal tangles of branching branches with green leaves not much bigger than buds. A very short season whose quick reversal comes and goes invisibly for anyone who hasn’t taken a long (an endless?) walk around the neighborhood.

        3) JoAnne Renard (Nicole Renard’s older sister) passes along with unrecorded others who’re passing for the first time — as if May 3 is the first spring day after the almost unlivable winter of ’75-76. It isn’t clear in Monica’s handwritten notes if JoAnne Renard sees Monica and stops to say something about the dizzying sweetness of the fresh green world that’s leapfrogged visual distance through smell (enters us easily here from over there) or if she passes on the other side of whatever street Monica’s walking on, without seeing Monica and without saying anything.

        4) (or not-4): Not noted when a detached mini-fragment of Pam Leary’s fragmentary mini-stories about Ted’s Mom in Vegas drifts back toward the original mass. While Monica is still walking? When she gets back to her green room desk and she’s transcribing her notes? Or later still. . . . Let’s see: Pam says that what Ted finds weird about his mother talking about herself as a former alcoholic, a reformed and struggling alcoholic, is that almost all his memories of his mother are of someone who practically lived in church — and the little time she didn’t spend in church she spent taking care of and worrying about her children. It’s his father who was and is a drunk. But now supposedly she’s a drunk and has no use for the church or for her children. When and how did all that happen? Where was he while it was happening? Was he that unconscious? What is it that he’s not noticing now that will come as a shock later? Etc., etc. Ted doesn’t say anything, but she knows that’s what he’s thinking. And she thinks that both Ted’s Mom and Ted’s Dad are there under the surface like a hook he’s swallowed but is able to swim around with while he’s bleeding to death. She’d like to know this: if Monica were writing about Ted would she describe him as “happy” or “unhappy”? Or maybe she’s not asking the right question. On the surface Ted is out of step with his whole family: he doesn’t drink, he’s quiet and considerate, he’s well-balanced, he’s what people call “nice”, etc. So why does his not drinking make her think of his father’s (and now his mother’s) drinking? And his happy unhappiness or unhappy happiness reminds her of them too — but why?

        5) (or not-5): Possibly still May 3 or could be May 4 without the slide from May 3 into May 4 having been noted. Monica wonders for a second if it’s really only a convention and a convenience for herself and the reader to distinguish “May 3” from “May 4” and so on — or if it’s in some way necessary to parcel out days by giving them their names in exactly the same way we name towns, avenues, boroughs, counties, etc. even if there’s truth in the fact that all of space is spread out on a horizontal, undifferentiated plane. Each day like a neighborhood with its own character, one separated from the other by nothing more than a long walk, a short drive, an hour’s nap. . . .

Notes say that Monica is working outdoors on a morning that’s sunny but not warm: blue of sky marked by white clouds that get bigger (and less white?) as the temperature drops. Dominant color across earth is oily green chlorophyll paste squeezed straight out of the tube and spread smoothly with fingertip or roughly with brush, broader areas thinned in pale washes. It’s a fragile moment for other colors. For example: the dominant chrome yellow masses of forsythias’ tangled wands as well as dogwood, apple and cherry blossoms’ mid-air palette of rose, pink and all possible rose-pink variations blended with white altered by daylight have dissolved away from the green landscape.

Same day or another (May 3, May 4 or still one more possible day she hasn’t taken into account) the far more vibrant and intense colors of azaleas and lilacs have already begun to stain the green world at or below eye level with blots of flaming dye — alizarin crimson, carmine violet, scarlet, kermes red, rose madder, magenta, mauve with a little orange in it — like fountain pens of colored ink left open on a green bedspread and emptying themselves there. Colors so chemically complicated and wildly clashing the eye can’t get enough of them while the brain spins on its axis trying to sort them out, let alone find words for them.

Let’s see: also on May 3 sliding through other days or other days in May 3 another copy of Coda with THE BLUE HANGER photo and a fragment of text in it arrives with a tiny note dated April 23, 1976:

“Dear Monica and David,

“Please see p. 27 for your Blue Hanger plot. Thank you very much for your help.

Sincerely,

Nelson Richardson

(document enclosed).”

The word “plot” is the only thing that interests Monica in the little note because she can’t figure out what it means.

Wanda Baer also gets mail delivered to her by Lou, the rolypoly mailman, and searches for Monica because she needs help translating the picture postcard written to her in French by the exquisitely beautiful Cristalene, who (without Wanda knowing about it) is traveling in California. Her French is terrible, Wanda Baer says, but of course that isn’t why she needs Monica’s help. When she saw that the card was from Cristalene — that Cristalene had bothered to write to her while she was traveling and that she’d written to her in French, the intimate language of her mind, not the public language of everyday speech — her brain went numb. . . .

Card reads (with a few words that are illegible or copied over incorrectly):

“Ma chere Wanda,

“Je pouvais toujourus esperer et imaginer. . . point de suspension — c’etait au dessus de tout. Enfin c’etait tres chauette. C’etait parce que je suis rentree. Je t’envoie cette carte de JFK et je parlerai dans quelque heures.

A bientot. Je t’embrasse.

Cristalene”

Glossy view is a standard tourist shot of Powell Street cable cars and the printed back text reads: “Busy cable cars climb the steep, terraced Powell Street hill at twilight time. San Francisco.”

Notes that are unquestionably from May 4 (without any ambiguity about May 3 or 5 leeching into them) suggest that May 4 is a particularly long day: begins early with too many clouds and too little sun and Monica can see that she’s going to have to search through an unusually thick stack of folded, handwritten lavender sheets of scrap paper to find out how the day drifts toward the boundary of the neighboring day.

The first person that Monica sees when she descends the front porch steps and is about to turn left (south) to head for the beach is Patty (“Twiggy”) Garvey, smoking while she walks (which direction not noted). Monica has no memory of “Twiggy” having been a smoker when she was younger — therefore the cigarettes must have something to do with her recent weight loss and the general change in her appearance. What strikes Monica is what’s missing: Twiggy no longer gives an immediate impression of size and pinkness: a large, somewhat puffy young woman with fluffy blonde waves of hair and a bright, bubble-gum pink complexion. Now she’s less noticeable: a fairly ordinary blonde young woman, not thin or fat, skin a common shade of pinkish-white.

On the way south (left from the porch) Monica has time to wonder if she’s ever had a conversation with Twiggy Garvey or if, in all the years she’s been seeing her in and out of the constellation of her family (four older sisters, wiry mother and largely absent handsome father), she’s only known Twiggy from across the way with never more than a wave and possibly not even a “hello”. Just an image in her image-world, never a sentence or two in all these years. . . ?

Now Monica’s stepped down onto the sand and the wind is so strong and cold it shuts down all thinking. She just has time to take in two ships on the horizon: a red one very low in the water, sinking into the horizon as if weighed down with too much freight, wallowing slowly east, toward Long Island: the other with slightly more stacked-up layers above the water, 1/2 red, 1/2 black (not noted how the colors are divided: above and below, side by side, etc.) and headed west, toward the Narrows and New York harbor. In the time it takes for Monica to sort out the two ships passing and separating on the horizon and to make up her mind whether a walk on the beach would be pleasant or impossible in the cold wind blowing from under the hull of the wallowing red freighter → through deep ocean → straight across the beach, she spots Leo Romero walking Greg and Lena’s old, black and drooly Newfoundland, Grendel. (Monica notes later that she has no way of knowing how odd or ordinary it is for Leo Romero to be walking the Coffin family dog.) Leo’s already spotted Monica and steers Grendel in her direction so he can stop and tell whatever stories he needs to tell. (Monica has the feeling later, while transcribing her notes into typewriter, that the order, if any, of Leo Romero’s stories has been re-ordered equally by wind and forgetfulness into a disorder just as orderly and inevitable-seeming as the surface of beach or ocean at any given instant.)

Leo says that the band has an agent now, but he isn’t sure that the agent knows what he’s doing — because the first thing the agent did was to change their name from a stupid outdated name to a stupid senseless one. They used to call themselves “Gregory and the Greyhounds” and the agent’s only valid point is that that made them sound like a revival band, a retread “doo-wop” band, but his genius idea is even worse: he re-named them “The C-Notes” and it’s cheesy and stupid and empty and none of them has a clue what it’s supposed to mean. But now the stupid jerk got them a week’s gig at the “Monte Carlo” near JFK so he’ll have to live with being a “C-Note”. . . .

Before the agent Greg was the one who arranged all their bookings and maybe they were better off, but Greg’s happy to be left alone to do his music. No question that, of all of them, Greg is the only one who could have a solo career. He gets calls to do studio work and for all sorts of other stuff, but no one else does. Is Greg the most talented? May be the most talented, but he thinks that what’s more important is that he loves to practice. Practices ten thousand times more than the rest of them put together. He (Leo) likes to practice, but has no time. Andy’s lazy and never really thought of music as a career (he’d just as soon go fishing) and the bass player’s just a stupid slob.

Is it possible that loyalty to the band’s gotten in the way of Greg’s career? He’s thought of that and it bothers him, but on the other hand he thinks it’s possible that their loyalty to each other may be what’s kept them alive. Greg and Andy have known each other forever and he’s known them both since 1970.

Speaking of loyalty, he wants to know if Monica remembers their old bass player, Colin: a very good bass player, much better than the dummy they have now, but a worthless dirtbag as a human being. When he quit without warning to start his own band and asked him (Leo) to join he didn’t have to think to say no. What he remembers saying to Colin was that out of the two or three hundred good reasons he could easily come up with for not going with Colin, the first thing that came to mind was that Colin had no sense of gratitude or loyalty or responsibility and that that would be more than enough, even if Colin didn’t sleep all day and shower every other week. . . .

Leo is jumpy, as always. Jumping around while he talks: jumpy and speeding through broken sentences, maybe even more than usual. Hopping from one foot to the other, from one half-sentence to the other because he’s freezing? Freezing and jumpy, but still not ready to stop talking. Some fragments of stories may be a bit stuck, but need to come out.

Monica knows (doesn’t she?) that he lives rent free? The house pays the rent for him is how he likes to think of it. And then of course there’s the family carpet-cleaning business: has to work there, no choice: hates it, but probably can’t do without that income, if he’s ten thousand percent honest with himself. So he’s basically got two things going for him always: his drumming (he’d have to be dead and maybe even dead and then buried to give up drumming) and the family business, always there if he needs it. Greg has his outside gigs and Andy and Grete (Monica probably knows this too) pick up a little extra change every week dealing small quantities across the Nassau County line. Very, very little, sometimes just an extra hundred or so, because what they make otherwise isn’t enough to support themselves and the two children. But never-ever the eight hundred or more other dealers make easily doing the same exact thing, because Grete and Andy know that once you start dealing at that even slightly higher level that’s when you get noticed and shit starts to happen. . . .

Cold light and cold air of a northern city make Monica wonder if it’s still May 4. New green tulips make David think of Amsterdam, but Monica doesn’t remember the quantity of light that’s falling today falling there or the precise way every green space conforms to the shadow of a cloud, no matter how the clouds shift and re-arrange themselves with the ambling pace of cows in a meadow. This day is cold and exact, she says, and that doesn’t bring Amsterdam to mind. There’s this too: her handwritten notes (which are sometimes hard for Monica to read when it’s time to type them months later) seem to talk in one place about light being blown through new green leaves and even through grass, though it’s barely started to grow: whatever light isn’t absorbed by leaves blows through and blows back very quickly, so that light flashes there and is eclipsed there in dots and dashes of movement that build up into masses of green and green shadow. But in another place her notes (still talking about light) seem to say “thrown” and not “blown”: “light comes and goes quickly, as if thrown with a strong arm into the far corner of green space” and, likewise, “a shadow tossed from the distance to cover something that was just clear and immediate”.

Can’t say that any of it reminds her of Amsterdam. Or, more exactly, the only thing that reminds her of Amsterdam or anything Dutch at all are the number of breezes and the complexity of the aromas blowing with them through the streets: so many breezes and aromas (most of them cold and spicy ocean breezes) that some of them may have passed through ground floor kitchens of three story shingle houses, second story kitchens of multiple dwellings and fourth, fifth or sixth floor kitchens of apartment houses, carrying cooking aromas down ABC Street, right under Monica’s nose — and that mixture of warm cooking aromas and cold ocean aromas is a heady smell that brings her directly back to the deck of a small Dutch ocean liner, the Maasdam, crossing the Atlantic with David.

On the same or another cold, clear day with shifting clouds, therefore shifting sun and shadow across ABC Street and the whole island-like neighborhood, Monica feels the need to wear a jacket and button up the top button, while Al Regan (diagonally across the way directly to the southwest) is out early without a shirt on, digging up one side of the Regans’ lawn (which side not noted) with pitchfork and shovel. Monica can’t remember ever seeing Al Regan working outside without a shirt. It’s not his style, in cold weather or warm, and she wonders if it’s only now that bald, wiry and suntanned Enos Greengrass — whose great passion was to sweep and hose his driveway in all possible weather in nothing but a faded and baggy pair of long blue shorts, heavy cotton socks and brown moccasins — has died, that Al Regan feels a responsibility to do some bare-chested lawnwork on a day that looks sunny but feels cold.

What else is happening pretty much at the same time?

1, 2, 3, 4 houses north on the west side of the street (next to the last house before the intersection with Coast Boulevard) tall, thin and pretty Elizabeth Garvey is mowing the Garvey family lawn in jeans and a long-sleeved rose or blue polo (Elizabeth Garvey’s colors, though color not noted).

Blond-blond little Timothy Corcoran is stuffing his face with Jujubes and another kind of candy he says is called a “Slow Poke”. Likes to talk to Monica and likes to talk in general, but doesn’t really have a story to tell so only says that he knows that eating so much candy isn’t good for him, but that he can’t help it because he’s a sugar freak. He’s an addict, but what choice did he have? Monica knows about his mom’s Pepsi addiction: sick already, she’s been warned but still can’t stop. So now his teeth aren’t coming in normally and some of them are even starting to rot. . . .

A dark-haired and attractive waitress still wearing her Cornucopia Diner uniform finds the keys Themis left for her in the mailbox and goes in.

Let’s see: who passes Monica on the porch next? which one before the other? They all pass, they all stop to say something even when there’s no story to tell, but Monica’s notes (and the Chronicle too?) have no concern for their order and that makes Monica think (not for the first time) that it’s possible that, no matter how experience actually unfolds, there’s a sense in which all of it — an entire afternoon and even a day or more than one day — can exist simultaneously across a horizontal plane in the mind, a horizontal narrative made up of mini-narratives that can be arranged in many different ways until freak events push them off the table. These passing horizontal units, these mini-narratives, are the way the day passes and the way life passes: therefore the Chronicle Monica’s way of putting the mind’s horizontal, simultaneous plane of story fragments on paper? An endless task and an endless pleasure, because new events are always occurring: new stories are always being told to Monica as acquaintances arrive and pass, and events that interest her are always in danger of falling off the table.

Yvonne Wilding, bored and slouching, passes, stops to poke around in the mailbox, perks up a little because she’s found something addressed to her, pauses for a few seconds to say (to Monica or herself) “letter from Vegas” before she heads inside while tearing open the envelope.

Monica tries to figure out how long it’s been since she last saw Artie Tilden, but can’t. It would take time to search backward through the Chronicle and, as always, she feels compelled to go forward. She doesn’t run into him often, so his long red ponytail that makes his smallish head look compressed and shrunken, skin so white his face is like a drawing of a face on white paper, small nose, tired eyes, perpetual jeans, jeans jacket and worn brown cowboy boots suddenly appearing before her on the porch always come as a surprise. Today (May 4?) Artie Tilden appears (out from inside or up from sidewalk not noted), leans against the railing near Monica, signaling to her that he has stories to tell and may even have been looking for her to tell them.

Let’s see: begins by remarking (apropos of nothing) that there are odd things about this neighborhood that he thinks about and he knows that it’s the kind of stuff that Monica thinks about too. For example: you can look at this neighborhood as being in the middle — the center point between two other neighborhoods that are geographically connected to it and that resemble it in the ways that all town-like neighborhoods that sit next to bays or oceans resemble each other, but are different from it in all kinds of other, important ways. You’ve got the very insular, airtight little community of Windy Pass over at the far western tip of the peninsula and then, across a little bridge, directly to the north, the tight-knit but not-quite-so-airtight neighborhood of Narrow Straits. (Can’t be so insular because so many cars carrying so many strangers have to pass through Narrow Straits to get to major highway connections, other, more populated neighborhoods, the airport, etc.) Has Monica noticed that — even though Windy Pass and Narrow Straits have stayed the same forever, generation after generation living there with no thought of leaving — lately some of the children have started to try to break away. In general they don’t get very far. Most of them (himself included!) gravitate toward this neighborhood, right in the middle, no more than fifteen minutes drive in either direction to the Pass or to the Straits. So he knows firsthand how hard it is to pull against the gravity that keeps us from leaving what we know too well for it to be good for us. . . .

Let’s see: what else? Artie wants to talk more and decides to tell Monica a tale that’s more of a tale than anything he’s said so far (possibly the tale he looked for her to tell). Monica may not remember, he says, but some time in the later part of April (not too long before his girlfriend Anne Marie’s birthday) they had a terrible hot spell. Made him itch to get out on his motorcycle and he and Anne Marie set out with no particular plan except getting out on the open road somewhere and feeling the wind. But there is no real “open road” around here. To get to anything like that the most logical thing is to head in the direction of Long Island, but you still have to go through a lot of populated territory to get anywhere near open terrain — and at the first red light in Hewlett or Woodmere or some stupid place like that he was hit hard from behind. Motorcycle flipped up in the air and all 500 pounds of it landed on the car in front. (Says parenthetically that he’s told the story to all his friends and he’s curious to see if Monica agrees with the ones who think it’s a story about bad luck or the ones who think it’s about good luck.) Motorcycle pretty much caved in the trunk of the car in front. Not his fault, but could have gotten complicated because he has no insurance. Guy who hit him from behind was clearly responsible, but, without insurance, it could still get ugly. Five hundred dollar fine, if nothing else. Unlucky because he was hit? Doubly unlucky because he has no insurance? Or are the people who jump to that conclusion stupid? Consider this: neither he nor Anne Marie were seriously injured (both were thrown off right away); car in front (the one with the smashed-in trunk) turned out to be stolen so the guy took off and disappeared; and the guy who hit him from behind didn’t want the insurance companies involved so he was happy to write a check and go home. The end result of his “bad luck” is that someone paid to have his motorcycle rebuilt. It’s running better than it did before, he and Anne Marie are feeling fine and they’d be looking for some open road right now if the weather wasn’t so lousy!

Monica says that she loves the lengthening of afternoon: when the bright and sparkling day takes its time being carried toward evening.

Who else of those who pass and keep passing on this ambiguously dated day in early May stops to tell a story (or at least speak a sentence or two that might turn into a story)?

Clear-eyed and businesslike little Ryan Lenehan surprises Monica by telling her that he not only plays the drums, but he’s learning the guitar! And not only that: he has his own space now: they’ve let him have Lenny’s old room in the basement: plenty of privacy and the thick walls swallow the sound of his drums.

Notes also say something about the unmistakable sound of a mourning dove, a cooing that’s throaty yet stuttering, not drawn out long enough to extend far out into woodland and certainly not into darkness, deceptively like the beginning of an owl’s hoo-hoo-hooing, except that it always comes up short and flaps around where it is, dripping its tiny dose of mystery by the eyedropper-full: draws Monica’s attention (while Ryan Lenehan is talking) up into the thin and cracked orange plastic awning over Greg-and-Lena Coffin’s front steps next door, where blinding sunlight has collected in a shadowy pool deep enough for birds that Monica can’t see to make a racket in, wallowing in light as in water.

Ryan Lenehan has something else on his mind. Meant to tell Monica something, but can’t remember what it is or even if it’s something he’s already told her. Could this be it? Did he tell Monica that Carla Ray Carlson is in a nursing home? And that they discovered that Carla Ray signed a lot of her checks Carlita Carlson? So right now they’re not at all sure what “Carla Ray” or just “Carla” or “Carlita” Carlson’s real name is or how much of what they thought they knew about her is true.

“Out of order”: a handwritten note dated “June ‘74” has found its way into handwritten May ’76 and it doesn’t seem in any way related to anything that comes before or after. How did it get here? Un-named force could have washed it to this spot in Monica’s notes from where it was anchored seven hundred miles or seventy days up or down the coast: not a coherent story, just a broken angle of one, as usual. Story-fragment that’s drifted this way says that red-haired, asthmatic and weakly handsome Matty Maple (friend of Norma Rosenkranz, Jerry and Reggy H. and others from a small constellation of 19-22-year-old friends Monica knows but who haven’t walked, driven or bicycled across the April or May ’76 Chronicle) has (and wants to introduce Monica to?) a new Portuguese girlfriend with the beautiful name “Madalena Fonseca” who’s determined to change her name to “Madalena Maple” just because she likes the way the two “M ’s” sound more than she likes her own “M” and “F”.

The fact that it’s “May 5” is clearly indicated on paper and also clearly marked in space by pink cherry blossom petals whipping by at eye level. A very mild storm of May breezes shifts soft pink masses from small trees to green lawn after green lawn. Spray from who-can-say-how-many sprinkler systems blows from one lawn to the other as well. Breezes just strong enough to shred flowers seem to dig into ocean-to-the-south with force, raking up dark water like dirt. Over and over, as far as Monica can see, wind digs into slate-blue-sliding-into-slate-grey peaks about to slide out into troughs with no blue in them at all, at the same time throwing off a beautiful green foam — not a dark seaweed green, more the green light of trees, vines or hedgerows. Wind sweeps across everything horizontally from bay to ocean, bounding back to bay, re-arranging masses and spinning whatever spins, tearing at leaves, flowers and bits of weakly attached alphabet.

A letter dated April 26 from Bill Fox, West Coast Poetry Review (WCPR), 1127 Codel Way, Reno, Nevada 89503, arrives on May 5.

“Dear Monica and David —

“Thanks for all the materials. I’d like to use the following from AS IT RETURNS — the photos and all the accompanying prose. What I’m sending back I can’t use unless you think it critical to publication. The mounting guide, for instance, would have to be photoed from the original photos — the ones you sent could be better, more indicative, illustrative even of the text itself, presenting more than just the installation view. If you have more photos, may I see them for possible use?

“I like TIME TABLE very much and will be very jealous to see it from another publisher. But there’s just no room here for it as a chapbook (ideally) or even in the magazine (a second best).

“AS IT RETURNS will appear in WCPR #2.0, as far as I can tell. Again, as far as I can tell, that issue will appear in a year. I’ve been turning away everything because we’re so full, but I simply can’t deny your work space somehow, sometime. So. . . .

“My wife and child and I will be in N.Y.C. from May 4 through the 9. I’ll bring along your address and perhaps try to get in touch.

“Let me know about the material I’m returning, and also if the documentation is to appear elsewhere. I’m not against that, just don’t want to cross over too much into similar territories.

“Very best,

“Bill

“W.L. Fox.”

“Out of order”: belongs here or it doesn’t. Monica can’t decide (but will have to decide) whether or not to include the April 12 letter (from herself and David) to Bill Fox that Fox’s letter of April 26 is clearly an answer to.

Let’s see: Argument (with herself) for including it: though it’s not in any way inserted into her handwritten notes for either April 12 or 26 (all their writing-related correspondence to others is filed away in used grey return envelopes labeled “Correspondence”, envelopes then dropped into cardboard cartons under the eaves, therefore rarely or never included in the Chronicle, therefore not truly chronicled), it does help explain most of what’s in Bill Fox’s letter.

Argument (with herself) for leaving it out: a) since the letter of April 12 to Bill Fox was never meant to be chronicled, inserting it violates one of the Chronicle’s unstated but natural laws, specifically its principle of exclusion; b) neither Monica nor David are in love with letter-writing, even less so with writing letters that restate in worse language ideas about their work already expressed as they wanted to in the work: therefore Monica has always found it uninteresting to chronicle their letters — while the letters of others to herself (or to herself and David) seem to her just one more external event, no less or more superficial than any event in nature, any passing figure, overheard conversation, fragment of story told to her, etc. that arrives of its own accord and allows her to chronicle herself solely by chronicling everything that makes an outline around her.

She decides (and already regrets the decision?) to include this much of their April 12 letter to Bill Fox:

“Dear Bill Fox,

“Enclosing a number of things:

“1) The photographic documentation you wanted to see of AS IT RETURNS, our environmental, wall-mounted “space novel”. Also including, in conjunction with the photographs: some reduced-scale models of a number of auxiliary charts, guides to mounting, proposals, etc., that were mounted with the wall grids; a two page “score” for the event.

“2) Time Table: 22 items on 22 sheets. It was shown as a 22 panel wall piece (along with a number of other language art table and wall texts) in the “Language and Structure in North America” exhibition, traveling language art exhibition that had its opening installation (nov. 3-30) at the 567 Gallery, Toronto.

“It’s a text designed to function as a conceptual whole, meaning in the total form, and we’d like you to consider it as a chapbook or whatever.

“The 22^nd sheet comprises a location code or graph for the placement of the preceding 21 on a continuous flat surface: so that what at first appears a wholly sequential (temporal) reading experience can be experienced as a simultaneous inventory of events, things, speech, and so on. The 21 items on the first 21 pages are re-placed within a sort of spherical graph, a dense and lucid mass of space/time, a conceptually transparent ‘world’.”

“What follows is a chart of twenty-one lines in four columns detailing the ideal design for printing TIME TABLE, plus some paragraphs about some upcoming SPACE NOVEL activities.”

Still on May 5? Lena Coffin gives Monica a quick hello before hurrying up her orange brick front steps with a fast, almost hopping gait that’s both nervous and athletic and Monica can see that Lena’s oval, too-thin-once-plum-like face and always-plaintive eyes have a new, softer and fluffier frame of hair that’s been given a curly look with red tones added to its chestnut. (Pauses for a split second to say hello precisely so Monica will notice her hair?)

At the same time and in the same way that Monica is able to see the change in Lena Coffin’s hair, she thinks she can see a more silvery tone to the fresh green leaves of the Regans’ magnificent, old elm across the way (25⁰ angle SW?), in its own way giving a quick, rustling hello to anyone paying attention to it across the way.

Is whatever’s written a score for something not completely on the page that the writer hears and wants the reader to hear? A score in the sense that what’s on the page has to be brought to life by the addition of what exactly from the reader? (Played where and with what?) There’s this too: writing’s existence on the page is real, but only in the odd sense that it’s not life and knows it’s not life or even a replica of life, but has its own, other, thin but infinite life here, on paper, that is at the same time an enormous virtual life, like every other reality that isn’t the one-and-only first reality. Most interesting when a bridge between writer and reader can, one way or another, be crossed?

Not recorded at the time or even just after, but a day later “from memory”. Handwritten notes say that on May 6 Monica is working outside though it’s just stopped raining, trying to chronicle “yesterday’s” trip to David’s childhood dentist in Brooklyn. “Today”, while writing, the ground is drying on a day that seemed as if it would stay wet forever and the air rising from it is damp and cool while (with pen and paper) she’s setting out again from the coolness of ABC Street wearing a turtleneck that will make her suffer every minute she's driving through the super-heated streets of Brooklyn.

According to Monica’s notes her route through Brooklyn goes something like this (though it doesn’t make perfect sense to her later, while typing, and probably should be checked for accuracy with a map):

path to Avenue K not noted

tree-lined Avenue K to Ocean Avenue

Ocean Avenue to McDonald Avenue

trees and pleasant, turn-of-the-century houses give way on McDonald Avenue to trolley tracks still embedded in the road under an elevated subway line: long rows of two or three story brick (and what other pale but dirty stone?) facades look as if they’re tired of what they have to look at and what they have to listen to. A horribly slow trip because the tires keep getting stuck and Monica has to maneuver to unstick them from the narrow grooves of the useless trolley tracks under the el.

Long trip under the el seems to be or really is hotter than the drive along Avenue K and then Ocean.

Let’s see, what else?:       McDonald to Cortelyou

                                       Cortelyou to Flatbush

                                       Flatbush to Beverly

                                       Beverly to Brooklyn Avenue (though Monica doesn’t remember a “Brooklyn Avenue” in Brooklyn)

                                       "Brooklyn Avenue” to the dentist’s office (street not noted).

David’s childhood dentist says that he’s sick of Brooklyn and sick of this neighborhood and sick of just about everything. Certainly sick of looking at the same thing out his back office window. He’s lived and worked in Brooklyn too long. So he’s sold his office and this is the last time they’ll ever see him here.

“Later on the same day”, on the way home, while trying to find their way to Nostrand Avenue, Monica and David drive along Avenue X, turn down S or T, turn another corner and have no idea where they are. The feeling of unfamiliarity is a pleasant one (as if there are pockets of unknown cities in your own familiar one) and they decide to spend a little time there before finding their way home. A small restaurant turns up so they can linger at a quiet, un-Brooklyn-like intersection, broad and light and looking out on the long, green space of a park-like playing field and they stay as long as possible in this little pocket of unfamiliarity before finding an avenue that leads back into the Brooklyn they know.

“Later on the same day” (at about 10 p.m.) Monica is on the boardwalk between ABC Street and ABD Street, doing nothing but breathing in the peculiarly sweet and grassy fragrance that can’t be separated (she tries to separate them) from the cool waves of air drifting north from the ocean. Not far away from her Joshua Coffin and Riley Liman are hanging out together (doing what exactly?) and Monica hears something about Hank Forest’s first birthday party “this afternoon”. Whatever it is Riley and Joshua are talking about isn’t remembered or noted, but it reminds Monica that she’d meant to scribble down but didn’t that, before leaving for Brooklyn, she’d seen Lena Coffin all dressed up and making a bee-line (south) for Babette-Grete-and-Andy’s shared two-family at the ocean end of the block. Invited to Hank Forest’s party, but any memory of it wiped out because of the long, hot trip to David’s childhood dentist in Brooklyn.

It’s not clear in her handwritten notes, but it may be from the perspective of Alyosha’s car (borrowed pretty much whenever she needs it and parked on ABC Street near the massive, cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her attic apartment) that Monica sees Artie Tilden’s small head, absolute-zero-color white skin, red ponytail going in and out the front (porch) door, carrying stuff and dumping it over the north-facing railing into the paved and grassy space (where the trash cans are kept) between the multiple dwelling and the landlord’s boxy pseudo-modern. Repeated trips, carrying and dumping junk — therefore “spring cleaning” of Artie’s small, second floor apartment, which, like every other apartment, is able to contain ten thousand times more junk then there’s room for because most of it is invisible until we think about it. . . .

At around 6 p.m. on May 6 rain begins to fall while Monica is sitting in Alyosha’s parked car (reason not noted). Starts suddenly and becomes heavy almost at once and in that way the space Monica is sitting in (looking out at the world) and the world “out there” (being looked at) are re-invented in a twinkling: all at once the wide, neutral basin of experience from a point inside the self to the endpoint of its gaze out of itself is flooded with pitcher after pitcher of sensation poured down as green water from a height over the roof of the car, sliding out across the windows in sheets and horizontally into the world where a green puddle might also be a green pond or a green tree. Thunder and lightning help far and near get mixed up and shoot the green puddle of the street through with cosmic energy. Fresh-minted green and mossy green, bright and blurred, are dispersed in droplets across a broad horizon of asphalt that might as well be the sky.

Not clear to Monica (while typing May notes in November) whether it's later on May 6 and still raining or already May 7, but notes say clearly that whether on the 6 or the 7 a seagull's cry (right outside her third floor attic windows) wakes her up in pitch darkness “at 5 a.m.”: wind blowing darkness across her windows as if it were snow. A cold storm of darkness that gives her apartment an unpleasant chill.

Later (on what must be May 7) rain has stopped, the apartment is bright and Monica is at her enormous oak desk-and-breakfast-table, giving herself the pleasure of editing the Chronicle while smoking a solitary cigarette and drinking from a tall glass of mild and creamy iced coffee (made for her by David?) while nibbling at a good-sized wedge of the famous Peninsula Bake Shop’s perfect cream cheese cake (with or without Monica’s favorite cherry topping not noted). The recipe seems to be a classic “New York Cheesecake” recipe and probably resembles the best ones David’s able to find in some of the American cookbooks he borrows over and over from the local library, but there must be some subtle difference in balance of ingredients (quantity of cream cheese, sour cream and/or heavy cream, number and size of eggs, quantity of sugar, vanilla extract or no vanilla extract, etc.) and/or execution (Peninsula Bake Shop’s top surface is always a deep and beautiful caramelized brown, rich and dense interior always seems to get even creamier and more melting the deeper you dig toward the center, cookie dough base (though Monica loves a buttery graham cracker crust) is crisp and crunchy, never sugary).

Lilacs in Monica’s modernist Czechoslovakian vase (tapering, faceted blocks of smoky grey crystal) and green avocado vines against golden bamboo blinds are the perpetual April/May background to writing, editing, typing, sipping iced coffee and having breakfast (with or without David there to make it) at the massive oak desk-and-breakfast-table in her green front (west-facing) studio.

Let’s see: winding tangles of green avocado vines and branches of cut lilacs that may not keep opening after they’re cut and either lose color with time or have another element added by time that bleaches their deep amethyst and syrupy blackberry down to a colorless lilac with no more tint or flavor to it than a violet pastille that’s been in someone’s mouth too long.

What else? By chance Monica is at the left-hand (south-most) of the two sets of west-facing green studio casement windows (taking a break from editing/typing?) just at the instant Wanda Baer is passing, heading S —> N from her elbow-shaped attic apartment in the Coffins’ massive orange brick and cracked white stucco multiple dwelling next door (south) toward Coast Boulevard and beyond: Monica has a chance to look at Wanda Baer for a peculiarly drawn out length of time, given the length of space she has to traverse window edge to window edge before her image is cut off by the lip of the landlord’s roof, because she’s moving as if the soles of her heavy boots are gummy and each step takes forever to get unstuck from the rough skin of the sidewalk. That makes Monica focus. Wanda Baer’s body looks unusually squared-off and bulky, as if shape-shifting in the direction of her friend Lizzy’s outline, heavy-legged, lumpen and depressed. Monica makes a note to herself to look back through her notes to see if she missed the-signs-that-should-be-noticeable-but-never-are of Wanda Baer’s metamorphosis.

“I was born when I met you.

“I died when you left me.

“I was alive for a few weeks while you loved me.”

At her desk on the same day (while drinking iced coffee, etc.)? Is it purely “memory” or is it something about her position and, because of her position, the direction she’s looking (out through plants and bamboo toward roofs and sky cut and pieced into blue and black lines and blots) that sends her tunneling back through days that may be the same day in early May: May ’75, May ’74, possibly even May ’73 or ’72. Monica could find out for sure on what day in early May of what year in the early ‘70’s she and David saw Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place in the downstairs movie theater in The Museum of Modern Art and if that day was a July-like 97 degrees (though “97 degrees” may refer to another day entirely, because the notes on the folded-in-half sheet of scrap paper are bristling with references in many directions) if she wanted to search back through her notes for May of those years, but she doesn’t (first principle of the Chronicle is to go back just enough to keep going forward).

Because Monica wants to keep traveling forward through the long (infinite?) tunnel of folded sheets of handwritten Chronicle — heavy lavender sheets that may be watermarked bond with cotton content, thinner and glossier white sheets with a green stripe along one margin, and all sorts of other scrap paper of better or worse quality, but always 8 1/2” x 11” or larger — she’s reluctant to take time to explore the importance of seeing In a Lonely Place for her writing life (and for David’s writing life equally) at that time. She finds it enough to say that, from that moment on, both she and David looked for, educated themselves about and taught themselves to pay a different kind of attention to certain kinds of black and white American crime films and melodramas. In particular, when they watched these films separately or together (avoiding even then the common terms for the categories usually used for these films because the assumption of a common understanding implied by using universally accepted terms inevitably leads to the meaningless muddle taken for cultural truth) they each began in their own way to make an effort to recreate scenes, to copy out dialogue from memory (that is, to re-invent it) and to note down precisely (while in the act of watching) names of characters, hotels, clubs, etc. For example: Monica notes the double-triple-or-quadruple-centeredness of In a Lonely Place: bitter inside-Hollywood drama centered on the screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart); Humphrey Bogart’s (Dixon Steele’s) combustible temper; effect of Steele-Bogart’s combustible temper on a) his love affair with Gloria Graham (Laurel Grey) and b) the policier/murder mystery centering on the investigation of the death of Bogart-Steele’s script girl or studio secretary. (A lot could also be said about Monica-and-David’s scene-by-scene re-creation of the film Dark Passage, for example, and what they tried to do with it in a 500 page novel called Locked Room, but she feels the need to keep climbing horizontally forward through the days of May ’76.)

Monica reminds herself also how much could be said — how much she and David have said to each other and how much she’d like to say here — about the Hollywood studio film and its familiar actors (only of a certain kind and a certain era?) as a body (the only body) of authentic American myth: the actors and actresses as figures whose adventures can be followed from film to film, exactly the way the adventures of Odysseus, Herakles, Athena, Artemis, etc. can be followed. (And probably the only myth-system an American writer can make use of without being literary in the wrong way.)

Out the side window of Monica’s green room studio on the evening of the same day in early May?: resonant dark-blue-in-luminous-blue sky (each blue rebounds off the other in a shimmering way that may create still other blues) above roofs as black as if night is resting there before standing to its full length upward. Let’s see: it may be while looking out the green room side window and trying to figure out how far into first or second blue the fourth or fifth blue she’s staring at is sinking (walking back and forth while thinking about something she was typing from her handwritten notes) that she continues to try to make a mental list of those who were very much in her life, but who she now hardly ever sees or doesn’t see at all. List begins easily with her sister, Kitty, with Lowell’s ex-girlfriend, the young violinist, Jill (who became Monica’s friend through Lowell) and with someone Monica knew in college — unmarried then and named Amanda Schiller and both then and now that she’s married a plum-dark jam of nervous intelligence, unhappy good looks, imagination, anxiety and awkwardness – who she now knows (but rarely sees) as Warren Rosenwasser’s academic wife and Fred Rosenwasser’s hardly-ever-mentioned daughter-in-law.

Five in the afternoon of what day Monica’s sitting on the front porch steps in bright sunlight, happily writing about what (aside from the hour that she’s sitting on the steps, etc.)?

Next notes are clearly dated May 8: taking a walk with David and circling around the neighborhood by way of the boardwalk, Monica is struck by the degree to which the white illumination of the moon alters blue of sky, water and land. The effect of particle-waves of light traveling through everything blue as powerful as what waves traveling through the human body?

White moon and long clouds that began as “fishbone” clouds minute-by-minute grow softer and more feathery as if combing themselves out from within.

Blue sky, blue water, blue land, blue evening: all different shades of blue to begin with, each blue needing to be named or in some way distinguished from the others and then named again in their altered (illuminated) state: cyan, hyacinth, indigo, cobalt, gentian and delphinium, azure shaded into gas flame and bluejay blue-grey and pure blue and then out into morning glory and what else, all there in hues that are variations of other hues and therefore can’t be named because of varying degrees of brightness, intensity, fading, reflectivity, absorbance and presence of anthocyanin, commelinin, delphinidin and other pigments and the interaction of these blue pigments with various ions, acids, etc. that change blues to other blues or change blue into something else altogether. It would take forever to name each blue precisely and Monica would like to have the time to do it, but that time would be infinity.

Let’s see: where exactly in their circling walk around the neighborhood do Monica and David become conscious that the “twins” are twinning behind them? Amid all other voices, noises, events, things to look at the unmistakable see-sawing of profoundly grumbling bass and bitter silence works its way into consciousness.

One sentence in her notes mentions Coast Boulevard, but only for the reason that Monica isn’t sure that following the twins while they’re twinning by allowing them to think they’re following her (and David) along an unrecorded circuitous route, justifies the fact that she was not able to see what she set out to see: she loves the long, late-afternoon moment when orange sunlight travels the length of Coast Boulevard’s double row of trees and builds up orange-green pyramids of light and leaf and leaf + leaf and light x leaf x light from the farthest point west to wherever she’s standing. May love it more because she usually misses it and misses it again today because she decides to follow the twins by allowing them to follow her.

TWINS TWINNING (May 8, ’76)

A. Look at that bum! no coat, no hat, no nothin!

B.

A. You remind me of fuckn Moriarity!

B.

A. All y’have t’do is look at the guy, am I right?

B.

A. I drink with a lot of pigs, so what?!

B.

A. You were talkin? I hadda talk!

B.

A. Rockefeller!? Forgettabout ‘m!

B.

A. Wait a minute! wait a minute! wait a minute!

B.

A. No-no-no-no! Eh?

B.

A. You got the bag without payin? And you asked me if I. . . !

B.

A. Oh! I’m tired! Tired of this neighborhood! Tired of this town! What else are we tired of . . .?

B.

David is slicing apples, but when?

Monica notes the aroma of apples and a sentence before or after (which doesn’t necessarily mean a second before or after) notes the strange double aroma of lilacs and sweet potato.

This too (and also not certain when): David reports to Monica for the Chronicle that he was surprised to see swallows on the beach, flying as low over the sand as they do over meadows, ponds, etc. And the same handwritten line says something about “sitting with Lowell in warm sunlight, around noon”. But do the way her sentences are written mean that a) David is sitting with Lowell in warm, noontime sunlight on the beach when he’s surprised to see swallows, etc. or b) she herself is with Lowell in warm sunlight, in his small, second floor, south-east facing apartment near the beach or in her attic apartment three blocks east, when she catches 1, 2 or 3 aromas — sweet potato, lilac and apple — one by one or all together.

May 9 and May 10 are spring days with no other season in them: warm and cool, already-green yet still-sprouting.

At different moments during these two days, which flow one into the other with little or no distinction, the Rosenwassers’ north-facing picture window (which is highly reflective, almost mirror-like, with only here-and-there a dark patch that could either be interior shadow with a mahogany or plum-colored easy chair at the bottom of it or layers of shade cradled inside a tree that may also cradle curtains and bookshelves) reflects sunlit movement of green branches and rows of pastel-colored towels.

The colors of the towels in the Rosenwassers’ picture window have replaced the colors of flowers: chemical lime green, vacant pale green there’s no name for in nature, weakest of weak and watery yellows, pink that hardly has any color in it at all and that you’ve only called “pink” because you can’t think of any other color to call it and a dissolving blue diluted to match pink, yellow, green.

As sun grows warmer and its power forces itself up inside and through shoots, stems, blades, leaves and vines, every street has its fountains and its flood plains of green: too many shades of green to catalogue and every other color drowned in or stained by green. Must still be flowers blooming on ABC Street or in the neighborhood, but on May 9 and 10 Monica doesn’t see them.

Let’s see: Al Szarka, who says very little to Monica, stops on his unusually bounding way across the porch and down the stairs (excited and smiling in a way that’s very un-Al-Szarka-like) to tell her that he’s on his way to play paddle ball and he has to hurry! . . . has to be back by (time not noted).

Almost at the same instant Al Szarka is rushing down the front porch stairs, acting in every way like someone who only looks like Al Szarka, apple-faced Finnley Lenehan is coming up the stairs two at a time to talk to Monica though he doesn’t really have a story to tell. He’s on his way back from mass and has to hurry if he wants to get over to the Peninsula Bake Shop in time to surprise his mom with a whipped cream cake for Mother’s Day. The cake he wants is expensive, but he should be able to do it because he’s chipping in with Teddy Finch, the tenant who moved into their tiniest studio two weeks ago and is already pretty much in love with his mother, like everybody else. . . !

More on Sunday, May 9:

Lena Coffin’s parents are visiting from New Jersey (city or town not noted or not known) and their visit has given Greg-and-Lena’s seldom-used-front-porch-ping-pong-room new life: hollow pip-pop/tik-tok double and quadruple bouncing of ping-pong balls this way and that without much force, strenuous lunging and darting of lit-up figures — glimpsed in flashes through the curtained frames of the porch room’s two north-facing driveway windows: one of them clearly Grete Forest (long, beautiful and suntanned arms and legs), the other most likely Lena’s father.

Earlier or later on the same day? Same day or another? JoAnne Renard bicycles up — not just in short, white tennis shorts, but in a coordinated white tennis outfit — racket carried how? Stops short of Lena-and-Greg’s (headed there to say hello to Lena’s visiting parents?) to chat with Monica, who’s not hidden as well as she thinks she is behind the tall and wide pyramid of the Rhinebeck pine. She has no story to tell or she may think that talking about gardening is a story: she’s had no luck with her garden this year: gave up and tried planting some flowers in flower pots, but that hasn’t worked either! “Not like Lena”, she adds — “just look at Lena’s tulips!” Voice seems meant to carry to Lena — who at this moment is working desperately on her threadbare lawn.

Lena says that she has no idea what JoAnne is talking about: she has no feeling for plants at all! All anyone has to do is look at her miserable lawn. . . ! She’s sure Monica looks at it every day and can’t believe she’s living next to something so ugly. Grass is dry and dead and nothing seems able to revive it, hedges are such a mess you can’t even tell that they are hedges, nothing but a few pathetic tulips, the easiest thing to grow. . . .

JoAnne says absurd things sometimes, Lena says, shaking her head, and goes back to trimming vigorous weeds at the edges of her barren lawn with a pair of oversized and powerful garden shears that, it seems to Monica, are exactly identical to the pair of oversized garden shears she saw being used early this morning — when ABC Street was quiet, moist and empty — by always-upright-and-immaculate Al Quinlan to keep in precise, military trim the L-shaped block of hedges around the Quinlans’ corner property at the Southeast intersection of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard.

Grete Forest appears (not noted whether from the direction of Greg-and-Lena’s front porch ping-pong room or from the two family at the ocean end of the street that Grete Forest, Andy Forest, Hank Forest and Martina (Tina) Lima share with Greg and Grete’s mother, round, tawny and attractive Babette, and therefore not at all certain whether the fact that Grete has heavy little six-year-old Hank on her back makes it impossible for this to be the same occasion when she’s playing ping-pong with Lena’s father) and agrees (having heard Monica-Lena-and-JoAnne’s conversation from where?) that Lena’s lawn is disgusting. JoAnne should know that the only one in their little world with a so-called green thumb is Babette. Her mother just has to look at a plant, while everyone from their generation. . . .

Lena wants to know if she’s the only one who’s noticed that her tulips and everyone else’s tulips — always the same childish blobs of high-intensity red, high-intensity purple and weird but electric not-quite-azalea — are the only colors left in the streets other than green. It’s as if the ocean had turned as green as a pond and flooded the streets.

Without Monica having seen Al Szarka return from playing paddleball here he is again — in a fresh shirt and bluer, crisper jeans — on his way out the front door with Yvonne Wilding, carrying two gift-wrapped packages and looking happy about it. Yvonne’s mother is alive or dead in Australia and it comes as a surprise to Monica that a) Al Szarka’s mother is alive and that b) he gets along with her well enough to be happily visiting her on Mother’s Day. Someone (a bad or false “collaborator”?) had told her that Al’s bad moods and heavy drinking had to do with a brutal childhood, but now Monica wonders if there’s any truth in that thumbnail version of Al’s life. Wonders also if, as a general principle, we need to know any more about anyone than what we see and hear.

Still on May 10? David is writing on Monica’s porch in the southernmost corner behind the tall Rhinebeck pine where Monica usually works, but Jojo Coffin and Daisy Brennan both know very well where Monica and David half-heartedly try to hide and they both run up the stairs to spend a little time with David, telling him stories (hoping he’ll write them down later, mixed in with the story he was writing when they walked through it.)

Let’s see: they spend a lot of time examining the pen David’s writing with: a plastic four-color pen with a clever system of pop-out ink tubes, given to him (he tells Jojo and Daisy) by Monica’s brother, Lowell, a medical student. And, according to Lowell, it’s a pen used by all medical students because they use the four colored inks to underscore words and ideas in their notes. David adds that, while he’s not in love with the pen because he finds the colors a little thin and lifeless, he’s touched by the fact that Lowell gave it to him because Lowell knows that his mind works in a peculiar way: thinks of every sentence in multiple constructions and — rather than waste time choosing between possibilities — prefers to get all possibilities on paper quickly, each one in a different colored ink. Or sometimes he uses a simple two color system, but that would take too long to explain. Jojo and Daisy like to hear such details and generally ask very sensible questions about them, but, even more, like to entertain David with stories and details of their own. Jojo begins by saying (while she and Daisy take turns clicking the springed levers and popping the colored pen-tips in and out of their chambers, experimenting by scrawling nonsense sentences in David's note pad) that she and Daisy were in the hospital together: Joshua broke his collar bone and, Daisy says, weaving her story in with Jojo’s, she had to find out why her hands were swollen: they swelled up suddenly and while they were swollen she couldn’t touch anything (or be touched by anything) because the slightest pressure made her skin hurt.

What else?

David can’t remember, so can’t report to Monica, which one of them asked the other if she remembered seeing at least one doctor using a pen like the one Monica’s brother Lowell gave David. (It’s a detail that interests them and that they both feel the need to get settled.)

This too: Jojo wants to know if David has any idea what happened to the two sisters. She’s pretty sure that one of them is called “Nora Salerno” and the other one “Marian Woolsey”, but she can’t remember which one of them was nicer and gave them tons of candy; thinks it was the one who went by bus and subway to work in the city every day and maybe drank a little and not the one who was retired from something and home all day and had a nervous, purry way of talking, but she can’t be sure. Can David solve it? Does he know which one was the nice one and which one is “Marian Woolsey” and which one is “Nora Salerno”? It always confused them, but now both of them seem to have disappeared and they miss them (even the one they didn’t like). Miss them or miss the candy, Jojo says, and David can’t help laughing with them.

Not noted when Jimmy X says that he can’t stay at Timmy’s any longer: it’s Mother’s Day and he has to get home quick because his grandparents are coming from the Bronx. Not the X’s — there is no Grandpa X, only Grandma — but the Kropotkins, his father’s parents who he hardly knows!

In one of at least two dreams “the other night” Monica is in the kitchen of her mother Betty’s house. It seems to Monica that the dreams are not discrete entities, but islands in a dream system: an archipelago of narratives more transparent than green and solid little hills in the water: a chain and a system only because the dream-islands are strung together along the thread of one emotion and because any look out of the self, even one into the near distance, can transport the self without limit into any one of a number of dream-narratives in the island chain.

A self that may be Monica’s self or not (like the disembodied movie-goer’s self, in the dark, watching as if acting) is looking at Monica’s mother listen with impatient sympathy to a woman she’s related to (not identified in the dream, therefore faceless later, when Monica’s awake and trying to write about it) tell a long, hopeful yet depressing tale about her ailing, eighty-seven-year-old mother. Someone’s informed her: “your mother’s had a stroke and she may not have two days to live!” And this too: “basically, your mother’s dead, but her pacemaker’s alive! And the fact that the pacemaker’s alive, even though not one organ or system of the actual body is working, gives us hope that the whole thing might kick into gear and start living again.”

So she rushed down to Florida — as fast as it takes to think about it — to be at her mother’s bedside when she died. But her mother didn’t die. The doctors were wrong. They didn’t admit they were wrong, they just called it “a remarkable recovery” and here she is together with her mother on Mother’s Day in Betty’s kitchen, arguing about where to eat. . . .

While the woman is telling her tale Monica is looking at her own mother and making the mistake of allowing her gaze to slip past her mother into the larger dream that includes this one or into another one visible through its teleporting membrane.

Glance into it takes you there.

The dream “in Monica’s mother’s kitchen” occupies a space about the size of a kitchen in the larger dream, which resembles the mansion-like Victorian house of Monica’s childhood friend, Alana (room enough there for Alana’s elderly unmarried aunts, Thelma and Wilma).

Let’s see: Alana’s cousin Billie is visiting: Billie wants Alana to meet the man she intends to marry and also has a story to tell “about her father’s heart attack”. The words “heart attack” feel to the dreaming self more like a terrible throbbing of the arteries of its brain than like words spoken by Alana’s cousin Billie. Monica’s notes aren’t clear: Alana may say, “my mother really did just have a heart attack: her heart attack is real, but I’m not sure if your father’s had a heart attack or if you just needed to attack my brain and my arteries with the words ‘heart attack’”. It’s probably not in the dream, it’s only later when she’s working quickly to get the large dream and all its little, internal dreams down, that Monica thinks about her own father Alyosha’s presence (the fact that he’s had a heart attack, for example) in one dream or another.

What else? It seems to Monica that she’s conscious in the dream of the fact that, in reality, Alana’s aunt Wilma has just died. Wilma’s death is palpable (visible?) in the dream in two ways: in the fact that the corpse being carried in a stretcher looks like Wilma and in the fact that grief has turned Wilma’s sister Thelma, always a pleasant-looking, likeable person, into a grotesque near-corpse, bald, shaking and unsteady on her wooden leg. She can’t let go of the stretcher that’s turned into a wheelbarrow being wheeled absurdly low to the ground (Wilma’s corpse makes such a heavy, sinking shape in the loose cloth that everyone’s surprised that death could add such weight), its noisy squealing waking Monica up at 4 a.m.

On a grey and chilly May 11 Monica first catches sight of Nelly X’s husband, Bill Kropotkin, as he’s heading into the post office on Bay Drive (between AAF Street and the supermarket) as she’s pulling away in Alyosha’s old two-tone Chevy. Can’t be anyone else: familiar slumping gait that gives the not-necessarily-true impression that he’s depressed; cheeks and chin that aren’t bearded but do have a permanent growth of un-shavable cobalt shadow that may or may not be the dark side of a bright, scholarly intelligence finding less and less use for itself out here in the infinite delta of the everyday; shirt and trousers that could be the unhappy three-hundred-times-washed shirt and trousers of a government clerk.

A little before noon and then again a little after noon of the same day, while taking a long walk with David around the neighborhood in the double shade of a cloudy day under dark and thickly-leafing trees on avenues, boulevards and cross streets, Monica spots Bill Kropotkin at least two times, no longer alone, Nelly X walking in her somewhat stork-like way at his side: always self-conscious (as if she can feel the pressure of downward glances from second or even third story windows like breezes blowing the exaggeratedly loose and superfluous cloth of her blouse and pants), always distracted and often privately laughing, thin and long-legged in homemade or mismatched thrift shop clothing. Deeply bitter voice and anxious whisper make for another kind of twinning as Bill Kropotkin and Nelly X approach under the trees.

Order is uncertain, but while typing, editing and trying to add a missing, perhaps unwanted element of order to her handwritten notes, Monica makes a little catalogue of the times she runs into Bill Kropotkin with or without Nelly X on May 11.

1. On ABC Street (where there aren’t enough trees to make a shaded tunnel the length of the street) Bill and Nelly are searching frantically together for Jimmy X, calling his name and poking around in driveways and other even narrower spaces between houses as if Jimmy might be hiding from them.

2 and/or 3. On Coast Boulevard in the dark shade of a row of massive old trees.

And if not on Coast Boulevard or first on Coast Boulevard and then again on ABG Street: Bill Kropotkin stops to talk because, almost against his will, he has a story he needs to tell to Monica and David in the dense and greenly leafy, arbor-like darkness of ABG Street between Coast Boulevard and Salem Avenue or in the open, relatively bright stretch where ABG Street approaches beach and ocean while (in either location) Monica is transfixed for ten, fifteen minutes or even half-an-hour by a bed of tulips whose near-black purple she knows is going to give her trouble naming (except by easy, half-true analogy) when she’s sitting on the porch with pen and paper.

Bill Kropotkin (who has no interest in the too-dark-to-be-called-“purple” tulips or in dark ocean (darker than blackest purple? darker than color?) made turbulent by absence of sunlight (absence of weight of sunlight releases breezes and churning of unbound breezes through ocean allows cold that had been sitting on the bottom to swim to the surface) begins his story on an optimistic note.

He has a grant! Monica and David must know — or maybe they don’t — how hard he’s worked and how hard it is to do the kind of serious scholarship he’s doing living the life he’s living! They know how he lives. They’ve seen the corner of the kitchen Nelly likes to call his “study”. So now, finally, there’s some hope of feeling or actually being accepted and acknowledged by the scholarly community despite the fact that life led him out here to this wasteland. . . .

Monica makes the mistake of congratulating Bill and that causes him to qualify his optimism.

To be strictly accurate, he says, he doesn’t actually have the grant: he filed his application before the May 1 deadline and the final decision won’t be announced until May 31, but his sponsor says that he’s been assured privately that he (Bill) will be awarded a $12,000 Mellon Grant, if nothing else. His sponsor says that what carried a lot of weight was that, out of thousands of graduates, he’s one of the very few who’s published articles in leading academic journals.

Tone still optimistic or not?

It seems to Monica that both Bill Kropotkin’s demeanor and the beard-like cobalt shadows that have never been shaven out of their skin-folds are getting darker and that the longer it takes to unfold his story the more gloominess has a chance to bloom into what Monica knows as Bill Kropotkin.

This is what worries him, he says: the person assuring him that he has the grant (though no official announcement has been made) is his sponsor and his sponsor is a fool. The books he’s published are unimportant, no one respects his scholarship, therefore his word carries no weight. While, on the other side, there are influential people arrayed against him. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for one, hates his guts and sits on the Mellon Foundation board. A couple of years ago he sent her his paper on Anti-Semitism in 19th Century France (hoping for what?) and he found the note she sent him insulting and misinformed — so naturally (stupidly) he wrote back and called her criticism reactionary, politically motivated and factually incorrect and she’s been his enemy ever since. And then, when the article was published in a respected journal, he may have sent another, even nastier note. There’s this too: even if they’d never argued, he was never Himmelfarb’s student so she has no reason to care if he gets a grant or not. Himmelfarb’s students generally end up with foundation money (because Himmelfarb is Himmelfarb) while his sponsor is a fool and a nobody whose students never end up with anything. . . .

Monica can see that Bill Kropotkin is now in his element (soul in its own bathwater in its own bath tub). He’s warmed to the subject of his own probable failure and (from where Monica’s standing) seems to be trying to coax the mass of miserable energy that’s always invisibly in him into a visibly foaming collapse.

What else? Bill says that, because he knows that Monica and David separately or together have seen just about every film ever made, he assumes that they’ve seen Taxi Driver. He and Nelly hardly ever go to the movies, but the young actor who plays the lead in Taxi Driver is Nelly’s art teacher’s son, so she was curious and wanted to go. The film was ok and probably meant to be depressing, but it depressed him for reasons that couldn’t have been anyone else’s. Of course he’s nothing like the young DeNiro and his life is nothing like the character’s life, but he is going to be driving a taxi. His unemployment runs out at the end of the month and he has to do something: over-educated for most things, unqualified for the rest. No teaching jobs available on the college or graduate level, so what’s left for him to do? He’s a good driver and (with the exception of Staten Island) knows the five boroughs. And that’s why he’s free to be wandering around the neighborhood all day long. Gave himself a mental vacation until the end of the month — and then there’ll either be a $12,000 grant or one more taxi driver loose in the city in a permanently lousy mood.

That reminds him: he and Nelly never go to films and they never eat in restaurants, but the night they went to Taxi Driver they ate in the same Chinatown restaurant they eat in whenever they eat in a restaurant and that he recommended to Monica and David. Did they love it as much as he does?

Monica has to admit that they never tried it. Can’t remember the name of the restaurant and can’t even remember Bill recommending anything.

Now Bill is enraged. All Bill’s shadows gather and turn a different color. So they were only pretending to be interested, he says with venom. They eat in Manhattan restaurants all the time, but don’t have enough respect for his opinion to try his restaurant even once! True, he doesn’t know the name of it and may never have known the name of it or told them the name of it, but that’s not the point! If they wanted to find it they would have! He must have told them and he’ll tell them again now that it’s the one at the intersection of Mott and Hester where you can fill up for a dollar fifty! All the rice dishes are so cheap and delicious, he says, that he can name and describe everything they ate and, to prove it, catalogues the ingredients of two dishes in detail (details not interesting to Monica and not noted).

Monica sees while typing that Nelly X’s presence doesn’t register in her handwritten notes and she thinks it’s safe to assume that Bill Kropotkin does a lot of his wandering around the neighborhood alone.

Monica wonders: why this sudden sudsing-up of light? No other way to say it, but what is it made of? Moisture added to the dazzling electrons of azaleas may have something to do with it — and then beaten by what? — by what exactly? — into an impossibly foaming atmosphere charged and clouded and azalea at its core: its un-namable color having something to do with the electrons of hyacinth and magenta flavonoid pigments speeded up and smashed together.

Nadja bicycles by (on what mid-May day exactly? tanned and beautiful in green and silky track shorts and raspberry halter top) and calls out “hello!” in her sweetly lazy, difficult-to-identify accent. Then adds cryptically but still sweetly: “a long winter!” “But,” Monica thinks she answers, “weren’t you away for the winter? didn’t you spend your winter someplace tropical?” “Yes, oh yes, you’re right, that’s so,” Nadja sings out, maybe with even more syrup that may be the syrup of laziness or the syrup of unhurried sensuality or just the simple syrup of untroubled friendliness, “but — I don’t know if I can explain it — I would get such a longing sometimes and I’m so happy to be home in this neighborhood where I can at least see a face I know. . . .”

There’s Bill Kropotkin again — this time walking S → N on ABC Street from boardwalk toward Coast Boulevard, not alone and not only with his immediate family (Nelly X and little Jimmy X), but with rarely seen, shy and nervous Philida (or “Phil”) X in even-more-ill-fitting-and-uglier-than-Nelly’s home-made blouse and trousers.

Through the horizontally scrolling panorama of chronicling Monica is used to seeing one thing turn into another: last night’s rain, for example, turning into the morning breeze that puffs up green, white and blue and moves them all against and through one another.

And this too: inspired by the life-giving sweetness of this morning’s breeze? an unknown woman telescopically in the remote-yet-near-distance south toward the boardwalk on ABC Street is stretching forward over her porch railing, shaking out a grape-purple rug violently into the common space of the street, sending dust on a journey that could end in ocean or bay or could continue out over Jersey, Brooklyn, Manhattan or upward into the stratosphere.

What’s likely to travel further: dust shaken from a grape-purple rug or a sentence you try to memorize until you can write it down?

Same day or another a purple that has more burgundy in it than “grape” appears as a sleepy, floating island in blue-green water. Seems to wriggle and shudder into life and then dive under in one muscular bolt, a powerful marine animal with wine-colored skin: blue-green water stops moving above it and turns into a sluggish and sedgy yellow-green wallow.

Joan Regan calls out from across the way to Monica or to Babette or even little dome-headed Rosamond Coffin getting into Babette’s two-tone caramel-and-coffee convertible: “Do you know? Can anyone tell me? Did it rain much last night? It smells like rain, but if it rained I slept through it!”

While typing her handwritten notes Monica sees that someone named “Ronnie” passed and said “hello” on Coast Boulevard earlier, but now she’s not sure who “Ronnie” is. Notes only say that it’s a long time since she’s run into “Ronnie” and she’d like to (but can’t) measure time by counting pages backward to the last time “Ronnie” was recorded. (Can only anchor herself with certainty, as always, in this moment of consciousness, typing (editing) May ’76 notes on December 12, 1976 on the ground floor of the Salem Avenue house in a livingroom too comfortable to be hers.)

Even though Monica is sitting behind the tall “Rhinebeck” pine (in the SW corner of the porch) with the idea of working, as usual, she notes that it’s too hot to work (hour of the day not noted) and instead half-heartedly tries to catalogue fictions scheduled to be published:

                           "Winter/       /Winter” in Exile (Toronto)

                            “How Many Twilights” in Gallimaufry

                                                                                     : thinks there’s more, but gives up because even cataloguing feels too much like work. Is it possible to allow the day to take over — for the day to simply be a day — without feeling the imperative to chronicle it?

Sitting in the massive, darker than pine green shadow-pyramid of the pine does not mean an escape from the sun: for the eye, sun on leaves — even on the clusters of tiny needle-leaves — is powerful and concentrated enough in its explosive energy packets that eyes pass rapidly through the common stages of eye-blindness, brain-blindness, dizziness, eye-ache, headache to a sober visual reality: real world before her looks solid and well-lit: through shaggy branches of black-green pine mass, through surprisingly tender green, sunlit cone tips: at a slight southwest diagonal toward the unnatural green of far-away tree masses that may or may not be the Regans’ elm or even further west, on ABD Street or beyond, moving in silken ways deep inside the green-black space that Monica can’t say for sure is exactly equal to the Rosenwassers’ picture window.

Breezes blow equally through what can be felt and what can’t be felt and aren’t even deadened by the weight of sunlight.

Johanna (Jojo) Coffin and Daisy Brennan are having one of their prolonged goodbyes not far from the porch where Monica is writing half-hidden (though Monica knows that Jojo and Daisy not only know very well that she’s there, but can easily find her in any of her hiding places). Their goodbyes are a drawn out separation as sticky as chewed bubble gum. This time Jojo is retreating toward her orange brick porch with a small red box of raisins in her left hand and a rocket-shaped bar of orange ices-on-a-stick in the other. The last “goodbye” is Daisy’s, a sweet, other-worldly aria traveling toward Jojo from somewhere near Alexi’s house (where Daisy and her mother Margaret have a small, ground-floor-rear apartment) through dark green tree masses and the blue-and-white of the enormous day.

A day of pairing?

“Twins” pass, twinning as always, right after Grete Forest passes with Donald Crosley’s (aka Alan Ryder’s) mother, Kate, also wife of red-faced, bullish and bristly “Donald Crosley Sr.”. The fact that the twins pass twinning (David hears their familiar see-saw harsh and rumbling bass/rumbling or miserable silence/rumbling bass/etc. before he spots them passing from where he’s working, hidden in the narrow, overgrown walkway between two houses, and sets out to follow, listen and memorize for Monica’s Chronicle) right after Jojo and Daisy, then Grete Forest and Kate Crosley and just a little later in the other direction Grete Forest and Nadja makes Monica wonder if there’s something she hasn’t thought about in either or both Nadja and/or Grete and/or Grete and Kate that allows them to twin, at least for the length of a stroll down ABC Street.

Let’s see: similarities (enough similarities to = anything like “twinning”) between Grete Forest and Kate Crosley seem unlikely to Monica, with the possible exception of a weak and smiling passivity oddly dissolved and hidden in Grete’s physical beauty, but converted completely into anxious movement in Kate Crosley, where a foxy wariness adds more tension to her quick, sparrow-like hip-hopping through the local universe. Still, the tenuous connection between the mild, watery weakness of Grete Forest’s mouth and ankles and Kate Crosley’s nervous, hopping tension can’t be enough of a similarity for true twinning. Comparisons between Grete Forest and Nadja, on the other hand, are far more interesting and hard to sort out, having to do with complex differences and similarities revolving around questions of beauty, laziness, athleticism, etc. Monica likes to get things down while they’re passing, likes to keep moving forward, and to take the time to figure out the parallels and differences between Grete and Nadja would make her feel stalled while important events are going by in the horizontal rapids of the day’s flat revolutions.

David reports to Monica that for a long time — “too long” — the “twins” said nothing: two different weights of silence see-sawing back and forth. Or it’s possible that what sounds to him like the silence of twin #1 (or twin A) is really a rumbling kind of grumbling below human hearing. Maybe coded too. Silence of 1 (or A) = coded grumbling below hearing, silence of 2 (B) a pure silence that for A or 1 is always an audible complaint.

After they turned the corner (right turn East on Coast Boulevard), David says, it went like this:

A. “y’know what I mean?”

B.

A. “does it make sense?”

B.

A. “make sense t’you?!

     “make sense t’me!?

                           “t’me too?

                           “t’me either!”

B.

A. “see what I mean?”

B.

A. “no, t’see what I mean y’ really hafta take a look!”

B.

A. “take a good look

     “Ok?”

B.

A. “fuckn’ dummy can look as much as he wants!

     “fuckn’ dummy never looks at nothin’!

     “fuckn’ dummy looks ‘n looks ‘n looks ‘n looks an’ looks an’ looks an’ looks, but he don’t see what’s fuckn’ in front of’m! Is he the only dummy? No! nothin’ but dummies in this whole town!”

On Wednesday May 12 Monica notes that Bah-Wah, on impulse, takes a stroll from Salem Avenue to ABC Street and does her best to interrupt Monica while she’s writing by pushing her hand away from the page with the strength of her nose. Monica doesn’t find it hard to read Bah-Wah’s mind: she wants to play on the beach and thinks Monica works too much and can use some playtime too.

Waits for Monica on the porch while Monica goes upstairs to put her work away and then they walk about 3/4 of the length of ABC Street south ← to the beach and then down to the wet sand at the edge of the surf — heading in a looping, leisurely way in the direction (west ↑) of Lowell’s small, ocean-facing apartment on ABH Street, Bah-Wah sprinting, woofing, digging, drooling, chasing, splashing all the way with unhinged ecstasy.

Monica is surprised to find Lowell home, on the beach, in a beach chair reading, not at the hospital. Says that he left early and isn’t sure he wants to go back. The more he learns, the more he sees and hears, the more the direction psychiatry is taking disgusts him. All the ideas that attracted him to psychiatry are dismissed as time-consuming fossils and there’s no one to complain to because agreement is universal. The original discoveries, principles and arguments among the giants are considered outdated and un-scientific — more literature than medicine. So he’s looked at not only as out of tune with the times, but as absurd for still finding Freud, Jung, Reich and their disagreements exhilarating. Maybe one day, after they’ve worked on him long enough, he’ll soften up and learn to accept the golden eggs that can’t help dropping into every doctor’s basket. But right now, today, he’d rather be on the beach, sinking into the sand and re-reading The Brothers Karamazov. . . .

Lowell catches himself crabbing and says that he’s happy Bah-Wah dragged Monica over to his place: talking to Monica has changed his mood, as usual, and now he feels like getting off the beach and going somewhere with her.

They drop book and beach chair off at his place and head for Salem Avenue with Bah-Wah (zig-zag dog-path from the beach and ABH Street north and east to Salem Avenue between AAH and AAI Streets) and along the way Monica can’t help noting that spring is coasting through its second stage into summer: all first growth is gone: all fresh, mild green of new leaves is gone: eruption of flowers and colors everywhere is gone: now only a matter (until the next stage) of leaves growing larger, green getting darker and more densely layered, summer everywhere building itself into green-and-darker-green masses: higher, thicker and with one loaded branch resting its full weight on the heavy branch below it, branch on branch on branch and green on green on green, light and shade slightly altering each green below and above each other green and so on and so on.

The hedges framing the Salem Avenue backyard have also grown up into solid screens walling off all neighboring yards and gardens.

Also on May 12, but Monica's notes don't say when exactly: blinding sun off leaves or

                                                                                        blinding sun off green in leaves bleached into the same odd, hard-to-look-at shade visible in the underside of waves just before they rise into even more blinding white foam.

And this also: whatever vegetable (chemical) portals were open and able to alchemize themselves into color are exactly the same portals that still welcome sun in and are burned by it: only where there was life and color and only in those saturated color zones pulsing with frequencies (only there exactly) are there now on May 12 no-color zones that are burnt, bleached and shriveled.

Monica wonders if the sky of May 14 is the sky of May 14 or if either sky or she herself has drifted within the Chronicle. Typed version of handwritten note says "sitting on the front porch under a white sky" and also that only the weakest and palest of possible sunlights — hardly more than a mist — is falling not only on the always-odd ashen green of the Rhinebeck pine needle-leaves, but on everything, making every single thing in the world look like a white stocking has been slipped over it.

But, re-reading her typed notes she finds that her account of the white sky on May 14 was typed (edited) with views of deep snow through the windows of the Salem Avenue house in the bitter winter of December/January ‘76/’77 and that fact unhinges Monica’s certainty about what sky she was chronicling and what might have drifted where.

On Friday May 14 the Twins pass twinning, but not for long. Even less is said than usual.

A. "You say ‘it’s a good buy’, but what the fuck is a ‘good buy’?

B.

A. "If I don’t need it, if you don't need it, what the fuck is good about buying it?!"

B.

A. "You say I should have said ‘goodbye’?"

B.

A. "I don’t say goodbye to no one!"

B.

A. "Ah!"

B.

A. "Eh."

B.

A. "Today?"

B.

A. "Today you say?"

B.

A. "Today is our 'lucky day'?"

B.

A. "Yesterday was our 'lucky day'?"

B.

A. "Who in this nothing town. . . ?"

B.

A. ". . . don't have a day. . . ."

B.

A. "Don't even want to have a day!"

B.

A. "How can any day be my 'lucky' day?!"

Is it before or after the Twins pass twinning to the right → (north), already growing fainter as they pass the landlord’s, slightly fainter still past the attached and matching everyday pseudo-modern and then inaudible or truly silent by the time they’ve reached Alexi’s wide grey board multiple dwelling (where Margaret and Daisy Brennan have a small groundfloor rear apartment), then right around Al and Peggy Quinlan’s long white two story corner frame precisely clipped in by a leaf-perfect flat top elbow of hedges that Nadja and Andy pass smoothly and quickly together without a glance, as if bicycling for bicycling’s sake (which is or isn't exactly the same as bicycling for the sake of being in the day together, golden-brown and sandy, sailing as if on breezes that feel like water).

Another looping, zigzag journey (trotting, nose up, sniffing air?) from Salem Avenue and AAH Street to ABC Street south of Coast Boulevard and Bah-Wah climbs Monica’s front porch steps and folds up quietly near her, not even trying to ask her to stop writing and go to the beach. Before or after Andy and Nadja bicycle by (Andy’s Christ-like profile and dense tobacco-gold beard, Nadja’s glossy green shorts and beautiful legs), after, during or before the Twins grumble by, etc.? (Time is tangled on this day and Monica’s notes don’t untangle it.)

Bah-Wah seems content to lie curled in a circle or flat-out on her side near Monica’s chair and listen to her read aloud to David a letter from Barry Callaghan of Exile magazine (Toronto), just delivered by Lou, the rolypoly mailman.

"I’ve read this new manuscript [Winter/      /Winter] with real interest. I find it formally among the most interesting I’ve seen in a long time. But I’m convinced it needs editing. I’m of the school that believes that whatever point you’re making, it should emerge ‘out’ of the story: you shouldn’t feel it’s being stated and re-stated, hammered home, and maybe even a trick of mind — or habit, as if under the influence of some potent professor (and there are moments when Winter sags under such weight). Still I think it could be quite good and interesting if you’d edit, cut it down, not try all the stops in one story, leave some air — but you may disagree entirely, let me know, sincerely.

                                                                                                                                                      B. Callaghan."

Green renews itself, but so does brown.

Green boughs of Rhinebeck pine refresh themselves and, if anything, appear "greener" (less ashen?): green so soft eye feels it can send out a finger to press into it. Handwritten notes may say that the fresh needle-leaves are "the color of new pine cones" or that this greener green is the cover of new pine cones that (under a velvety green membrane) are themselves a lighter, softer brown that renews the Rhinebeck pine by surging through the pulp and forcing last year's dry, woody cones to the ground.

Time in the Chronicle often flows in an easy and obvious way, like a stream not so much down the 45^o slope of a hillside as one that’s racing along horizontally (up or down as needed), parallel to the isolated county route you’re riding on. But, other times, time is so layered, looped and tangled that nothing in nature resembles it.

For example: when events observed and recorded in May are typed and edited in December fresh notes taken in December are allowed to enter the typed record of May side by side and on the same plane as anything recorded in May.

This too: later (now), preparing the Chronicle for others to read, Monica is always confronted with the question of whether to leave her notes just as they were sketched in quickly, no matter how a coherent event is pulled apart and dispersed through other narratives, or to slip around to the side of the reader and make things clearer than they were when they happened by pulling all the dispersed fragments together into the coherent narrative she didn't record.

To make one choice or the other is to choose realism in relation to what?

Monica decides that the only decision that makes sense is to plunge into it and let the internal forces of the Chronicle (weight and pressure caused by duration) decide for her.

Still on May 14 (or on the 12 or 13 and only noted on the 14 in a warm atmosphere of sun through clouds) Yvonne Wilding says hello to Monica as she (Yvonne) lopes up or down the stairs carrying clean laundry in or dirty laundry out. Yvonne says "hello" just before or just after Monica runs into Nora Salerno on the boardwalk, out for a stroll (strolling back and forth between ABB Street and ABD Street, hoping Monica will take a walk at the same time?) with Pam Leary’s little girl, Erin.

Nora Salerno doesn’t seem surprised to see Monica, only a little over-excited, and says that she hoped they’d bump into each other because she has a lot to tell her and always likes to hear what Monica has to say. Thought she knew where she wanted to begin, but now can’t decide. Let’s see: did Monica know that Yvonne Wilding (the attractive but lazy Australian girl living with Al Szarka in the second floor apartment right under Monica) isn’t staying here (not just in the neighborhood or in New York, but in the United States!) only because she likes it here, but because she can’t go home?! Did Monica know that? She didn’t know that until Teddy Leary told her a story about Yvonne and Teddy’s older brother Billy (who she (Nora) can’t really say she knows). She knew (and she’s sure Monica knows) that Yvonne knew Teddy’s brother in Australia, but she always thought that Billy Leary was in the Navy and was stationed in Australia and that, when he had to leave and return to the States with his ship, Yvonne followed him over. But the story is more confused and complicated than that. The brother must have left the Navy or been kicked out of the Navy somehow, because (according to this new story Teddy just told her) Billy Leary and Yvonne Wilding worked in a hotel together in Australia. Was Teddy’s older brother a sailor at all? Now she’s not sure. She should have asked Ted that, but didn’t, and now she’ll have to get that part of the story straightened out. They worked in a hotel together and there seems to have been the usual mishmash of sex and romance or friendship or friendship and romance plus drugs and alcohol that people call "falling in love" and (unless she’s got it all mixed up) whatever there was between them seems to have been strong enough for the two of them to leave Australia together and then return to Australia together, get jobs in the same hotel where they worked before and then rob the hotel of a lot of money together! What happened to all that money she has no clue (because Teddy has no clue and Yvonne doesn’t talk about it and certainly doesn’t seem to have any money), but Teddy says that one thing he knows for sure is that neither his brother or Yvonne can ever set foot in Australia again.

Nora says that she can’t imagine why that would matter to Billy Leary, but she’s pretty sure (though not absolutely certain) that Yvonne sometimes falls into depression because she might never see her mother again. (On the other hand, she’s not sure if Yvonne’s mother is alive!)

What else? Another piece of news she doesn’t think is true. Ted’s kid sister Susie says that Ted told her that Yvonne Wilding is getting married. Even though she didn’t say to who, it has to be to Al Szarka, but, whether to Al Szarka or to someone she never heard of, how can it be true? How can Yvonne marry anyone when she’s here illegally? She’s hoping that Monica can get to the bottom of it.

Searching for more stories to tell? There’s a little more about Susie Leary, she says: Susie moved from the crummy apartment house at ABD Street and Coast Boulevard to a much nicer one on the boardwalk near AAI Street. Sounds positive and Susie arranged her voice tone to sound positive, but she had a feeling there was more to the story that Susie was leaving out. One day when she was over at Teddy and Pammy’s (maybe on a day like today when she was going to baby sit for little Erin) she ended up alone with Pammy and Pammy was happy to go into deeper, darker detail about Susie. The truth (according to Pammy) is that Susie was able to move from ABD Street to AAI Street only because her boyfriend is moving there with her. Nora wonders if Monica would recognize Susie’s boyfriend from the neighborhood: a lot older than Susie, a gambler who used to be a bartender in the bar on the Southwest corner of the intersection of Salem Avenue and AAF Street, right where the route of the blue bus line begins and ends.

The story she was told goes like this: at the same time the boyfriend was bartending at the bar at the intersection he was running numbers for either the Mafia or for some other mob (not clear to Pam or to Nora or to both, therefore can’t be clear to Monica) and one way or the other he was stupid enough to take somebody’s bet and then either not play it or not pay off on it when it hit (no clue how it works), so of course he ended up in a lot of trouble: lost his job, owed the man thousands of dollars, afraid what his bosses might do to him, etc. But — this is odd — she thought she saw him the other day limping and swinging his body on crutches along AAF Street!

She can’t be sure it was him, of course, and she could have but didn’t call out to him. She did follow him along AAF Street trying to get a better look at his face, but he crossed over and went into the candy and cigarette store (the one that has the soda fountain and lunch counter) near the corner of the Boulevard. Doesn’t Monica agree that it stands to reason that the limping guy she followed was Susie’s boyfriend because the Mob (no matter which one) probably broke one of his legs?! And it’s logical that he could be in the neighborhood because he’s supposedly moving into the new apartment with Susie! But it could also not be him, because Pam says that, whoever he was working for before, the Mafia now definitely has him working at one of their bars out in Maspeth. . . .

Monica can tell that Nora Salerno’s told all the stories she needed to tell, but doesn’t want to stop walking and talking with Monica and is searching for story fragments that may also be tidbits of information. For example, Monica knows, doesn’t she, that Teddy’s mother works (or worked) for the phone company? Not sure — because Teddy doesn’t talk about her very much — if she’s still around New York somewhere or if she’s out in Vegas doing the same sort of job.

What else?

She can’t believe that Nancy didn’t send her a Mother’s Day card. Have things really gotten that bad? Does Monica know? She knows that Nancy confides in her. Monica seems to have the patience for Nancy’s moods, but she doesn’t. Of course Monica isn’t Nancy’s mother, so she doesn’t have to endure Nancy’s abuse. Monica hasn’t seen Nancy at her worst, but that’s too long a story. . . .

Still on May 14?

After walking on the boardwalk with Nora Salerno and only short minutes after Monica reaches her front porch steps ABC Street’s look is completely altered by mist that Monica didn’t see arrive (as if it was following her as she made her way north from the boardwalk) and that’s at once sheer enough so that shapes can be made out through it and powdery enough so that everything looks different because of it. Notes about the mist appear on three or four hard-to-read handwritten pages separated by substantial blocks of quickly-sketched-in notes about other events. On one page Monica says that trees, lawns, houses, etc. appear as if sheathed in a white cotton stocking. On another page Monica says that “a fine white powder” of mist coats green leaves “in the distance” or it may say “with distance” (sketchy, rapid handwriting can be read either way). This too: mist obscures memory (which in any case erases itself within seconds). Monica can’t remember for sure what was in the center of the Regans’ lawn before the mist arrived: thinks there’s always been a small, spherical flowering shrub there, but now the mist has made her uncertain: looks more like an impossibly large bouquet (scribbled note may say: “a bushel”) of roses there.

When is it exactly (not clear in Monica's sentences about the mist, bobbing around un-anchored) that the low-to-the-horizon notes of small fishing boats — horizontally flattened and spreading along ocean’s shifting mineral surface, a sort of fearful lowing that speaks of the terror of invisibility and of moving cautious inches in darkness — signal that it hasn’t taken long for mist to turn into fog and that not one thing can be told apart from any other thing for the whole length of ABC Street from bay to ocean, maybe even from Cape Breton to Bermuda.

Monica’s notes say that Nancy St. Cloud (Nora Salerno’s daughter) hasn’t paid Monica a visit since her mother and her aunt (Nora Salerno and Marian Woolsey) moved out of the house and off the street (whether living separately or together now and on what street exactly not noted), but chooses this day (“today”, May 14) — the very same day as Monica’s long conversation on the boardwalk with Nancy’s mother, Nora — to take a walk from her house on ABB Street and appear on Monica’s porch for a little visit.

It unfolds like this: Monica sees Nancy St. Cloud arrive before she arrives: from her hidden position in the southwest corner of the porch behind the Rhinebeck pine and near the Coffins’ massive orange-brick-and-white-stucco multiple dwelling Monica very clearly hears boys shouting and cursing across the way:

“You’re a freak!”

“Your mother’s a freak too!”

“And your father’s the freakiest freak in your whole freakn family!"

“Don’t want no freaks on our block!”

“Let’s beat its ass!”

Monica has to shift her position so she can see around the wide, ragged blot of the pine. Her first impression is an odd one: Jimmy X is alone on the Sloths’ barren lawn and seems to be slinging pebbles at the Sloths’ pure white shingle twin of the Greengrasses’ dark and inwardly compacted little brick and iron fortress next door (left of the Sloths' for Monica looking at it from across the way, right of it (south) in reality). It doesn’t make sense to her that Jimmy X would have come all this way just to throw pebbles at the house of people so recessive no one would know they exist without the obsessive attention of a chronicler chronicling.

Something like a daily prayer:

pay closer attention (never close enough):

look longer (never long enough):

knowing that things always change into other things when we look longer and closer.

Now Monica’s not so sure that Jimmy X is throwing pebbles at the Sloths’ house: may be whirling wildly on the knobby lawn as if something's got hold of him and is swinging him, one hand flinging pebbles in all directions, some banging off the Sloths’ unstained white shingle by accident.

Now a pack of six or more eight-to-ten-year-old boys is closing in on Jimmy and now Jimmy’s rolling on the barren lawn, kicking and swinging and being punched. Cries coming from the pack of boys are as human as they are hound-like and have a tortured joy in them.

This is the moment Monica spots Nancy St. Cloud before she’s meant to. Can’t hear what Nancy St. Cloud says (no shouting) and it isn’t clear what it is exactly she does to intercede, but the pack of boys can be seen dispersing in the direction (north) of Coast Boulevard and Jimmy X is able to pull himself together and limp off south toward beach or boardwalk.

Minutes later Nancy St. Cloud is paying what’s supposed to be a surprise visit to Monica on the porch. She has a few things to say that don’t quite add up to a story. On the way over (may have been on Coast Boulevard, but she’s not sure) she saw (that is, she’s almost 100% certain that she saw) her mother coming toward her: she (Nancy) was still two-or-more blocks away and invisible to her mother because of her mother’s fading vision: so she crossed the street. She has to admit that she felt a little odd about avoiding her (she was acutely conscious of the fact that she was avoiding her), but the odd feeling wasn’t guilt. Not guilt, but what was it? The desire not to see her is very definite. She knows that she needs to stay away from her and that there's an emotion that's paralyzing connected to the need to stay away from her that must have a name, but she doesn't know it. What else? Even from a distance (and it’s the only thing that gave her any doubt that it was her mother) her mother looked strange. She didn’t look well. Her mother’s weight has always been stable, but she looked heavier, almost jowly. A jowlier, heavier version of her mother, but of course with the same blonde curls and white-white powderpuff skin. And the strange child she was with! Who is that? Is that Ted and Pam’s child? Ted and Pam’s child is a girl and this might have been a girl, but looked more like a boy! A strange boyish-looking little girl or the other way around.

What else? Nothing much. Does Monica remember Andre’s cousin Ugo? (Really “Hugues”, but everyone calls him “Ugo” because he’s been working for an Italian airline for so long and "Ugo" is easier to remember and pronounce.) Working for an airline for years, yet still only twenty, a handsome spoiled baby so in love with American culture he wants to come to them in New York for an indefinite visit. That’s ok with Andre, of course. Andre wouldn’t mind if “Ugo” planted himself here forever, but she’s already dreading it: catering to two European men instead of one! Andre at least is a grownup who knows how to take care of himself if he has to. But Ugo's just another narcissistic slobby baby who'll be a teenage baby till he’s forty: first Mommy, then the girlfriend, then the wife who’ll take care of cute little Ugo while he sleeps past noon and crawls into the kitchen in his underwear asking “what’s for breakfast?”

And before the endless “Ugo” visit Andre’s encouraging his parents to fly in from Grenoble. That would certainly be another long visit and she’s even more anxious about that than about “Ugo”. She can’t explain her anxiety and because she can’t explain it there’s no way she can tell Andre without offending him that the idea of his father sleeping in their small apartment fills her with dread. The only one who understands her is Dr. Beechnut and months ago Dr. Beechnut came up with a plan that isn’t working: try to talk Andre into buying a house upstate, not far from West Point, in a town called “Cornwall”, where Dr. Beechnut has a beautiful second home and another large practice. The argument she makes to Andre is that with a house there’d always be room for his family to visit and, at the same time, Dr. Beechnut could continue training her to become her assistant. She’d work for Dr. Beechnut, she’d become a counselor and the money she earned from that would help pay for the house. It’s a perfect plan so of course Andre doesn’t like it. He has a thousand reasons for hating the plan and some of them are reasonable and most of them aren’t. The fact that she'd have a good excuse for getting away from her mother and her aunt means nothing to him. He and her mother are pretty lovey-dovey. When Andre enters the room the air around her turns to powdered sugar. She’s sweet, she’s a complete phony, she’s sickening when he’s around and of course he laps it up and does her all sorts of little favors.

Here are Andre's arguments that may or may not be reasonable:

a) He’s only fifteen-twenty minutes from the airport now so moving upstate will mean a new, hellish life of endless driving-in-traffic.

b) She has no idea how isolated she’ll feel in the country and how that isolation will affect them both psychologically and change their relationship.

c) He has a financial “masterplan” and this is not the time to buy a house.

She needs Monica to tell her (she walked here from ABB Street just to get her opinion!): are Andre’s arguments honest or is everything he says designed to keep her away from Dr. Beechnut? In her mind all his arguments are false arguments (even the ones that seem reasonable) because he’s threatened by Dr. Beechnut and suspicious of any idea he assumes comes from her. . . .

What else?

While transcribing her notes it seems to Monica that Nancy St. Cloud had more to say (couldn’t stop talking and it never got recorded).

May ’76 notes are being typed (therefore edited) in December ‘76/January ’77 and the complex ebb and flow of time in the Chronicle (not only because of its habit of digressing from and returning to the immediate moment) is further wrinkled and folded by this forced intrusion of each season into the other.

While editing (typing) on an undated day in mid-or-just-past-mid-May, for example, Monica notes that, while walking west on Salem Avenue between 3:30 and 4 p.m. on an undated day in late December (that is, on the day she’s typing handwritten notes written in mid-May), winter light — on and through the thin leaves of the hedgerows of the long avenue — tunnels through time in this way: in one direction (west) “the bright red coals of winter” (the colder the day, the brighter red leaves burn), the fire of winter’s coldness; in the other direction (east) “winter’s rust" (last vestige of an exhausted purple drying into brown, oddly similar to the purple-brown drying into death of azaleas in Fall) and both winter’s rust and the bright red coals of winter are the hedgerows’ signal that they’re about to lose their leaves to the far sharper edge already there in whatever the eye still sees as warmth.

Monica asks herself, but can't come up with an answer: how many Decembers have she and David observed Salem Avenue tunneling west (red spark in leaves all the way to the horizon) and east (hedgerows as heathery, as lilac-brown and brittle as dried flowers tied in bunches). Time in the hedgerows, laid out horizontally, also cuts a section deep as a mineshaft back through the Chronicle.

December/January notes being scribbled quickly (after Monica'd been standing on the cold porch for a few minutes, then seconds later carrying whatever she experienced indoors to be transferred instantly to paper like something dumped from pan to plate before it has a chance to congeal into something else) have a harsher texture than May notes being polished a little for the first time. (In winter, of course, everyone is indoors and the pleasure of the surprising encounter, vision of the random figure strolling horizontally between the curved edges of the local universe are missing.)

There is this: “today” (same day that the Chronicle says “being typed after playing with Bah-Wah in the deep snow of January 6”?) Monica is house-sitting in the Salem Avenue house (between AAH Street and AAI Street) and sees (through the tall downstairs front windows looking out on the open breadth of Salem Avenue or through the not-quite-so-tall back (south-facing) windows looking down and out into a backyard that begins a long channel of backyards cut behind the houses facing AAH and I Streets all the way to the wall of apartment houses screening off beach and ocean) a bird she hasn’t seen before: woodpecker that doesn't belong here and may be migrating and just passing through or may have taken a wrong turn, got stuck here or stayed too long. Let's see: pattern of alternating, vivid black and white bars on the back with one startling bolt of red that Monica’s quickly scribbled notes locate on the bird’s beak, but research (searching through whatever field guides David can lay his hands on (at the local library?)) uncovers no black-and-white woodpecker with a dash of red on beak: black-and-white with blood red on crown or side of head, on cheek, on back of neck, on throat, covering entire head, patch on underside below wingtips, etc., but never-ever on beak. Therefore Monica’s hurried description is wrong or unreadable, David’s research is hasty and sloppy or the beautiful black, white and red bird hammering at the thin branches of the leafless lilac bush is not a woodpecker.

On May 15, a day that's meltingly warm on the skin after an unusually cold night, Monica spots "Gloria" (in her and/or David's writing sometimes called “Agnes”) pass on the other (west) side of the street, heading north → in her form-fitting pink waitress’s uniform, on wobbly, highest-of-high heels at exactly the same instant she smells heat in green leaves. Or the smell of heat in green leaves bypasses nose and goes straight to the brain. A brain aroma (world inside the body) rather than a nose aroma (world outside the body). Thinks a bit more and tries to memorize what she's thinking (a familiar kind of writing-in-advance-of-writing) about the aroma-world of the out-of-doors absolutely erased from winter: green juice strained straight into the brain as if into a pan on the stove plus earth aroma heating up to the point of unearthliness, the whole raw world beginning to cook just enough that the mouth doesn't want to wait for the other senses, wants to bite into the green world just before too many things begin to flower all at once and all of nature's sweetness boils over into an undifferentiated green goo that scorches on the burner.

Monica sees Gloria/Agnes passing exactly at the instant she takes mental note of a season she hasn’t smelled before and also (exactly-exactly at the same instant?) spots a purple bedspread (recorded earlier in the week when someone was folding it or shaking it out) draped across the groundfloor porch railing (midway down the block south) of one of ABC Street’s massive Victorian mansions turned into beachtown multiple dwellings.

Seconds later Margaret Brennan passes and stops to talk because she has stories she needs to tell.

Says that she just wants to let Monica know that the severity of her heart murmur has subsided a bit and the doctors say that their only concern is with some of the after-effects of both the condition and the treatment, such as glaucoma. Can't remember what else they're worried about and didn't stop to talk about herself. There are a few things she needs to tell Monica about Daisy, even though Daisy made her swear she wouldn't talk about it, not even to Jojo. Daisy was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, but they won't know the results of all the tests "until Monday”. She's out of the hospital (they kept her over a week) and what she needs to know from Monica is (if and when Daisy decides to show her face) whether or not Daisy is the same child Monica remembers.

Daisy was always unusually sensitive and intelligent, but a sensitive and intelligent four-year-old. Now, to her, Daisy isn't acting like a child who's going to be five in November. She isn't even a child. She went to the hospital for ten days and it's as if she came back from the dead. She isn't with her in the same way she was before and needs to know if Monica feels it too or if she (Margaret) is imagining things.

Daisy doesn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone, particularly not anyone she loved. This is what Daisy said: "I hate compliments and I hate anyone who 'admires' me. I wish I was invisible so no one would know I'm here." And there are times now when she's almost transparent: look in Daisy's direction and you can see the wallpaper through her. While Daisy was in the hospital she had the inspiration to buy her a beautiful spring coat in Daisy's favorite blue-cloud-in-blue-sky blue and was looking forward to giving it to her and watching her try it on, but Daisy has no interest in it.

She wants Monica's opinion: is it truer to say that Daisy has become "deep" since she was wherever she was for however long she was there (hospital is stupid and insists that Daisy was there and visible and acting like any other child the whole time she was there) or that she went someplace deep and that deep place came back with her as the place she's in now.

There are some other odd facts: Daisy has never been afraid of the dark. On the contrary, Daisy liked the dark. Exactly the opposite of most children who need to have their bedroom doors left open at least a crack so a little light can get in from the hall or so they can feel a drop closer to mommy or daddy in the next room. Daisy could never fall asleep unless her bedroom door was shut so no light could get in. The other night, after Daisy'd gone to bed and all the lights were out, Daisy called out in a voice so frightened she hardly recognized it. Said she could hear a spider crawling across the ceiling and getting closer and closer to her bed and she knew that the spider could only keep crawling toward her if the room was completely dark so it could feel invisible. So, from now on, light has to be on in the hall and door has to be left open a little. . . .

This too: Daisy (as Monica knows) has always looked a little unreal, as if she could live on nothing but the sweetness in the air around a bed of flowers, but (in private) she’s always had the appetite of a wolf. All that changed while she was away. Came back from wherever she was while she seemed to be in the hospital unbearably thin and disgusted by food. Can’t afford to lose an ounce, but nothing tempts her.

No one at the hospital worth talking to. Doctors clam up whenever you ask a question. Why, for example, did they have Daisy on so many baby aspirin before and why have they suddenly reduced the dose to only two a day? Was it good for her then, but bad for her now? Never good for her? A mistake from the beginning? Is it the reason for Daisy’s condition? Is there something else they’re not telling her? She can’t get them to talk. Hospital's their world and whatever happens there, even if it's happening to you, is none of your business. . . .

On the same May day or another one very similar to it an open-backed blue truck loaded with oversized clay pots of sapling-size red-flowering, leafy green plants bounces loudly up the block (south) toward the ocean end of the street.

Monica can’t see who Lou the rolypoly mailman is talking to.

“Trying to work without a bag!”

Sometimes he has the wheel cart, he explains, but other times they want him to carry the shoulder bag. Don’t ask him why. Today there’s not much mail, thank god, because, in this heat and without the wheel cart. . . . So he doesn’t want the big shoulder bag weighing on his shoulder and he’s trying to see if this way is possible. . . .

Now Lou comes into view and Monica can see that he’s without shoulder bag or wheel cart and he’s juggling and fumbling with loose armfuls of envelopes. . . .

An unfamiliar woman's voice yells out, friendly but frantic, “hi, Lou!” “Oh, hi there Ronnie.” “I want my own mail, Lou!”

A red-haired woman in loose blue slacks runs down the block and Monica can see her go up the front steps of the vast roominghouse toward the ocean end of ABC Street (cracked and crumbling stucco not exactly the color of dried hotdog mustard (dark or yellow?), long, swayback structure not quite as depressing as an old state hospital, still in use or abandoned), where Fat Agnes and her invalid husband live in a basement cubbyhole behind the boiler room.

Later Lou explains to Monica that “Ronnie” is crazy. Or maybe that’s not fair: maybe he should just say that Ronnie's spent at least half her life in mental hospitals. Half in, half out and when she’s out she's in toilets like the one down the block. If she has a family, he hasn’t seen it or delivered any mail from anyone with the same name. Fat Agnes makes Ronnie crazy because Ronnie knows that Agnes always comes up the block to meet him so she can get everyone’s mail before he can deliver it. . . .

Monica notes a hot (undated) summer day with clouds

                                                                            super-abundant green

                                                                            “tropical" bird noises

                                                                            new (as if freshly peeled) green pine needles laid against old (black-green) pine needles

                                                                            spattered red of cardinal's broken flight through leaves and branches, viewed out the side (green room's north-facing dovecote?) window by David, who wonders if the cardinal’s song-like sequence of broken notes while flying are what Monica meant by “tropical bird noises”.

Whatever else she was paying attention to gets erased by the loud passing of the twins, twinning as they go.

Twin in shabby navy peacoat says: “green as a stupid young pine needle!'

                                                          No audible answer from twin in soiled black trenchcoat.

                                                          "stupid enough for what?"

                                                          No answer.

                                                          "to be showing its face on a day like this? as if it was a real leaf?!"

                                                          Inaudible complaint.

                                                          "who doesn't know that a winter pine needle is a dark pine needle? Darker than spinach soup but not as brittle as we are!”

                                                          Louder, but still inaudible grumbling.

                                                          Peacoat twin gets louder too: “we get shit, while they get. . . ?"

                                                          Long answer below human hearing still sets something vibrating.

                                                          "air up there? everybody knows they get air up there! But whadaya call this shit down here?!"

                                                          Deeply rumbling bass of audible peacoat twin, almost as deep, even more rumbling than the bass rumbling of the delivery trucks speeding through the ruts and hollows of Salem Avenue?

                                                          Audible twin continues complaining even around the corner.

                                                          "blue of what, of what exactly?!"

                                                          Inaudible twin transmits nothing from around the right angle of hedgerows.

                                                          "color yellow that yellow can never be the color of. . . ?"

After they've vanished over any possible sound horizon Monica wishes she knew the sign for the voice about to disappear or the other sign for the voice that has disappeared, a simple mark on paper like the brick-orange blood of a tiny insect you didn't even know was an insect till you pressed it with your thumb and squashed it.

"Same day or another.”

“Green leaves under grey skies.”

Air smells like water and there’s a distant sound-horizon to the south made more complex by sounds that invoke distance: extended basso foghorn voice holding its note to the point of irritation and far deeper and more horizontally extended basso foghorn voice underlying the soprano voice and gradually finding a way to get exactly synchronized with it in order to swallow it. Long, irritating note of soprano foghorn drowns itself in the extended depths of basso foghorn and isn’t heard again, while basso foghorn note persists as if drawing a dark blue circle of midnight around the world.

Deep voice of foghorn gets deeper and quieter as it moves in and out of waves toward what should be the southeast, but could even turn out to be the northwest because the sea strikes the coast of New York at an odd angle or the other way around.

Roses should be blooming, but aren’t: can’t escape from their fat green buds. (How close does Monica have to get to see any red in them?)

The dizzying tea aroma of un-bloomed roses.

To the eye the world is nothing but mist from end to end, but the world also comes close to the skin as an unpleasant chill.

While taking still more notes about the Rhinebeck pine’s new needles Monica also notes (on this May day that could just as easily be another May day because no date is noted) that this may be the first year she’s paid close attention to changes in the pine. And exactly at the second of writing (cold pencil between cold fingers makes her conscious of the moment) that the new, spring needles are not simply a “fresh green” as she'd thought (they have a yellow in them as similar to the yellow of yellow split peas as their green is to the green of green split peas) Monica sees two things at once (as if one through the other): palest blonde/whitest white-skinned yet oddly beautiful Lily Romero passing while waving hello and looking pregnant and a yellow bird with black stripes landing just about at eye-level in the broad, deep green boughs (with their thin new layer of yellow-green needle-leaves) of the Rhinebeck pine, not ten feet from where she’s sitting.

Writing quickly Monica first identifies the bird as a ”chickadee”, immediately thinks better of it (though not completely certain it isn’t a chickadee and without any idea how to distinguish this yellow-and-black bird from all other possible black-on-yellow and yellow-on-black birds) so asks David if he’d mind doing the research it would take to identify the bird accurately (knowing very well that any sort of research that resembles detective work is one of David’s pleasures).

Let’s see: does David have to go to the local library on Coast Boulevard between AAF and AAG Streets or does he already have all the local library’s bird-identification guides on more-or-less permanent loan along with who-can-say-how-many food-stained cookbooks?

Quickly able to rule out the family of vireos because not one vireo appears to have a true "black mask”.

The family of warblers, on the other hand, takes David a long time to sort through because, in the first place, so many warblers are yellow and because most of the warblers that are yellow also have some degree of black marking the yellow one way or another.

Let’s see: how many yellow warblers with some black stripes, streaks or patches are there for David to consider before he reports to Monica? The Common Yellow-throat, Wilson’s, Hooded, Cape May, Magnolia, Golden-Winged, “Lawrence’s”, Black-Throated, Townsend's, Hermit, Golden-Cheeked, Yellow-Throated, Kentucky, Black-Throated Grey and Tennessee all have yellow and black in various patterns, but (to David’s eye) only the “Black-Throated Grey”, the “Tennessee” and "Common Yellow-throat” are serious possibilities for Monica to identify as the bird she saw in the deeply shaded green of the Rhinebeck pine’s broad boughs (while at the same instant looking through the pine at Lily Romero) and of the three the “Common Yellowthroat” stands out because of its vivid black “bandit’s mask”, yellow throat and beautiful white streak arching above the top edge of the mask.

Artie Tilden’s girlfriend, Anne Marie (pretty little oval face and long, straight licorice-brown hair), is carrying a heavy air conditioner section from Artie’s car (parked far away), along the sidewalk, up the porch steps, across the wide porch boards to the front door (where she’ll cross the hall’s worn-out maroon carpet and then carry the heavy air conditioner section up and around two bends of the hall stairs to Artie’s second floor front apartment). Anne Marie pauses to tell Monica that she hates days like this. And then again (struggling to get through the front door): "other people think it's a nice day, but I think it’s a muggy day and I hate it.”

Still on the porch on the same uncomfortable day in May (the 16th?) David hands Monica a heavy-bottomed bar glass filled with tomato juice and ice, the full weight and thickness of its tomatoeyness cut in half by the juice of a lemon squeezed straight into it.

A question Monica asks herself: can the ripe red depth of tomato and chilled yellow of lemon cut through the dead weight of the atmosphere on this colorless “muggy day” the way lemon cuts through tomato?

Monica’s mid-May notes talk about “indexing” the December ’74 raw Chronicle (without spelling out what “indexing” amounts to) at the same time that she’s recording new events and typing (editing) her handwritten notes for December ’75.

In this way (among how many ways?) time enters the Chronicle without Monica having to think or write about it. Time doesn’t have to be the Chronicle’s subject (is it the Chronicle’s subject?) for the Chronicle to be about time as its potential infinity of writing trickles its horizontal way across a paper landscape easily rotated backward or forward as if the seamlessness of this time can actually cancel the relentless direction of that time.

Let’s see: “getting light” at 5 a.m. on May 16, 17 or 18 (not clearly noted) while typing December ’75 handwritten notes (exact time while typing also not noted); while indexing December ’74 (“at exactly 5 a.m.”) and March 3, ’75 (“at 6:40 a.m.") and then March 6, ’75 (“fiery red sun at 6:56 a.m.”).

March notes add that the red heat "of the sun or of the day” at 6:56 a.m. signals the end of another winter. And that prompts Monica to note (while typing and indexing earlier Marches and Decembers “now”, in May of ’76) that “now another spring is fading”: not only lilac, but all spring colors have faded — out of daily reality, out of space, out of “memory”, out of the senses that are memory in a different way.

So deep into spring that there’s the danger (while sleeping) of diving too far into summer. Summer heat or heat superheated into light could wake up even Monica, whose sleep is never affected by light.

Another note calls it “an unusually ugly dawn” and says that unexpected summer heat —> light will wake David up easily (can’t sleep when even a little of the water of daylight begins to dilute his bedroom's pitchblackness) at 5 a.m. or earlier. Can't sleep, so forces himself to work on a fiction called Winter/      /Winter (cuts a narrative section through several winters).

How many false summers are necessary to prepare the way for real summer? And at what moment exactly does the light and space of spring give way to the darkness and weight of summer?

"At 6:30 a.m.”, while David is having his first anxious moments trying to lay out a structure of mini-narratives that will build up into Winter/      /Winter, Monica is lost in dreams, but not in a dreamy way: a dream she can’t remember and did not wake up from, forcing herself to remain awake scribbling it down while still in its aura (last night); a dream-she-can-remember-but-doesn’t-want-to (over 24 hours ago); and another unpleasant one from the early '70's she’s re-reading (while “indexing” her Chronicle) and which in some way relates to the dream of 24-or-more hours ago, compelling her to remember what she’s been trying to avoid.

Let’s see: Monica feels it’s important to say from the beginning that she’s conscious of her own resistance to recounting (“now”) the dream-from-at-least-twenty-four-hours-ago that she’s been remembering not as “memories” but in involuntary flashes of mini-(image) –narratives unified by an emotional aura very much like an aroma sniffed by the brain only.

Monica is aware that each dream narrative within the over-all plasma of the dream is a long see-through column of image-events transecting other such see-through columns of image-events and every image and word in every column collapsible and expandable into other long columns depending on what direction the mind looks or walks in. There are crossing points of apparently unrelated narratives that have to do with an alternate logic of relatedness and that are almost always forgotten on waking, leaving a mistaken sense of exaggerated surrealism and/or incoherence.

For example: for weeks or months (not in the dream, but in reality) Lowell has been talking to Monica about the “first outpatient” assigned to him. Lowell says: “this is how crazy I am!”: when the resident first assigned the patient to him he heard him say: “the woman I’m assigning to you is named ‘Kitty’” and he had a panic attack! How could he possibly deal with that? How could chance and fate and destiny be so cruel and ridiculous? How could his first patient possibly be named “Kitty”?! All his deepest nightmares and terrors and most screwed-up, humiliating sexual fantasies and fears are all tied up with images and messy half-memories of incidents with Kitty that he isn’t prepared to look at under a microscope or even at a distance through a telescope — and all that is bound to cloud any possible therapeutic relationship with this woman and make him act like an idiot, like an infantile bumbler or like someone too disturbed to even pretend to offer help. . . .

It’s his first patient and his innermost life will be exposed.

Then he met the patient: no resemblance to their sister Kitty at all: a forty-three-year-old Latin American woman worn out by life and looking more than fifty. And when he glanced at her chart he was shocked to see that her name was actually “Kikki”!

She’d been “Kikki”, not “Kitty”, from the beginning!

It shook him that his problems were that deep and that so many of them revolved around Kitty — that even hearing the name “Kitty” or a name that only resembled “Kitty” could make him too crazy to hear or think. He saw that a horrible mess lay ahead of him. Does Monica believe that it’s possible — ever really possible? — to get to the bottom of a mess as horrible as that, as murky as the deepest lake you've ever been afraid to swim across, as silty and tangled as the most muddled and boggy swamp. . . .

Let’s see: Lowell’s notes, or Monica’s notes scribbled down as Lowell recited what seemed to her to be his notes, about the patient named “Kikki” not “Kitty” go like this:

          born in Honduras

          family moved to Cuba (reason not noted) when she was fifteen

          fell deeply in love in Cuba (at what age not noted by Lowell or by Monica, but Monica calculates it had to be between the ages of fifteen and seventeen)

          separated from her beloved by her father because the beloved belonged to a different religion (name of neither his religion nor her religion noted)

          heartbroken and in despair, but she obeyed

          moved to New York City (not noted if “Kikki”’s despair was the reason the father decided to leave Cuba) when she was seventeen and for reasons not explained or not noted settled in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

          “Kikki” hated Greenpoint, Brooklyn and New York from the first second, never stopped hating them and was in a perpetual state of longing for “the tropical paradise” of Cuba (and/or for the lost beloved)

          started plotting ways to escape from Brooklyn to Florida, which she pictured as a lesser, but more possible Cuba.

Anything else to Kikki’s story as related by Lowell? Monica searches her notes and can’t come up with anything, but all the conversations with Lowell about Kikki over a span of weeks or months are distilled into Monica’s dreams on the night of May 16, 17 or 18 as a long see-through column of mini-(image) narratives about a beautiful Latin American woman in an elegant, but large and “tropical” hat living near “the only park in Brooklyn”.

The word “park” allows Monica (as the Latin American woman in her large, beautiful hat) to gaze out into space that’s nothing but green.

Because she's gazing into green she's sitting on a bench just outside a low wall bounding the boundless green space of a park, gazing into green but not so much seeing green as being in green and on green as if green were the entire underfoot and visual space of the dream, the green space of the dream exactly = to the space of her mind and the space of her mind the entire outer world she finds herself walking across and looking into from under her wide-brimmed tropical hat. (The feeling resembles, but isn't exactly the same as, Monica's sensation sitting on an eternally cold stone bench on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan with all of Central Park behind her.)

Later in the dream Cuban/Honduran Monica is no longer wearing a hat and is living in an apartment (large or small, ugly or beautiful not remembered or noted) whose windows (from what height?) look down into nothing but the infinitely varied green of a park.

Here she is at a window, looking down into the park, where snow is now falling, as if to remind her that all it takes is a look in the wrong direction to pass out of the tropics entirely.

Is this (can this be?) the endless green space that can never be entered (let alone crossed) (destined always to sit on a bench beside it and facing away from it, to look down from windows from what height into it) and that we call our longings, our dreams, aspirations, even our plans for a different life that's better just because it isn't the one we're living. . . ?

Monica’s dream that flows from Lowell’s account of his Cuban/Honduran patient seems to end, but her notes documenting Lowell’s notes about the patient continue a little longer and Monica makes the decision (at the time of typing/or later/or later still) to go on until she runs out of Lowell's notes before peering into the neighboring see-through column of unrelated dream-narrative that nevertheless does find ways to intersect and pass through the see-through column of image-stories about the Latin American woman, the limitless green space of the park, etc., etc.

Lowell says that the husband forced on Kikki by her father because he belonged to the right religion ends up a depressed shoe salesman in Brooklyn. He’s content to remain a shoe salesman in Brooklyn, may even be content with his depression, and this depressed lack of ambition that translates into lack of ability to earn the kind of money it takes to even think of a better life makes her feel hopeless. To make matters worse: she knows for a fact that her beloved also left Cuba and moved to the States: he was ambitious, went to college, became well-educated, went on to have an interesting profession, earned money and is leading a pleasant, upscale life in New York and Miami — exactly opposite to the miserable, lowgrade and loveless life her father arranged for her.

Notes don’t say whether she says plainly to Lowell: “Life is hopeless. I’m in despair because there's no way out. Or am I wrong? Is there something I can't imagine that you can do to help me?" Or if Lowell wonders what, exactly what, psychiatry has to offer in the face of real, external (not psychological) reality. He doesn’t want to fool himself and he doesn’t want to fool his patient, but he needs Monica to tell him honestly if he isn't fooling the patient and himself already. If all he has to offer is a tiny little strategy that helps her take a step so small it doesn't feel like a step (and may actually just be a way of getting her to lift her foot a little without ever bringing it down into a step that goes someplace) then what does all his training have to offer this woman? Is the goal to help her change her life or is he supposed to somehow get her to have a more positive view of her misery? Is he supposed to actually do anything for this patient or is she really only a dummy for him to practice on?

Let’s see: Monica is simultaneously aware of how many more than two things while continuing to sketch in her dreams of at-least-twenty-four-hours-ago:

                                                 a) images that travel up other see-through columns of mini-image-narratives she doesn't know why she's reluctant to look at

                                                 b) the troubling fact that anything she's able to get down on paper can't be true because she is able to get it down on paper, while she knows very well that in the original plasma of the dream all narratives and their chains of images can unspool themselves simultaneously along filaments as fine and densely coded with information as any strand of DNA, their narratives often seeming to unfold in conventional time-sequences and across a plane of ordinary space and matter.

For example: another column of image-narratives takes place on a beach. How does Monica know (even later (now)) that it is a beach? Hot sun on bare head, hot sand on bare feet: therefore (in May) it doesn’t seem to be the beach at the end of ABC Street, it seems like a “tropical” beach, possibly in Florida (or Cuba?).

There’s a sense in the dream (or it's only added later, as one of memory’s chemical additives) that the difficulty of walking through hot sand means that the beach is endless: an endless (an impossible) walk from this tropical beach, up through all the sand of all the beaches on the Eastern coast, toward her cooler ABC Street beach, which in some way equals home.

The language that comes to Monica as she’s trying to put her dream into words is very precise on one point: the girl coming toward her in the glaring brightness of water and sand is “twelve years old” and has a “radiant, animated face”. Monica knows her and this recognition can easily be turned inside out the way we turn a sock inside out by forcing a hand into it and its inside/out state is a sense of being overjoyed, but not surprised, to come across this familiar, beautiful girl, just as the happiness of the girl with the radiant face is so intense when she sees Monica that it resembles relief. It's surprising, Monica thinks, that neither of them is surprised to come across the other "here".

Doubtful “for a second” and about to question the girl about her identity, Monica’s overcome with a dizzying wave of certainty that this is her cousin! and not only her cousin, but the very same twelve-year-old cousin who just visited Alyosha not more than one week ago!

Knows her cousin well enough to be overjoyed to find her here, but can’t remember her name.

Just saw each other yet here, in the bright, overheated landscape of this beach, it feels as if they haven’t seen each other for a lifetime and are overjoyed (but not surprised) to rediscover one another.

The nameless twelve-year-old cousin rushes to Monica’s side and links arms with her so they can continue walking together toward "the cooler beach" whose coolness has something to do with being impossibly far away. (Her cousin-whose-name-has-been-erased questions whether it's the relative coolness of one beach in relation to the other or if it's the density of sand that suggests distance.)

The word “radiant” is used in a sentence that radiates out into the dream: reflection off the beautiful, radiant face of the young girl (her “cousin”) by her side may pass blindingly across the dazzling plane of sand where others (how many others not noted) are now walking with difficulty. One of the walkers struggling through the sand is identified as her cousin’s “father”, but Monica doesn’t recognize him — and there are others she has the nagging feeling she should be able to name, but can’t.

“Struggling in sunlight.”

In different ways and to different degrees all of them are laboring to get through the heat and weight of sand to go forward for what reason? The struggling of her dead aunt is particularly horrible, trying to keep up with the others, who may be trying to get away from her. Her torn nightgown could be a shroud and the bandage-like strips of the shroud are binding her legs and making it hard for her to move.

Monica isn’t sure on waking (or twenty-four hours later) if her aunt (who she knows extremely well, but whose name has been erased) said nothing or kept complaining like this: “they're all sick of hearing my voice! don't want to know I exist! want to keep walking! don’t care how I walk! walk'n'walk'n'walk'n'look the other way! look at anything but me! don’t wanna see, don't wanna know how ugly it gets! Force yourself forward — push through the sand like anyone else, but it gets harder and it gets uglier and nobody wants to hear your voice saying the same ugly thing over and over again. . . . " And on and on in that vein, a bitter, side-to-side sing-song with the imbalanced rhythm of a corpse walking with crutches.

Two of the familiar-but-un-named relatives trying to escape from Monica’s aunt are talking to each other as they make their way forward across the super-heated beach.

“Now I know what death adds to Time,” one of them says.

“Obviously”, the other one answers, “death adds an end to what's endless. And once we know there’s an end we can never really forget there’s an end and we’re always making adjustments based on that inevitability, even though we keep telling ourselves that it's endless."

“Death adds fear to Time,” the first one argues. “Sometimes we see it horribly in front of us, other times we feel it behind us, slower than we are yet gaining ground and drooling like an animal. . . .”

“Always on our minds?”

“Some people have a lucky kind of dullness and don’t even know it exists. They’ve heard of it and they know it’s something you’re supposed to dread, but it’s just another monster living in the swamp that no one’s ever seen. They wake up every day as if they’re turning on the tv and will always be able to turn on the tv. But I learned the secret too young and I don’t think I’ve ever had a completely relaxed and happy day. . . . "

"I think we're leaving out the simplest truth: that death adds a bad smell to Time. . . ."

Monica’s aunt, who was always kind to Monica in life, has aged into a horrible, frightening figure (much older and more frightening than when she died “last January” or “a year-and-a-half ago”) even in bright sunlight. Pain and bitterness make her thin white hair fall loose in an oddly horrible way and, when Monica asks her why she’s not in a wheelchair, her bitter answer (while spitting out that Monica’s question is a stupid and insulting question) is to show Monica that she doesn't need a wheelchair by taking five huge, lopsided strides forward above the sand using both crutches for leverage, lopsided strides turning into one or two powerful and springing animal bounds that land her white hair and shroud on the sand, crouching on her shaggy white haunches, spitting and snarling on front of those fleeing from her.

What else?

It can’t be in the dream, can it? or “later” or “now”, after the dream and trying to remember the dream despite wanting to forget it, that the bitter and struggling figure of her dead aunt (whose familiar name has been erased) reminds Monica of Kitty-Monica-and-David’s friend Janet Dumas, who killed herself “five years ago” at the age of thirty, “for no good reason” and who is now exactly the same age as Monica’s aunt.

Of all the events that Monica records with certainty on May 16 the one event that Monica notes but doesn’t date is the fact that she wakes up "at 4:30 a.m.”, hears the cries of seagulls circling the roofs just before gliding toward the ocean and forces herself to record a dream she had “over twenty-four hours ago”.

Definitely on May 16 or from the perspective of May 16:

1. On a day when a drizzling coolness weighs heavily on the air Monica does her best to get “yesterday"’s events down on paper and notes a brief encounter with Nicole Renard. Nicole says that her car is parked down the block at Babette’s and she walked over as soon as she could get free. There are a few things going on in her life she’s been dying to talk to Monica about, but — the way the day’s been going — she won’t get ten words out before they come to pick her up. She hasn’t heard Greg and Andy play for a long time so she said yes when Grete invited her to come along for the band’s new gig at the “Monte Carlo”, out by Kennedy Airport. Had no idea there were clubs near the airport (did Monica know?) and thinks it could be fun. Particularly now, when she could use some distraction, . . .

Car horn sounds and Nicole Renard never gets to tell Monica any of her urgent stories. . . .

2. Not noted when Monica’s old friend, the artist Nancy Jaye (as nervous, talented, thin and sharp-witted as she was when Monica knew her in college, her self and all its selves positioned at an acute angle toward reality) took up temporary residence on ABC Street — hiding from what? recuperating from how many injuries and defeats at the hands of who (who exactly)? Monica only found out that Nancy Jaye was living on ABC Street after Nancy'd moved into a tiny studio in the same hideous mustard stucco dump, an overground cave-system of mousehole studios and tunnel-like apartments known as the "Shangri-La”, where Fat Agnes and her perpetually out-of-work, invalid husband have their basement cubbyhole near the boiler.

Let’s see: Nancy Jaye (not noted when she stops by to talk to Monica) says that her landlady — a pouchy-faced old bitch named “Mrs. Z.” — won’t let her use the washing machine. There’s no language in the lease one way or the other about the washing machine, but, Mrs. Z. says, since it’s not explicitly in the lease, it’s not allowed. The tenants’ only rights (according to Mrs. Z.) are the ones explicitly stated. Whatever's not in the lease is forbidden. Of course that logic is insane, but no one living in the "Shangri-La” (including herself) has the energy to fight her. It might be fair to say that 99% of the energy in that huge building — as big and dark and endless as an ocean liner that sunk to the bottom of an ocean a century ago and is still crawling with life that's learned to breathe in its atmosphere — belongs to Mrs. Z. and that the rest of them share a few leftover molecules.

Nancy wonders if some of the tenants are allowed to use the washing machine and some are not, because Mrs. Z.’s argument is that if she allowed all the tenants to use the washing machine “there wouldn’t be enough water left to flush the toilets”. . . .

So, Nancy says, she’s been doing all her laundry by hand in the studio’s shallow and rust-stained old washbasin. . . .

Fog horns "all day yesterday, through the night and into the morning of May 17”.

Days (exactly how many?) of fog and drizzling coolness condensing into oddly dripping rain, as if the entire expanse of grey sky were the slowly leaking gutter of one rundown multiple-dwelling roof.

Monica notes that x number of dated and un-dated days without “real sun” or “real sky” keep her indoors and in her green room, at her tremendous oak breakfast table/desk, getting a lot of work done, while she waits for sun to burn off grey sky as it drifts horizontally across the surface of ABC Street as fog.

At around 10:30 a.m. on May 17 a little hopeful wash of distant sun appears as a weakly burning spot, no stronger than a 60 watt bulb through a discolored paper lampshade, but immediately goes away.

Not noted on what day Monica is able to work on the front porch through the fog, settled in the streets for days and so tightly woven and seamless that all the visible world from AAF Street (east) to ADI Street (west) and from the beach to the railing along the bay is blotted into it without a knob or an edge and something like rain is forced out of it, so light and weak it may not be able to reach the ground.

Days of fog and dampness have made the grass on all the lawns on ABC Street and every other street grow tall and “today’s” odd rain has darkened it.

Monica’s handwritten (scribbled and close-to-unreadable?) notes say that she borrows Alyosha’s car and (driving around the neighborhood) is struck deeply by the vibrant purple and green shafts of the irises (sharp and light-filled as the edges of broken glass) embedded in the dark green blades of tall lawn grass not yet shaved by local gardening crews mowing their way through the south side of Bay Drive (looking left out her window while driving west). Monica would love to ask David if he'd mind doing a little research into the plant chemistry and pigment history of those illuminated strokes of purple in the grass for which she can find no adequate analogy to summon up what she's seeing for someone who hasn't seen the exact purple of irises scattered and sunlit in green. Later David is able to come up with a little information about "Tyrian" purple (mentioned in both the Iliad and in the Aeneid), a dye extracted drop by drop from the gland — called the "flower" or the "bloom" — of a mollusk. He starts to recount a Greek legend about Hercules finding his dog's mouth stained purple after playing on the beach and chewing on shellfish, but Monica finds nothing in any of it to bring the purple of irises to life.

Monica wonders about this too (while she’s driving or later, when she’s hastily scribbling her unreadable notes): is it the endless rain and fog (which may or may not be the same as the sheer absence of sun) that’s been making little dome-headed Rosamond so miserable? Even late at night Monica can hear the depth of her inconsolable sobbing through the slightly open third floor attic windows next door.

Is this May 18? Monica wonders while typing her quickly–sketched notes that enjoy hop-skipping around days as much as children enjoy hopping through gameboards chalked on the sidewalk.

For example: notes say “bright yellow tulips” (that is, yellow as a yellow dress with light in it) and then “blood red tulips”, but don’t say when (or where) Monica saw them (yesterday, while driving around the neighborhood, seems likely, but notes don’t say so). Skip back to “days of white mist” — air white with a ghost-snow that's white, but isn’t cold, leaving the visible world wet from end to end.

Notes shift to a brief natural event that would have absolutely no life in memory — would happen and then not be happening without leaving any trace, no matter how riveting (the object of how many gazes?) for twenty-eight seconds, nine minutes, half-an-hour, etc. — if no one felt compelled to chronicle it one way or another, from the dullest, most literal and undifferentiated (with no ear for the patterns, rhythms and laws that make experience of the outer world viewed in a panoramic way interesting and that need to be edited back into the horizontal sentence that keeps rotating by) to the most abstract and coded.

Let’s see: “at about 7:30 last evening” and lasting exactly one half hour, from 7:30 to 8 on the clock, the day’s heavy rain and rainclouds part, allowing sun (or some distant mirrorglass reflection of sun) to make a blinding rift that follows the entire curve of the horizon above the ocean: not sitting on the horizon, but inches that = yards or miles above it and precisely measuring the head’s ability to swivel 180 degrees or more on its neck. Curving rift of this “clearing” has the effect of making clouds above it circle the arc of the sky’s lower dome along with it, while below the charcoal-and-violet mountain range of evening rears up swiftly into an inky tidal wave headed not for land, but upward toward the rift of light that helped create it. It takes exactly one half hour for the bright rift circling the ocean to get swallowed up and for the seamless blackness that begins right in front of you to become frightening.

For how long during or afterward: wet gutters gleam where the setting sun burned them.

“Out of order”?

Not at all clear in Monica’s handwritten notes whether “before” or “after”, in daylight or after dark: Pat Corcoran’s niece (who lives with the Corcorans like an adopted daughter), blonde and pretty Allison Meehan, can be seen clearly sitting in her green-and-yellow Datsun with an unfamiliar sixty-something man, very slight in black turtleneck and glasses. Allison, behind the wheel, is wearing a crisp, sky-blue windbreaker and long white earrings, as if she spent time deciding what to wear for this meeting.

Monica would love to hear what they’re saying, but can’t (both Allison’s and the slight, sixtyish man’s voices are soft and easily ground up by ordinary street noises). All Monica can do is observe that there’s some conversation, that the slight man has a big, black portfolio in his lap, that Allison Meehan leans over to sign something in what may be a ledger resting inside the portfolio and then seems to sign and tear a check out of her checkbook and hand it to the man while he’s writing vigorously in his ledger.

Monica notes to herself that it’s often the case that you have no idea what you're observing, but feel compelled to observe it and to note it down. It interests Monica that Fat Agnes isn’t able to pass without stopping and staring into the car. No attempt to conceal herself: flattened face, iron red curls, hips wide as an automobile bumper, dressed how? (not noted whether in her usual royal blue polyester), she stands on the sidewalk staring for long minutes (hearing some of what’s inaudible to Monica through her green room windows 1, 2, 3 stories up, just behind the tip of the Rhinebeck pine). As far as Monica knows Fat Agnes doesn’t know Allison Meehan and she wonders what catches Fat Agnes’s attention and why it matters to her what Allison Meehan and the slender, sixtyish man in the black turtleneck might be saying to each other (and what narrative she might be weaving out of the transaction in the car).

May be nothing more than the eye’s eternal need to stare at whatever’s there to be stared at. May, for example, just be another kind of television for Fat Agnes, with its afternoon stories that never come to an end.

“Twelve hours later” Monica looks down from her green room (west-facing) windows in “the early morning” and can tell that it had rained during the night: sunlight in puddles.

Later ("mist at 3:30”) Monica is on the front porch, writing. Pale blue of sky is such a weak blue it has no grip on its white clouds: they skim across it easily and easily go out of view. "Around four" there's sudden thunder and a sudden, hard rain (in which order not noted).

Same day or another?

Passing the door to Al Szarka/Yvonne Wilding’s front (west-facing through a handsome row of tall windows with turn-of-the-century stained glass panels across their tops and, below, the original solid oak window-seat running the windows’ width) parlor/kitchen/dining room, Monica stops to read a small note taped there and addressed to someone named “Kenny”.

“Kenny! We’re at the lunchonette at the corner of the Boulevard and AAF Street.”

a) Doesn’t say the northwest corner of the Boulevard and AAF Street, but Monica thinks she knows which small, wedge-shaped luncheonette Yvonne means (not the deeper, darker one on the northeast side across the way, two or three stores in from the corner, not exactly at the corner).

b) Monica wonders how “Kenny” managed to get in the house to read the note with no one home to let him in.

c) Also: no time given, therefore “Kenny” could (if he found a way to get in the house and read the note) easily arrive at the wedge-shaped luncheonette long after Yvonne and the others had gone elsewhere.

The more Monica thinks about the little note the more it empties out and becomes pointless.

38^o “at 8 a.m. on May 19”.

According to a television weather report (odd, shallow and unstable historian of transient conditions, such as “today is the coldest May 19” since sometime in the 19th century [no exact date given]).

The Chronicle notes that “rain began yesterday afternoon” and continued into the night, wind picking up as the temperature dropped. And later “cold wind and rain strike the house in sheets angling sharply 22 1/2^o downward from the west and rattling all the loose or crumbling three-quarter-century-old windows and window frames in Monica’s attic apartment and all uncounted windows three stories up x the great unmeasured breadth of the old house.

Pat Corcoran waylays Monica the first chance she gets to tell her that she had a horrible night: “chilled to the bone”: kept waiting for the heat to come on, but it never did: tried to be patient, did everything she could think of to keep warm, but finally couldn’t stand it and her anger boiled over. So mad she didn’t pay attention to what it was like outside — threw a raincoat over her nightgown and marched herself out into the wind and rain and cold, just to have the satisfaction of pounding on the landlord’s door, jamming her thumb as far into his bell-socket as it would go and keeping it there till one of the little fat-asses had to roll out of bed and answer the door.

She’s proud of herself for holding her temper: lisping little pale-face/fat-ass sonny-boy was the one they sent to answer the door and she could have said a lot, but all she said was: “We have no heat. I’ve been up all night waiting for it to come on, but it never did. I’m not feeling well — I haven’t been feeling well — and I think it’s because I’m not used to living in a house where they give no heat, where they have no consideration for anyone but themselves. I grew up in an ugly building in the Bronx and I lived in a few other apartment houses and they weren’t the garden spots of the world, but even in those shitty places they knew that they had to give heat and sometimes they’d even suffocate you, it was so hot. So I’m not used to this kind of stinginess and selfishness and it’s making me sick! So could you please tell your parents that I was here and they should remember that it’s a two-way street and we can make their lives miserable too.”

Seems to her that he started to say ok, he’d try to take care of it (actually looked to her like he was ready to cry), but the mother – the ugly little fat-ass toad mother — yelled in from somewhere, “tell her we have the thermostat set exactly where it’s supposed to be! the night-time thermostat setting is allowed to be lower than the daytime thermostat setting so the thermostat setting is completely legal and she has no right to be ringing our bell at this hour! So tell her to go home and shut the door.”

So of course he obeyed mommy and closed the door in her face and she came home and turned on the stove and got under extra blankets — and while she was lying in bed and thinking about her life and how she ended up in a position where a mama’s boy doughball like that can slam a door in her face, she realized that even if they gave a decent amount of heat she’d still be miserable. As Monica knows, she hates winter: she’s always hated it — always hated the sensation of cold on her skin — but it’s reached the point where she doesn’t just hate it, she can’t tolerate it. Can’t tolerate it, but there’s no solution. Can Monica think of a solution? What do you do when you’ve reached your breaking point but don’t break or can’t allow yourself to break and everyone thinks you’re wonderful for putting one foot in front of the other and tolerating what they know you absolutely can no longer tolerate. Said yesterday you couldn’t take it for one more second, yet here you are today. Can’t take it, but you do take it. The ability to adapt is supposed to be human nature’s greatest virtue, but it’s not a good one — it’s the one they sell you as a virtue, but that kills you eleven times out of ten.

Monica can’t remember the last time she spoke to (or even saw) childish, overweight, slow-talking-but-not-so-slow-as-she-seems, pampered-yet-kind Margo Burger (one daughter in a family that breaks down like this: grossly overweight, affluent local meatpacker father/attractive, always-struggling-with-her-weight blonde mother/one overweight but contented daughter (Margo)/one dangerously thin and starving daughter), but here she is in front of Monica in the supermarket, shopping for dogfood for the tiny black poodle in her arms (dog could be named “Barbara”, but name not noted so uncertain). The only fragment-of-a-story Margo Burger has to tell is the story of what happened to her beloved cocker spaniel, Walter (the reason she has her little poodle). A year-and-a-half ago and for no reason anyone’s been able to give her, when Walter was only six years old, he suddenly went blind in both eyes. She wanted to keep him and take care of him, but her parents convinced her that she was being selfish — that she was thinking only of herself, not Walter, and that a blind dog would be a miserable and suffering dog — so she let them take him away and have him put to sleep. They bought her the poodle and of course the poodle is nice and she loves the poodle, but it isn’t the same and she knows she’ll always be heartbroken. She knows that she’ll never forget Walter the way she knows she’ll never forget Monica and David, because without their help she never would have graduated from high school and for the rest of her life everyone would have thought of her as even stupider than she is and she never would have had the confidence she has now.

At 9:30 a.m. of the same or the next May day it’s too hot (“hot as a morning in July”) for Monica and David to get the early start they wanted, but by 10:30 a mild wind pushes summer back where it belongs (that is, pushes time’s arrow back in a conventional direction) and by a little after 10:30 Monica and David are on the boardwalk (as they planned) reading (editing?) a new story called Winter/ /Winter out loud.

Bill Kropotkin, profoundly unshaven (so profoundly the shadows in his face seem to have nothing to do with shaving) yet oddly spruced-up in (what colored?) suit and (what colored?) tie comes running (not “jogging”) toward Monica and David somewhat awkwardly but quickly, as if trying to close the distance between East and West as fast as possible. Stops to talk, but does that necessarily mean that he has a story to tell? Let’s see: says that he knows what they’re thinking! he would be thinking it too — can see how nuts he looks a) just because he’s always looked weird in a suit and tie and b) because he’s running on the boardwalk in a suit and tie! Ridiculous! Ridiculous that life has made him look like such an ass. And what’s more ridiculous is the reason he’s running on the boardwalk in stupid suit and stupid tie: someone told Nelly that three people were suddenly fired over at Bay View High School and that they needed to fill those three spots immediately. Of course nothing’s ever too perfectly clear when someone’s told Nelly something and then Nelly’s repeated it (as they know) so she thought they said “desperate for a History teacher”, but she wasn’t certain they said “History” or even if they said “desperate”. Still (because he’s the one who’s desperate) he got himself all dolled up and galloped over there early — so they’d see what a responsible eager-beaver they’d be getting — but they didn’t seem all that desperate to him — hardly seemed interested — and certainly not eager for an overqualified History teacher!

So he’s not at all optimistic. That is, it’s back to the truth. He’s known the truth since childhood. For example: he’s known that happiness and success are so fragile that they’re false. They’re what’s false in life. Disappointment and failure are the truth of life and to live in them is to live a life of truth — the life that the great mass of humanity has always lived — while culture holds up a mirror of illusion for us to look at: don’t see ourselves in the mirror of culture, don’t want to see ourselves in the mirror of culture, we stare at the successful handful of others living the false life of happiness as if they were ourselves. Live the truth of failure and disappointment while always staring into a second, illusory world of ease and pleasure. Our miserable lives drain into their happy ones. And as soon as we become successful we become, without exception, self-deluding and revolting. That’s history in a nutshell.

What’s most likely is that he’ll wake up tomorrow and start looking for another cab-driving job. And if Monica and David hear him singing a different song next week — the song of the temporarily happy and deluded — it’s because a miracle happened and the ridiculous Mellon Foundation grant came through!

What else?

They know the story of Jimmy’s leg, don’t they? Nelly must have told them about Jimmy’s leg. Not that Jimmy’s leg is all that interesting, but it surprises him that Nelly didn’t look for them to tell them all the details.

Last summer Jimmy picked up a splinter running barefoot (like an idiot) on the boardwalk. The splinter was so big and went so deep they had to take him to the local pediatrician everyone raves about, Dr. Dumbo. And Dr. Dumbo removed the splinter, reassured them and sent them home. But a few weeks ago Jimmy started complaining that the same leg that had been treated by Dr. Dumbo felt “heavy”. And not too long after that the “heaviness” became pain and then the pain became so severe that Jimmy was afraid to let his foot touch the ground and he stopped walking. Couldn’t take him back to the sainted Dr. Dumbo of course and the only thing they could come up with was to go back to a doctor they liked when they lived out in Douglaston. That doctor is no more a foot or leg doctor than the beloved Dr. Dumbo is, but at least he was honest enough to send Jimmy to a pediatric surgeon and the surgeon saw right away that what was wrong was that Dr. Dumbo had left the deepest part of the boardwalk splinter buried in Jimmy’s foot! Took him ten minutes to solve the problem created by the revered Dr. Dumbo a year earlier. So they fixed Jimmy up and now he’s getting better, but he (Bill) can’t recover what he paid Dr. Dumbo for messing Jimmy up and of course he had to pay his old doctor and then the pediatric surgeon. The surgeon only charged $75 and he was grateful for what he did, but it still adds up to too much money — so he lied and said that all he had on him was twenty dollars and the surgeon was nice enough to say he could send the rest later, but he’s not going to do it. They’re all a brotherhood, it’s all a cabal, so if you finally manage to screw one of them in some sense you screw them all. It’s tortured logic, but that doesn’t stop screwing a doctor, any doctor, from being satisfying.

Daisy and Margaret Brennan pass and Monica would like to find out how Daisy’s tests turned out, but Bill Kropotkin lingers just long enough (as if he has more stories to tell, though he doesn’t) for Margaret and Daisy to go by, then turn north on ABC Street toward home.

Most likely on May 20 Monica steps out the front door onto the porch of wide, grey boards and is confronted immediately by a sky exactly the soft blue of an old blue blanket pinned to a clothesline. Blue-blanket-blue of sky trying to blow across space, but pinned there out of view (to a second horizon below the horizon?). Smooth sheet or furling and flapping?

All of deep space between herself and windblown blue (receding away from the gaze, as always) is uncommonly bright: wounds the eye as if the sun were hidden everywhere in it. No-longer-new, no-longer-small leaves are happy to wake up to first sunlight in days: even if diffused in deep brightness of space, sunlight on leaves starts to warm them up: smell of green leaves (or of green in leaves) warmed by sunlight fills the moment, but also takes Monica out of the moment as if it were the aroma-memory of something cooking that’s been tasted before. This too?: almost-but-not-quite as strange as the wild smell of a green and clammy living mineral that’s swum up from the bottom and crawled right up into your hand so that you can’t help remembering its smell for the rest of your time on Earth.

Before the green aroma of the world, the moment is purely visual. Eyes burn from staring into bright blue space that always pretends to be near so you won’t know that it’s receding and even a tiny moment of dizziness helps you fall into blue’s internal distance so that you need to steady yourself on your steps, watching the sky blow across the wide screen of the Rosenwassers’ north-facing picture window.

Blue there so soft you dream of rolling yourself in it, but every ray of sun striking off windowglass (no particle gets through to fall on board or carpet) burns Monica’s eyes even more than first sun diffused in first reality of sky.

Notes talk about a “frosty green” on May 19 and also talk about a “blue sky of clouds”, but it isn’t clear if both occur on the 19th or on the 20th or if one (which one?) occurs on the 19th, the other on the 20th.

Hedges bow under wind?

And then (looking ahead just a little through handwritten pages) hedges bow under light? under weight of light?

Notes talk about the “heaviness” of the hedges and the fact that it’s this heaviness that the wind is moving in masses (exactly unlike what happens in winter, notes say, when there’s little more than a nervous agitation of hollow branches as wind passes through hedges as easily as a look from any direction toward them).

Therefore (true or false): warmth has something to do with density or the other way around? And this too: warmth creates the place it needs to gather and store itself: accumulated warmth forces new growth and this thicker atmosphere = summer and makes us forget how sharply isolated things were not long ago when every object was thin and space was empty.

Can no longer see through it (through them?).

Handwritten notes say that the “heaviness” of the atmosphere is (surprisingly) not unpleasant and (scribbled, almost legible) seem to suggest a relationship between atmospheric heaviness and the weight of warmth in green leaves growing fuller every minute (not just present, but future weight of warmth making its presence felt).

Reading (editing) her handwritten notes in order to translate them Monica has trouble figuring out whether it’s sister Kitty or mother (Betty) who tells her that Kitty sent out wedding announcements for her soon-to-take-place marriage (date not noted) to Hap “Happy” Huntington Blank — hoping of course for generous gifts. There’ve already been a few gifts given, but not generous ones. The worst (the one that got Kitty so mad she called Betty) was from their wealthiest cousin who sent a check for one hundred dollars! Betty told Kitty to send it back, but Kitty said that, even though she’s furious and she’d like to, she needs it.

Two solid days of winter in May have an effect on the molecular structure of the Rosenwassers’ picture window and shift it toward blue. (Only the window and not the day?) Image in the window (image that is the window) is muddled: not a soft blue blanket, not a blanket at all and, soft or not soft, maybe not even blue: might be white drapes drawn across the whole length of the inner (or outer?) surface. Drapes are thick and have an opaque creaminess (no light gets through them), yet the window isn’t white, it’s blue. Blue of white? Blowing across white and the other way around? Glaring whitened blue that resembles the sky without reflecting it.

On May 20 or May 21 (handwritten notes are unclear) violent wind continues to blow and absence of sun (swept off the table along with napkins and forks) darkens all green, but wind’s persistence spins the wheel of the local universe quickly through its revolutions and May revolves back into place: mild air all along ABC Street at 9:30 a.m. (when Monica gets downstairs to work) and atmosphere is warm, almost summery on the boardwalk at 10:30: cools down by the time Monica and David get tired of editing Winter/ /Winter and head north from the boardwalk along ABC Street toward home.

On the same unclearly dated day or another Monica (while working on the front porch) sees Vicky Liman pass, deep in conversation with tall (that is, even taller than Vicky), stoop-shouldered, flat-faced and square-jawed Norma Maloney. Norma Maloney seems to be doing most of the talking (as usual) and, just as Monica starts to ask herself if there is or isn’t an odd similarity between Norma Maloney’s agitated and slippery way of talking and Pat Corcoran’s frictionless racing around the banked edges of sentences (with the difference that Norma’s physical droopiness seems to slow her down a little), Pat Corcoran (who must have spotted Monica writing on the porch by peeping through the wooden slats of her ancient blinds) pops out her front porch door to show Monica her new elkhound/shepherd puppy, Rommel. Looks more like a shepherd than an elkhound to her, but — does Monica know? — is it possible that the elkhound will emerge later and take over? Either way it’s going to be an enormous dog.

What else? Pat says that she’s feeling a little better because a drop of sunlight touched her face. Feeling a little better because of the sunlight, but not enough sunlight, so she isn’t feeling as good as she could. This too: we all rave about spring, but if we’re honest about it how often is spring really spring? As soon as spring starts to act like spring (and that generally means you can feel a breath of summer in it) cold rain and wind spring up to blow spring and summer-in-spring away, as if February’s still out there in the bushes waiting for a door to be left unlocked. Doesn’t Monica agree? In New York spring is just an idea. It’s the name we give to a few minutes here and there. It’s like a heavenly breeze you think you feel for a few seconds blowing down an alley between two apartment houses in the Bronx.

While Monica is playing with Pat Corcoran’s beautiful shepherd/elkhound puppy and listening to Pat Corcoran complain about spring she’s also keeping an eye on a small yellow, black and buff-grey bird she feels confident sketching in quickly (without David spending hours doing research in the small local library on Coast Boulevard near AAF Street) as a female or possibly even a juvenile “Yellow-Throated Warbler”, because, as far as she can see, the small, darting bird is lacking the male’s characteristic black eye-mask. Makes short, dashing flights from level to level and from pad to pad of dark and drying old needles within the interior shade of the tall Rhinebeck pine and then out onto the more frond-like outer sun-pads where new needle-leaves are glowing, as transparent and green as sucking candy.

Later David can’t keep himself from going to the local library and, he tells Monica, the pictures he saw there in various bird identification guides make him think the bird she saw hopping through the interior of the Rhinebeck pine was not the fairly common “Yellow-Throated Warbler”, but a female Blackburnian Warbler as it appears only at this exact moment in spring, when the female’s black eye-mask is a barely perceptible pale cocoa.

At 10 a.m. on May 22, on her way upstairs to her attic apartment, Monica catches sight of Yvonne Wilding through the wide-open door to Yvonne Wilding and Al Szarka’s spacious, west-facing parlor-diningroom-kitchen with beamed ceiling, oak window-seat and stained glass window panels. She’s sitting on the edge of a hard wooden kitchen chair in a crisp white pants suit, putting on white high heels.

Minutes later David (looking down from the left-hand set of green room windows) says that he sees Al Szarka on the sidewalk in front of the house, all dressed up in suit-and-tie, looking good but fidgety, waiting impatiently for Yvonne to get ready and says to himself “so this must finally be the day.”

Sighting of Yvonne and Al getting ready to be married reminds Monica of two events she didn’t think of chronicling when they happened, but feels magnetically compelled to chronicle now that she’s seen Yvonne in white pants suit and white high heels.

1. Earlier the same day (before 10 a.m., but at what hour exactly not noted) Monica heard the horn of a car speeding west <— east on Coast Boulevard honking out the notes of “Here Comes the Bride” as it passed ABC Street.

2. Monica had no idea that Artie Tilden (lazy and/or permanently stoned, not-quite-hippieish, motorcycle-riding postal worker whose long red hair hangs straight down, sometimes in a ponytail, sometimes not, making his already-small head appear shrunken) had ever spoken to, let alone had any sort of relationship with, Yvonne and Al, but last night (starting when and for how many hours not noted) Yvonne and Al entertained Artie Tilden and his girlfriend, Anne Marie (newly engaged, therefore his “fiancé”) in their apartment. Unmistakable sounds of an uncomfortable social evening. (About to get married and feeling the need to spend the night-before getting drunk and/or high with an engaged couple they assume are more “normal” than they are, know nothing about and have nothing in common with? to find out what? what exactly?) Goes on for a while and gradually loosens up and gets louder.

On May 22 Al Regan (still haunted by short and wiry neighbor Enos Greengrass, who spent a good part of his life outdoors, in front and to the right (north) of his house, hosing, mowing, raking, brooming, etc.) is mowing his lawn with little grandson, Matthew, who’s dressed in cardinal red playsuit from neck to ankles: red comes to life as photons ripped loose from cotton fibers by aggressive sun-rays digging into every surface through the easily-penetrated atmosphere.

Is it also on May 22 that Monica (whether on porch or porch steps or at the vast green-room oak desk/breakfast table not noted) is editing handwritten notes for January 9?: notes say that “a major snow storm” is predicted to begin blowing in “around midnight”, while snow and ice are still on the ground from the last heavy snow storm and that that snow covered snow and ice that had no chance to melt away from the heavy snowfall before that. Fresh snow on top of old snow, how many snow layers on top of how many ice layers, the bottom-most layers bonded in a dark and gritty glue to sidewalk and thorny hedge-tangle equally. A winter it would take a blowtorch to get to the bottom of and fresh sheets of snow perpetually swirling around the anchored masses of turn-of-the-century three-story shingle houses and even more massive multiple dwellings that were once mansions.

“On May 24” Monica sees (glancing sideways while walking south on ABC Street toward boardwalk and ocean) white drapes that seem to be inside the Limans’ front (west-facing from the east side of the street), ground floor picture window, though Monica knows, from chronicling the Rosenwassers’ picture window, that the white drapes may be the lifelike reflection of drapes (at an odd angle) inside someone else’s house or apartment. Further confusing the image: masses of fully ripened green leaves appear embedded and impressed in the softness and density of the white drapes.

Two or three pages later Monica’s notes for May 24 say that “an empty clothesline” is reflected along with white and green of drapes and leaves in the Limans’ picture window, but no way to tell where in the continuous level space of ABC Street’s backyards the clothesline is. Notes say that all that can be said for sure is that the clothesline, even though it’s reflected in the same picture window as white drapes and embedded green leaves, seems to exist on a different plane or in a competing reality where qualities like weight and softness have an entirely different meaning.

It’s not only the images inside/outside the Limans’ picture window that are hard to untangle. Time is hard to untangle in this long sequence of handwritten notes on folded lavender scrap paper.

A number of events certainly occur and are certainly chronicled on May 24; other events occur that logically should occur on May 24 but aren’t dated; several pages after the certainly chronicled events of May 24 the scribbled words “the morning of May 25” introduce a number of events immediately chronicled after that notation; intercut in events that definitely occur on the 24 and undated events that probably-but-not-definitely occur on the 24 there’s a detailed (yet random and disorderly) recounting of a trip to Manhattan to see Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon.

Transcribing her handwritten notes from the 24 and 25 “later” (in November or December of ‘76) and then again “now” Monica can’t figure out when or how a trip to Manhattan could slip into either day when so many events on ABC Street seem to be chronicled — as if the trip to Manhattan and viewing of An Autumn Afternoon occur on an entirely separate strip of time, no day at all, a dayless day, dated or undated, something but not exactly like the empty clothesline that doesn’t exactly co-exist with heavy green leaf masses that leave a deep impression in a white bedspread in or reflected in an ABC Street picture window.

On what day does Margaret Brennan call out excitedly to Monica (in what location, from what distance, while walking in what direction?) that Daisy’s tests have all come back negative!

Not noted whether on the same late May day or another that Nadja and Grete (both beautiful, but, it seems to Monica, in entirely different ways despite some similarities: both have long, athletic bodies, both are addicted to the outdoors, particularly the beach, both have year-round glowing tans, both are bicyclers and swimmers, both are with men named “Andy”, yet they don’t resemble one another at all: Nadja and her Andy are lifeguards who travel the world trying to turn the whole year into summer; Nadja has no children, doesn’t seem to care about having children or even about marrying Andy; Nadja is athletic but lazy and sensual with a happy pliancy to both her skin and nature; Grete Forest, on the other hand, is married to her Andy and has two children (little Hank Forest with Andy and Martina (Tina) Lima with first husband Tony “Lima Bean” Lima) and has the conflicted girlishness of a grown woman and married mother-of-two still living with her mother) say “hi” and “hello” to Monica as they bicycle by in candy-colored nylon shorts and sleeveless tops on the boardwalk heading <— west or —> east not five minutes after Monica (walking south toward the boardwalk) spotted a cardinal sending out its little knotted string of notes on a tv antenna atop one of ABC Street’s massive multiple-dwellings-that-used-to-be-mansions. Cardinal’s red exactly the same shade of supersaturated red as the playsuit Matthew Regan was wearing yesterday or the day before, out on sidewalk with grandfather Al.

Not noted how many films by Yasujiro Ozu Monica has seen before she sees An Autumn Afternoon on May 25 or, for that matter, whether or not she’s already seen An Autumn Afternoon, but she does note that she’s sure that knowing one or two works by a great artist is not enough to have any knowledge of what the artist does or what she/he is after. What’s needed as a minimum requirement for knowledge begins with the desire to re-experience the pleasure of the first experience, possibly the need to dig a little deeper into the pleasure of the first experience, desire and need for re-experience gradually becoming obsessive, obsession becoming addiction and then immersion and all of it resembling one of the extreme forms of love. And nothing else will do for the kind of knowledge that matters.

For example: as soon as An Autumn Afternoon begins, before there are any images, only wistful and nostalgic music that reminds Monica of other long-ago-heard-and-forgotten music together with Japanese characters in black ink against coarsely woven straw or hemp that resembles the texture of the tatami mat where, it’s often been said of Ozu, he positions his camera at a low angle to view the quiet, horizontal flow of his un-dramatic family dramas, Monica is already experiencing the profound pleasure of re-immersion in Ozu’s coherent world with its rigorous aesthetic rooted in an idiosyncratic biological rhythm that demands the repetition of visual and thematic elements to the point of equaling a private code.

Let’s see: An Autumn Afternoon begins with a wide view of industrial smokestacks: red and grey dominate and the wide view may take in the façades of a factory complex. This wide, exterior and distant view serves to frame the narrower, closer and less abstract human action within: Chishu Ryu (elderly industrialist or executive, whose quietly expressive anti-dramatic presence, thin, monk-like face and wiry body, air of forbearance, patience and amusement are the core of the film’s tone) has his office here and whenever we see the exterior shot of red-and-grey smokestacks a conversation in the office between Ryu and one of his three old friends (also industrialists or executives and also carried over from film to film) is bound to follow. These conversations have some bearing on the plot, which can easily be found summarized elsewhere: as in the earlier Late Spring social convention brings extraordinary pressure to bear on a widowed father to marry off his only daughter, no matter how doing the right thing is bound to destroy their happiness.

Monica tries to list the fixed shots that (in addition to the repeated shot of the smokestacks) repetitively frame (and trigger our anticipation of) the scenes and conversations that make up the minimal plot.

Exterior of a large, modern office building.

Exterior of a large, modern apartment house.

Night view along a narrow passage lined on either side with bars, coffee and/or noodle shops, clubs, restaurants, all with colorful neon signs.

Interior of “Tony’s Bar”.

Hallway or corridor inside the married son’s apartment.

Row of colored towels hanging over the railing of the large, modern apartment house where the married son has his apartment.

View of the son’s young and pretty wife inside the apartment, beating a large, colorful bath towel.

Driving range on the roof of the large, modern office building: Ryu’s son and fellow office workers driving balls at white canvas practice targets that may or may not be slowly and stiffly sailing in clouds and in breezes, as if on a clothesline.

Sounds of passing train whistles heard from the roof of the office building and at other times in other places signaling the same or different emotions for different characters and for the viewer.

Shift of viewpoint from office to bar to interior of home to interior or exterior of apartment house to factory to bar etc. etc.. Or from wide to narrow, exterior to interior, day to night and, of course, the same shifts in reverse.

What else?

Monica would love to have counted the exact number of repetitions of each repeated framing shot or location.

Exactly how many scenes take place in the interior of “Tony’s Bar”, for example?

These are some of the Tony’s Bar scenes that come to mind:

a. Genteel, widowed, peculiarly philosophical and contemplative industrialist or executive Chishu Ryu, sitting on a bar stool and drinking at the bar in “Tony’s Bar” with one, two or three of his old comrades, observes that the proprietor, an attractive younger woman, reminds him of his wife, but Monica doesn’t remember if anything is made of the probability that it’s the emotion attached to this resemblance that draws Ryu to “Tony’s Bar” rather than any of hundreds of other, similar bars with their neon signs lining the alleys, passages and side streets of this district.

b. One of Chishu Ryu’s friends (the tall and dapper professor married to a woman no more than three years older than his own daughter?) has rediscovered (by chance or because he set out to find him?) one of the little group of old friends’ former teachers, a thickset man with a wide head and brushy crewcut, nicknamed “The Gourd”.

A long, boisterous evening of dining and drinking.

The old man — the former teacher, The Gourd — gets drunk. Storytelling and reminiscing. The Gourd’s life has changed for the worse: he now lives alone with his miserable, unmarried daughter. His life is impoverished and bitter, while his students have become prosperous businessmen and professionals. A great deal of warm sake and cold beer are consumed: little sake cups and tall glasses of beer are lifted with groans of satisfaction. The old man’s gratitude mixed with unhappiness and drunken confessions. An extraordinary moment of satisfied lip-smacking: The Gourd has never tasted eel — “eel from the sea” — before. He marvels at it and keeps bringing morsels of the dark, barbecued flesh to his mouth with much lip-smacking and many groans of pleasure. The alternate title of the film is said to be “The Taste of Mackerel Pike”, so Monica assumes the little dishes of food The Gourd and the group of middle-aged comrades and former schoolmates keep dipping their chopsticks into between drinks offer more than sea eel.

c. Is it in “Tony’s Bar” while drinking with one of his friends or when one of his friends drops in to chat with him in his office that Ryu gets this advice: though it will be painful to be left alone when he forces himself to find a husband for his daughter, it will be far worse if he asks her (or simply allows her) not to marry and to continue living out her life with him as a caretaker and companion. She’ll become bitter, he’s warned. “You’ll be exactly like our old teacher: worse than alone because you’re reminded every day of your selfishness by your daughter’s misery.”

This too: only later (“now”?) Monica thinks of another set of fixed and repeated shots that signal repeated actions: when a Western-style door is closed or a screen slides shut a conversation between father and daughter, occasionally between father and son, always follows.

And this: Ryu’s house is at the top of a hill and there are repeated shots of Ryu slowly ascending the hill toward home; views of the city from the hill; and views of Ryu arriving home and entering, followed by the repeated, fixed, low-angle shot of a door frame opening onto a passageway within the house framing the movement of figures this way or that.

What troubles Monica most, as always with art of this subtlety and magnitude: the impossibility of finding ways to isolate and suggest to others the essence of Ozu’s art, what again and again gives her as much pleasure as the taste of sea eel or “mackerel pike” gives to The Gourd.

Monica knows that it isn’t exactly this, or is this but so much more than this that to say it all would be the same as making Ozu’s films again, but for the moment she can get no further under the skin of her thinking than this: at the heart of Ozu’s aesthetic and her pleasure is a tranquil, harmonious tension: between the coolness and formal rigor of the scene-by-scene framing, repetition and composition and the warmth, humor and occasional, profound melancholy of the domestic narratives that are never melodramatic or quotidian, but intimate and eternal.

Another way: she loves Ozu’s abstraction made human and daily life made abstract. Coolness or warmth added or reduced exactly opposite to the way they’d be reduced or added in ordinary, unimaginative story-telling.

While walking in the neighborhood Monica runs into Pam Leary (on what avenue and near what cross-street not noted) and Pam makes it her business to stop for as long as it takes to tell Monica the tiniest particle of a story that may not have any more complete and coherent story that contains it. Leads into her tiny partial story by saying meaningfully that it looks as if she won’t be visiting Nora Salerno any time soon. Most people never see it — even Monica may not see it — because Nora is so nice that all you can see is her niceness and so sweet that all you can feel is her sweetness — but Nora is very vain. Her vanity’s well hidden by the sweetness and niceness, but it’s the reason no one’s going to see her. The fact is that she’s been in terrible pain for a long time, but endured it because she dreaded having major dental work done. Now she has no choice and she’s about to do it. All her bottom front teeth have fallen out from neglect and there’s no getting around the fact that she’s going to be a hideous mess for a long time. She doesn’t want anyone to know (swore her (Pam) to secrecy in fact!) and intends to hibernate and not show her face until the ugliness wears off somehow.

What else? Nothing else. Or Monica loses interest and doesn’t record anything else.

Same day or another: Nelly X passes the porch where Monica’s working with little Jimmy X and Jojo Coffin and makes a hole in whatever mini-narrative Monica is in the middle of by stopping to explain that she and Jimmy are walking Jojo home. But, as soon as Jojo skips off up the short flight of stairs next door, Nelly X comes closer, looking every which way, so she can whisper a secret Monica absolutely can’t repeat to anyone. She and Bill are moving to Australia! Of course Chloris will go with them (if anything, it should be easier for Chloris to get a job in a nursing home than for Bill to get a job in a university). The most important thing is that no one can know their plans! Why is that? She wants Monica to take a second to think about it! Think about the economy! Think about how many people are unemployed right now. If all those unemployed people ever got wind of their plan there’d be a mass emigration, a stampede — a real Exodus — and the competition for jobs over there would make it pointless to go.

Nelly X pauses for breath, but she’s not done. She’s sure the move will be good for all the X’s: not just Chloris, but for Leila too! Think about the vast population, therefore the incredible number of available men down there! Doesn’t Monica agree? Doesn’t she think that having an endless choice of men would solve Leila’s perpetual man problem? Wouldn’t it be great to finally get her away from Jose and Kim and whatever other dead-end relationships she’s been stuck in for half her life? So can’t Monica picture exactly the same way she’s picturing the whole X family already settled and happy there?

Nelly X pauses for a long time, as if taking a long journey over her own horizon and several other horizons, all the while standing there smiling with a vague happiness that resembles a vague unhappiness, as if unaware she isn’t speaking. And when she’s finished circling her own and all other possible horizons she returns armed with a fresh argument.

Does Monica know that the common cold (an incurable epidemic here!) never reached Australia?! No one in Australia has ever gotten a cold! So they won’t just be happy and employed — they’ll all be healthy too!

The hard part is waiting. Too much time on your hands. Life is boring when all you can do is wait for something to happen and you have nothing important to do. So right now she’s thinking of going back to teaching, even though she knows for a fact that there are no teaching jobs available.

There’s this too: everything really depends on Bill. All her plans would change if Bill actually got his grant.

Nelly X speaks vaguely, as always: pauses, swallowed words, sentences broken or trailing off because another zone of her brain’s spotted the thing it was searching for six weeks ago and drifted toward it, dragging along the zone of the brain that’s talking, all within a ground mist always hanging in its hollows.

For example: Monica has no idea what Nelly’s trying to express when she says that her life will change because she’ll “have more to do” if Bill does get the grant or if Bill doesn’t get the grant. At different times or possibly even in the same sentence she seems to be longing for contradictory outcomes. “If he doesn’t get the grant he’ll have to go back to driving a cab, so. . . .” And/or “If he finally gets his stupid grant he’ll get lost in his stupid research, so. . . .”

No way to know, as usual, what Nelly X means: has nothing to do and mind is melting with boredom and that condition will get worse if Bill does or doesn’t finally get his grant.

What else?

Nelly X says that she’s not the only one with too much time on her hands. Jimmy needs to move to Australia more than anyone. So bored that he’s always in trouble and knowing how much worse it can get keeps her from sleeping.

Makes Jimmy turn around so Monica can look at the stripe shaved into the long blond hair at the back of his head. All she knows for sure, Nelly says, is that Jimmy was playing on the beach and ended up with the back of his skull split open and needing stitches. She says that Jimmy says that he was playing some sort of war game with his friends and digging trenches, but she’s not so sure he has any friends so in her mind it’s possible that he was alone and playing some sort of fantasy combat game on his own and somehow gave himself the injury as his own enemy. Monica can ask him right now if she wants to and let’s see if she thinks he’s telling the truth!

Nelly can tell that Monica has no interest in questioning Jimmy so she gives an alternate version of her story. Maybe Jimmy didn’t injure himself. When he came home with blood dripping down his neck she sent Bill to see if he could figure out what happened. He found the “trench” (a deep hole about the length and depth of a grave) and a beer can packed with sand at the bottom of it. There was some blood on the can so Bill thinks someone put it together as a weapon and hurled it at Jimmy’s head. May have been some sort of combat, but not a game and not with “friends”. . . .

All on the same late May day? (no other date noted): after Nelly and Jimmy X retreat toward Coast Boulevard Pat Corcoran pops out her front porch door (southernmost corner, facing west) just to tell Monica (after hiding behind the wide slats of the old wooden venetians in her dark front parlor and straining to piece together Nelly X’s whispered, rambling secrets) that their little summer bungalow down on IB street was vandalized! It’s John’s own fault! Warned him that he couldn’t let the winter go by without showing his face down there. So, no surprise, god-alone-knows-how-many kids have been squatting and partying there — drinking all their booze, blasting loud music, dancing, probably screwing on their mattresses, using up all their canned goods, busting stuff, writing on the walls. . . . Makes her skin crawl. So now John’s got what he deserves. Gotta get off his ass and scrub that mess or he knows that he’ll be spending the summer there alone. . . !

Pregnant Lily Romero and another pregnant woman (Monica thinks she recognizes an old friend or old highschool classmate of Wanda Baer’s who may or may not be named Melora, Melinda or Nerissa) pulling shopping carts fully-loaded and heavy with supermarket bags and wondering aloud together how hard — how impossible — it’s going to be walking home all the way from the market on AAD Street or is it AAE Street? with their piled-up shopping carts and their baby carriages. . . . How do they do it? one of them says. All those young mothers. . . . . They don’t seem to have any problem, the other one laughs: pushing or pulling two or three things — plus a heavy pocketbook or tote bag over their shoulder. . . !

Pregnant at the same time, starkly white-blonde and oddly beautiful Lily Romero and Nerissa, Melinda or Melora (no description noted) can often be seen taking walks together while having fun planning, speculating, laughing and grumbling about how their lives are going to change before they know it.

There’s Matthew Regan again, this time riding his little bicycle while drinking from a plastic bottle almost exactly the same shade of yellow as his hair. How many seconds or minutes later not noted Fionnuala Regan follows on her bicycle (headed south, toward the boardwalk?), her blonde hair looking orange, almost red, because Monica’s been looking at and thinking about the yellow of little Matthew Regan’s hair without finding any exact analogy for it in nature — far milder and softer than lemon, banana, pineapple, a little like the palest yellow skin of one or another variety of “golden” apple, but not exactly that either.

“Themis” (sometimes (where and why?) called “Spylianos”), together with an unfamiliar thirtysomething Cornucopia Diner waitress in uniform and with dry masses of carbon-black hair, is crossing the porch — first with his tv, then his stereo. Pauses to tell Monica (cryptically) that even though it’s summer or near-summer and he hates to leave this beach-front neighborhood he has no choice: he has to move to Canarsie. Doesn’t Monica agree that it’s a cliché but it’s true (a cliché because it’s true or it’s just that everything possible to say’s already been said whether true or not so everything’s a cliché and there’s no point to saying anything?) that sometimes “we have to do what we have to do”? Doesn’t wait for an answer and leaves his story-fragment unfinished and his actions unexplained.

At 2 a.m. Monica’s bedroom (her “red studio” where there’s a mattress on the floor) feels airless: she opens the two south-facing casement windows looking straight out at the baked and layered red clay half-pipe shapes of the tiles of Greg and Lena Coffin’s roof, down at the cracked and stained white stucco of their side wall and all the way down into the weedy, half-paved driveway between the two massive multiple dwellings.

Deep darkness at 2 a.m. (darkness inside darkness so that, as the eyes adjust to waking up in darkness and darkness dissolves, eyes still see nothing but darkness) seems related in some way to the heat and stillness that make Monica open the windows.

At 5:30 a.m. the birds that get up early as if they have a job to do that really does help the sun come up are so close and noisy they seem to be in the room with Monica. Bird songs and songs broken into chatter inside the room’s thinning darkness (darkness that no longer has a dark core to it, so that the eyes begin to have the illusion of seeing through to something else).

Night ends with birds settling down into their ordinary, daily job: to scatter, singing and chattering across the entire dome of space, as if distributing bits of something that every now and then clusters into a string as coherent as a sentence, but mainly stays unstuck and flung apart: the busted, undesigned design that ends up feeling inevitable.

Darkness, charcoal grey and watery, can almost be called light when Monica jumps up chilled (at 8 a.m.) and closes the windows.

At 9:15 a.m. on May 25 Monica looks out one of her front (west-facing) green room dormer windows and, under grey skies, sees an ambulance lettered “TUFARO’S NORTH SHORE AMBULANCE AND OXYGEN SERVICE” parked in front of Enos and Sylvia Greengrass’s dark little brick fortress.

The ambulance driver and attendants (two or more than two not noted) in dark and lusterless, unsaturated blue uniforms are one by one permitted to pass through the always-locked black wrought iron gate and up the short flight of stairs, across the small porch and into the tight little fortress (ambulance driver pulling a dolly).

After that all movement flows out of the house and down the stairs:

A peculiarly long, iridescent green oxygen tank on wheels.

Second oxygen tank (no color noted, but not green or iridescent, length not noted or whether or not on wheels).

Ordinary aluminum walker.

White metal headboard of a hospital bed.

Box spring.

Mattress.

Hospital bed on wheels being cranked closed with difficulty by one of the attendants in dark, lusterless blue as he’s wrestling it out onto the porch.

Various clamps and metal bed-parts tossed carelessly, with noise, onto the porch.

Wheelchair.

Extra clamps and metal parts for the wheelchair (also tossed carelessly etc.).

One object at a time carried or tossed out through the front door — not carried downstairs, but set down in a row on the porch. Only when bed, spring, mattress, wheelchair, headboard, etc. are lined up against the wall so Sylvia Greengrass can check that everything’s in order are the driver and attendants allowed to carry each piece of equipment one by one in single file down to the ambulance.

Equipment carried out, equipment carried down: one at a time with long intervals between each action.

The attendants and driver spend time trying to dis-assemble the bed etc. and something about the determined way they’re wrestling with stubborn clamps and screws makes Monica think that Enos Greengrass is dead and not just back in the hospital again.

Monica can hear the driver and attendants grumbling: hadn’t calculated on so much stuff and now they’re struggling to push and twist it into the ambulance.

As soon as they’re done and about to pull away Sylvia Greengrass pops out of her dark little brick and iron fortress, showered, changed and refreshed. Showering’s awakened something in her brain that would have stayed dozing and now she’s standing on the porch — small, puckered and aggressive, in vivid youthful turquoise jumper and fresh white blouse (Monica can see now how thin she’s become) — waving and shouting at the ambulance. Driver has to hit the brakes and back up in front of the house. Then driver and attendants stand paralyzed and cursing on the sidewalk trying to figure out how they can possibly take the load of stuff Sylvia’d forgotten to give them.

Monica’s notes say at different points in the same sentence “the other night” and “Saturday” and Monica isn’t sure if either of them refers to May 24.

Yvonne Wilding, back to the everyday, wearing ordinary street clothing (tight, faded jeans and loose t-shirt, not like the last quick glimpse Monica had of her through a half-open door, sitting at the edge of a hard wood chair in a handsome but slightly too-large white suit, pulling on new boots before her wedding to Al Szarka), turns right (east) at the intersection of ABB Street and Coast Boulevard, in no hurry, ambling in a tired, slouching way in the direction of AAF Street (one of the neighborhood’s two shopping streets), carrying a red cake box tied with white ribbon, as if on the way to a child’s birthday party and already bored and miserable.

Not noted whether on May 25 or (less likely) May 24 Monica is looking at what or for what, at first through her badly-made roll-up bamboo blinds, then still looking at or for the same thing by lifting the blinds (cheap drawstring and pulley already busted?). Unintended effect of lifting the bamboo blinds is to let harsh daylight fall on the green walls whose green is something like the bright and living interior green of an avocado, but which, in the acid of this daylight, look worn-out and ugly. Even the beautifully looping, tangled lines of the green plants on her desk/breakfast table look ugly against the shabbiness of the half-rolled blinds and the exposed, peeling frames of the ancient casement windows. (Monica notes reluctantly how fragile the charm and beauty in life are and how little it takes to scrape through to what’s ugly and immortal.)

May ’76 notes being typed in January ’77 chronicle events in May and events in January.

In May (from what location, what angle, etc.?) Monica notes a puddle of water colored olive green from end to end with the reflection of an old green bedsheet on someone's clothesline. Green puddle itself is clearly visible to Monica in the driveway between two houses (between Sloths’ and Greengrasses’? Regans’ and Arlington sisters’?), but it’s impossible to say what exactly the puddle is looking at. Olive green sheet that completely fills the puddle’s curious gaze could be on a clothesline to the south, to the north or even further west. (Monica discovers “later” (exactly when?), and from what different location and/or angle, that while the puddle has eyes only for the olive green bedsheet the rest of the clothesline is filled with deep-dyed indigo (jeans, work shirts and so on).)

In January Monica’s notes can’t find much to talk about other than snow and ice. Snow on the ground too long and indistinguishable from ice — only a dash of color here and there from discarded Christmas decorations.

New snow on old snow, old snow on ice, and sun can’t melt new or old ice or snow in the icy air.

Let’s see: On January 13 Monica copies out her horoscope exactly as it appears in the January ’77 issue of Harper’s Bazaar: “You begin 1977 with outstanding good luck. On New Year’s Day money comes into your hands or you find an exceptional bargain. Weekend of the 1st-3rd will bring pleasant limelight: you’ll be in great demand. Most people are easily managed this month, but someone very dear to you could be extremely difficult on the 14th. Say and do nothing that could breed resentment. Otherwise you have good prospects end of month, particularly on the 28th. You could consider a new and better job. Important dates: 4th, 14th , 23rd.”

Same May date or another: Wally (Lenehans’ inquisitive and intelligent calico mutt (cinnamon patches on pure, flossy white fur of medium length)) is taking a break on Monica’s porch from his daily rounds. Monica has only a general idea what his daily rounds are: knows that he’s streetwise and has stopping-off points all over the neighborhood, but no way to know exactly how many porches he’s welcome to nap on, how many houses he has a bite to eat in along his zigzag, sniffing path through the neighborhood on his way to one or another bar on AAF Street or on Coast Boulevard just below (east of) AAF Street (between AAF Street, let’s say, and AAD or C Street) where the bartender expects Wally to jump up on a stool and get served a rare burger and a bowl of beer.

Monica always has a box of medium-size “Milkbone” dog biscuits waiting for Bah-Wah, but also for Wally, and he settles in to keep her company, stretched out or curled up and in no hurry to gnaw off corners and edges of the crunchy biscuit while Monica writes half-hidden behind the Rhinebeck pine. When he does get around to eating it seems to Wally that the pleasure he’s getting with his side-of-the-mouth, unhurried chewing has got to be the same as the pleasure Monica seems to be getting scratching horizontal lines of letters into flat or folded paper.

Monica’s notes say that, returning from AAF Street to ABC Street (apparently by way of Coast Boulevard), she sees and hears a nighthawk (the one she’s likely to come across here in New York is listed in field guides (David says) as a “Common Nighthawk”). Notes don’t say whether perched, in flight or circling, don’t describe feather patterns and complain about her inability to reproduce the complex sound, taking place quickly and only in the living instant: a nasal call underscored by odd, hollow drumming of wing-beats.

Somewhere along Coast Boulevard (within the green umbrella-shade of a long double row of full-leafed trees, therefore near the “Memorial” Circle between ABA and AT Streets?) Monica spots an exceptionally large grackle, feathers (it seems to her) even more iridescent, more profoundly plum-purple in their gleaming violet than usual, hopping crow-like through the green depths of a beautifully unmowed lawn.

A long green tunnel of leaves and green shadows of leaves filled with bird chatter starting let’s say on AAH or AAI Street empties out on ABC Street where (settling into a chair on the porch) Monica sees:

Wally, stretched out on his stomach, alert (already in his mind tasting-before-tasting the darkly baked and fragrant milk-and-wheat cookie taste and chewing-before-chewing on another medium-size “Milkbone” biscuit, its oddly tasty and resistant rock-hardness crumbling with a little corner-of-the-jaw gnawing and inevitable juicy salivating) and staring at Sylvia Greengrass across the way and slightly to the left (south), just barely visible in the deep shadow of her low-ceilinged dark brick porch, reading a book that Monica would love to know the title of. Or it might even be enough just to know if it’s non-fiction or a novel, paperback or hardcover, romance or literary classic, biography, mystery, self-help, cookbook. . . .

White clouds, wind-filled and sailing without moving very much beyond puckered little pouchy Sylvia Greengrass reading on her dark brick porch or over brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle (big body, Q-tip long-neck-and-little-head, actual face that may be making all kinds of faces under unchanging smiley-face, glossy and bouncy little Buster Brown haircut) on her wide and open hacienda-style yellow-stucco-and-brown-wood porch, looking confused and trying to figure where to put a yellow birdcage (no record of a bird in it) and an absurdly spindly avocado plant (single, suspended, looping green thread with no more than five leaves attached to it).

Clouds multiply, but stop billowing: there are more of them, they’re darker and they’ve forgotten how to sail.

What else? Monica can’t say for sure if she has a premonition that, after Wally (Lenehans’ calico mutt), Sylvia Greengrass and Nancy Wattle she’s going to see someone else or if she’s feeling on the back of her neck the prickling of the lurking, ghastly presence of Lon Gurion (strange retired pharmacist with yellowish complexion, wormlike moustache, thinning black hair combed straight back, oddly clogged and strangled voice who Pat Corcoran calls “that repulsive man”).

No way to know how Lon Gurion knows that she’s there: he appears out of nowhere from his dark little ground floor studio hidden all the way in the permanent shadow at the back of the entry hall behind the Corcorans’ second, interior door and the door no one opens leading down to the dark, unused basement and pretends to be surprised to have run into Monica by accident, on his way to a mythical somewhere.

Has, as usual, a story to tell that isn’t really a story: always some odd tale spinning off into something loonier. Sometimes his looney tale is really a looney theory and he has a compulsion to tell some cracked-off piece of one of his looney story-theories to Monica (or to someone/anyone?), with the delusion that Monica is a sympathetic listener. (Zip backward to the March Chronicle to read again, instead of trying to remember, Pat Corcoran’s story about the time Lon Gurion left the gas on in his locked little cubbyhole and came close to blowing up the house.)

What’s the story or tidbit of story/theory Lon Gurion seems to already be telling before he gets close enough to Monica for her to hear a word? Whatever it was, he seems to lose track of it when he stumbles on Wally stretched out and pretending to be snoozing but really dog-chronicling (super-alert and surveying with nervous eye-movements) the porch’s, the lawn’s, the sidewalk’s never-ending horizontal carnival of mini-events and wind-blown accidental narratives. Many-many things interest Wally, though they aren’t necessarily always the same things that interest Monica.

“Oh,” Lon Gurion says, “I’ve had dozens — hundreds — of pooches in my life”, as if more to himself than to Monica, while Monica’s noting his use of the word “pooches” vs. all other possible common ways to refer to dogs and wonders what — what exactly – the words “pooch”, “pooches”, “poochy” summon up for Lon Gurion. And again he says, “So many, many pooches” to himself with a slow (melancholy?) shake of his repulsive head.

He has several pooches now, but obviously they’re not here. Can’t have them here in this worm hole. They’re with his daughter in Connecticut. A French pooch, the “Papillion”, is the sweet little poochy that interests him most. Wonders if Monica knows the story about Marie Antoinette and her Papillion. It’s not a well-known story, but it is a true story. No? He’s visibly pleased that Monica, who he believes to be highly educated, is ignorant of this important historical fact. To begin with, the Papillion was the pooch favored by Marie Antoinette. Not merely favored by her, but loved so dearly (for its sheer poochiness) that she hid it under her skirts on the way to the guillotine! To comprehend the significance of that fact fully, of course, you need to have stroked the fur of a Papillion to appreciate how silky, how sensuous, how smooth as a peeled egg that little poochy must have felt under her skirt, against the sensitive skin of her leg, and how it must have given her comfort and even a perverse little private pleasure on the way to her death. Touch of the Papillion’s silky fur the last sensation she ever had. Not many people are aware of this incredible historical fact and, if he were Monica, he’d write it down with every detail just as he told it to her.

Mark Stevens? William Bendix? Monica thinks she hears William Bendix’s distinctive voice, matter-of-fact as peanut butter yet harsh and grainy, always disappointed and aggrieved to the point of bitter anguish, yet at the same time overlaying a sweet Brooklyn tenor. Still, when typing her handwritten May notes later, in another season, she can’t be sure it’s Bendix. Could be Mark Stevens’ harsh and mirthless baritone, the deadened voice of the too-handsome World War II veteran turned postwar detective, somewhat Alan-Ladd-ish but without Ladd’s deeper shadings of disillusioned melancholy or the hidden psychological center that’s both amused and taciturn, blond and dark. But she doesn’t think so. It’s Bendix’s voice she keeps hearing.

“How was I to know he was gonna do a Brody?!” Bendix/Stevens complains, defending himself (if Bendix; with regret, if Stevens). “He came out that window like a hot rivet!”

Monica notes (later?) that the lines are from a corrosive, underrated Henry Hathaway/Joe McDonald postwar mystery/thriller called The Dark Corner and that she’s tempted to try and describe the distinctive voices and flavors added by Clifton Webb, Lucille Ball, etc., etc., but restrains herself just for the sake of going forward.

Monica is at a loss where to begin. In her handwritten notes handsome, perpetually-suntanned little Riley Liman, a thin and silky chocolate brown angle of hair always across his forehead, appears on a page numbered, for example, “74”, but then again — even though it’s the same tiny story, same little event — not again until page “79” and then on “80” and again on “82”. It’s all (or could be) one coherent moment, but in her handwritten notes, because other stories and events are arriving (always-always arriving) simultaneously or in quick succession and it all has to be sketched-in as quickly as possible without delving too deep or, really, without delving under the surface at all, because it’s exactly that surface — horizontal and endlessly rippling — that Monica’s obsessed with and which she sees as the seam along which life and work are zipped together.

Let’s see: when is it exactly that Monica becomes aware that she’d written the name of the wrong Liman brother and therefore, while she’s given an accurate description of Riley Liman, the younger Liman brother, who does not appear on her porch or on pages 82, 80, 79, 74, etc., she should have been talking about the older, bigger brother, blond and red-faced Tommy Liman.

At 10 a.m. of what day Tommy Liman is knocking on the door to Monica’s attic apartment (her little house atop the house). David (barely awake or awake only at this instant because of Tommy Liman’s loud knocking) calls out without any idea who’s knocking and says “come back later!”, but Monica, awake for hours, opens the door and lets Tommy in. He has his arms around a huge (how many pounds or ounces not noted), clear jar (washed clean of all labels and glue) that Tommy says is a commercial mayonnaise jar. (Too big to fit on a refrigerator shelf and, with Tommy’s arms wrapped around it, Monica can’t tell what’s in it.)

He had to come by (he says) because Monica never came over to see his basement club room and he figured that she must have forgotten their last conversation (which surprises him a little because he knows that she writes everything down!) when he told her that it’s not just cicadas he’s interested in, but praying mantises and she asked a lot of intelligent questions and seemed really interested. So (doesn’t she remember?) he invited her over. He’s inviting her again because things have gotten really interesting, but in the meantime he brought something to show her.

The oversized mayonnaise jar has a circle of screen wire stretched and fixed in place over its wide mouth and a green-leafed twig put in place by Tommy Liman at a diagonal from just below the mouth down into a thick layer of unusually black earth. A small, brownish cocoon (really nothing more than a temporary case for the female mantis’ egg mass), which must have been attached to the horizontal twig with the green leaves, has fallen to the bottom layer of black earth and released dozens of tiny but fully-formed praying mantises, the underbellies of many of them clearly visible as they try to climb the inner curves of the oversized jar.

Not noted whether later on the same day or on a day how many days later Monica finds herself visiting Tommy Liman in his basement “club room”. The low-ceilinged room is warm and smoky, Tommy says, because — according to what he’s read — the mantises need to be kept warm if you have any intention of breeding them and warmth is also important for the survival of both the egg mass and the tiny, fragile babies. So he comes downstairs every morning and lights lots of candles and by this hour the room gets a little too warm and too smoky for humans, but the mantises seem to like it that way.

Not stated by Tommy or made clear in Monica’s notes, but she knows that Tommy has always been attracted to the idea of chronicling: at first it puzzled him that Monica sat on the porch with pen and paper recording what exactly? that people said or did on ABC Street, but before long he started going out of his way to tell her ABC Street stories with as much physical/visual detail as possible — with the clear intention of making it easier for her to picture and write down what he says.

This might surprise and interest Monica, he adds: he’s already given at least a dozen mantis babies to friends who’ve asked for them. Even one of his aunts asked for one! And he should have kept a list (for himself and for Monica!) of the people he’s said “no” to because he doesn’t trust them to do what it takes to keep the mantises alive.

What else does Tommy Liman have to tell or show Monica?

Hundreds of mantises have hatched in the same giant mayonnaise jar Tommy carried down the street and up to Monica’s attic apartment. He says that they’ve eaten the cocoon and, as Monica can see, the result is a pool of water not completely absorbed by the earth. It bothers him but it excites him too that he can’t explain the pool of water and needs to do further research. . . .

This too: in another, equally large jar there’s a plant with a white, foam-like substance that, Tommy says, is the egg-mass of a beetle he’s become interested in recently and is trying to breed while he researches it. . . .

May should be — must be — coming to an end, but, while typing up her May notes in the winter of ’76-‘77, Monica can’t find a date no matter how many handwritten sheets of densely but faintly pencil-scribbled scrap paper she leafs through.

Monica thinks about this too: some days (or clusters of days) narrate themselves (no matter how broken and interrupted) in a continuous, horizontal way as if telling themselves a story. Something like this: events unfold with their own internal order, without drama, possibly without meaning, without rising and gathering themselves like someone about to argue a point, more like someone knitting a sweater with holes in the weave big enough for experience to flow, buzz or even peddle through. And there are days or clusters of days that are nothing but unraveled or never-woven threads that have no thought of tangling even accidentally into a sock’s-worth of connected narration. Monica has always loved such meaningless days that are more like accumulations of wrappers and bits of newspaper blown up against a fence than anything tailored to illustrate a point.

For example: on an undated day in late May:

Lon Gurion (having arranged to bump into Monica by accident, as usual) says apropos of nothing that he’s “into parapsychology” and, also as always, tries to keep Monica pinned to the spot with weird stories and crackpot theories that should be entertaining but that the Chronicle recoils from as if from burning plastic.

Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle (in what color form-fitting jersey-knit pedal-pushers and too-small polo) is watering a few droopy potted plants with a big avocado green watering can on the broad hacienda-style brown-and-ochre-painted stone front porch across the way and at an angle not more than 15⁰ to the northwest.

Everywhere along the horizontal space of the street (the day?) hot sun is divided from cool shade in clean blocks by the relentless forward pressure of the tiny, spinning teeth of a noisy, hand-held electric saw. Or it’s overhead space that’s being sawed into board lengths by a glittering little plane with a strangely harsh and burring engine.

Best buddies and brothers-in-law Greg Coffin and Andy Forest, both tall, one a drop taller than the other (though Monica isn’t sure which), wave hello as they pass right under Monica’s south-facing porch railing going back or coming out through the cracked and weedy driveway carrying busted-up lengths of dark and rotten wood and other debris to fling into the open back of a “U-Haul” van (clearing out accumulated junk from the back yard where they’re building stalls for showering off sand after the beach). (Source of the sawing that’s carving up the day?)

Monica knows that Andy Forest is a skilled carpenter and that carpentry (particularly if it allows him to spend his days out-of-doors) is one of the things he does to earn a living, but seeing Greg Coffin working side-by-side with Andy strikes her (not forgetting her limited knowledge of how Greg spends his time) as unusual and she wonders if the fact that he has time to be hammering, sawing, hauling lumber, etc. has anything to do with the fact that she can't remember the last time she heard Greg playing or even practicing the piano: from his long, graceful arms and legs easily spanning the width of the small piano tucked into the corner near kitchen sink and west-facing front windows of Greg-and-Lena's second story loft-like breakfast-dining-parlor-living-practice-room, little unstable ladders and lattices of notes crossing above the bare wood floor and exiting the right(northernmost) window nearest the southern corner of the front porch of Monica’s massive multiple dwelling next door.

Note also says that "Lena Coffin and Grete Forest are sewing” (where, where exactly, not noted) while their husbands (Greg, of course, both Lena's husband and Grete's brother; band-mate and best buddy, Andy, married to Greg’s sister, just to knot the four-way knot as tight as possible) have fun smashing rotten boards and hammering up new.

All at exactly the same instant:

Cathy Castle, passing S —> N on the east side (Monica's side) of ABC Street, crossing the clear space between the tree and the shrubs on the two wings of the lawn (Rhinebeck pine/ /holly bushes), calls out to Nancy Wattle across the way doing what? on the broad porch of the massive brown and ochre multiple dwelling where her family (Nancy, husband and two waggly-and-lightbulb-headed boys, one named Hank) live in the ground floor rear apartment: "I’m taking Debby to see Dr. Kaboolian! She’s running a fever and I can’t get her temperature down!” May continue talking, but her words are chipped and splintered by the clanging burr of the out-of-tune bell of an ancient knife-and-blade-grinder’s truck making its herky-jerky way up and down all the streets of the neighborhood.

Blond-blond little Timothy Corcoran is disappointed: dashing from the front porch room where he was stretched out on his stomach playing a game, out quickly through front porch door and bounding down the steps as if there were no steps, across the street, afraid he'll miss the ice cream truck before he sees that this worn out greenish old truck can not be the ice cream truck, raspy bell not the tinkling, musical notes of the ice cream bell. . . .

A dog (single breed or mutt, if single breed what breed, coloring, size, etc. not noted) trots by with a quick but limping gait, one hind leg (left or right not noted) bandaged, splinted and stiff. Catches Monica looking at him, gives her a quick return glance and speeds up his trot as if to get through an opening that’s closing, heading south.

Still within the same long moment or imperceptibly out of the moment: bubble gum pink, blonde and rounded Patty "Twiggy" Garvey is hosing the Garvey's front porch (last porch of last charming old seaside frame house at a 45–55⁰ diagonal across the way (West and to the right (North), just before the L-shape brick house occupying one whole corner where ABC Street crosses Coast Boulevard), helping wiry mother Ellen Garvey get the house ready for older (but not eldest) sister Elizabeth's wedding.

David (who's learned to use his willpower to focus his acute hearing to overhear conversations in cafes, clubs and restaurants, even at great distances, and who’s also trained himself to memorize them for himself and/or for Monica) thinks he hears Ellen Garvey and Peggy Quinlan having a little conversation about Elizabeth's wedding all the way at the northern end of the street, but he doesn't remember (or doesn’t report to Monica) whether they're standing on the sidewalk in front of the Garveys’ (where "Twiggy" is hosing) or directly across from the Garveys’ on Monica's side of the street or even further toward the corner, somewhere along the length of the neck-high, precisely trimmed L-shaped hedge that meticulously clips in the Quinlans' two story white frame house whose long side is on ABC Street, its handsome façade looking out on wide and leafy Coast Boulevard and those coming or going (rushing or strolling) on the long trips they have to take to catch the subway on AAF Street or do their errands on AAF Street and beyond.

The only sentences from Ellen Garvey and Peggy Quinlan’s conversation that he bothered to memorize for Monica’s Chronicle, David says, are these senseless ones, because he liked the way they sounded.

"Cousin Rose Chenille."

"Put a little water in your mother's geraniums."

"Oh, you never know!"

Now Monica sees that Al Quinlan — bald, seventy-something, erect, sparklingly clean, blood brought close to the surface of white skin as if scrubbed with a stiff brush, causing veining of tiny broken blood vessels, always crisply dressed in solid colors or blue or red check button-down sports shirt and casual slacks (off-blue or khaki) — has come across the street to help "Twiggy" Garvey wash and broom sidewalk and driveway or, more likely, to make sure they're cleaned correctly.

Lon Gurion says to Monica (not noted how or where he succeeded in cornering her) that's he's "into parapsychology" and, as always, manages to make the subject tedious if not revolting. His stories, not inherently disgusting, under his worm-like moustache and thin and slippery upper lip, his thick voice oddly clogged, pick up an undefinable filthiness.

It's not clear in Monica's handwritten notes if it's now — in the same conversation at the same time in this place or at another hour on the same day or on another May day altogether when he’s managed to corner Monica again — that Lon Gurion gets it into his head to question her about her writing. (Monica doesn’t want to slow things down (aim is to keep going forward, even if at a turtle’s pace), but can’t help digressing: wants to know why it matters to her whether there were two conversations that happened on different days or if there really was only one conversation remembered or recorded so hastily that one conversation seems like two, two like one. She could, without anyone knowing the difference, record them (it) as if they were (it was) continuous and bound by all the classical unities, but — and she wonders if others feel the same way — it seems to her that there’s a law of randomness that’s at least as sacred as any so-called rule of unity or coherence and that to reshuffle natural disorder into any notion of order would be like tidying up the wrappers, lists and clippings in a vacant lot or, even worse, on the vacant lot of her desk.)

"Now" or "then", one conversation or two, Lon Gurion says that it just occurred to him! he knows it's ridiculous, but it just occurred to him (how come he didn't think of it before?!) to ask Monica for the first time if she's ever published anything! Reason he asks is that it just dawned on him (and — again — he can't imagine why it didn't dawn on him ages ago) that his son-in-law is a publisher! He publishes some sort of industrial manuals or textbooks — it's never been clear to him and he's never asked questions because it doesn't interest him — but why should that matter? She's a writer and he's a publisher. He'd be happy to talk to his son-in-law and see what he can do for her. Of course the other side of it is that he hasn't read anything that Monica's written, but that doesn't really matter to him either. The important thing is to get them together. . . . And so on for as many words as there are needles in the Rhinebeck pine, whose tip reaches to the middle of one of the nine small panes of one of Monica’s west-facing green front studio windows, as unfathomable in their meaninglessness as the pine is in its zzz-ing interior cavern of webs and shadows.

Also in the same conversation? Lon Gurion (voice too thick, too strangled for anything like a real exclamation) says "isn't it great that it's spring!?" He just felt it! He just felt it and realized for the first time — really remembered it by feeling it — that it's spring. Why only today? He sees an important theory in it somewhere that he felt the sensation of spring only on a day that's more "summery" than "springy" (sun today is actually quite hot). He's going to try to formulate his theory in a sentence he can write down and make public somehow so other people will remember it and repeat it to other people ad infinitum: "we only allow ourselves to feel things when it's" what? Has to think about it a little more, but there's certainly an important idea there about how life works, doesn't Monica (as a writer) agree? And doesn't she have the same desire as he does to invent a sentence that gets repeated and distorted and translated and transformed and mutated into other sentences forever?

How many trucks does Monica see on the same or another mid-to-late-May day?

Dominick Ianni's red gardener's truck (red cab in front of wide-open, slat-sided flatbed) parked in front of Enos & Sylvia Greengrass' tight little brick and wrought iron fortress, yet no one is working on the two fenced-in little rectangles of the front lawn. Monica thinks she sees (but has no way to be certain) Dominick Ianni himself at the Greengrass's front door (up a short flight of brick steps to the small brick-framed front porch) talking to Sylvia Greengrass, her pouchy face not quite visible inside a hooded sweatshirt of some kind and doubly hooded by the darkness of the doorway.

Later David tells Monica (for her Chronicle) that he thinks Dominick Ianni had his men do a little work, not much (not much to do, after all, on the two barren little planes of grass), just some unnecessary trimming of the edges where hardly anything was growing.

The unhappy driver of a (what color?) Macy's delivery truck has already unloaded an enormous sofa with a high, arched back that he describes as "early American". He leaves it on the sidewalk while he adds to his unhappiness by calculating the misery of having to carry the sofa up porch steps, wrestle it through the unknown dimensions of front door, up other flights of stairs hidden inside, etc. "Doesn't look good," he says to no one in particular. And then (to Monica?): he has to deliver this stupid monstrosity to some jerk named "Artie Tilden", but he hasn't been able to get this idiot "Artie” on the phone and he needs to at least see what kind of inside stairs he'll have to deal with and, of course, he has to take a look at Tilden's stupid door just so he can figure out exactly how big a moron this Tilden is (whether or not he ordered something that can't get through the door!).

Unhappy Macy's driver reloads the sofa, cursing, and drives away.

Same day or another tall Greg Coffin and slightly taller/slightly less-tall best buddy, fellow band member and brother-in-law, Andy Forest, together with two or three muscular-but-shorter men are hauling/dragging industrial-weight black plastic sacs loaded with broken cement, wood and other debris all the way to the front sidewalk from Greg-and-Lena’s weedy backyard with its cracked and ancient paving blocks and rough wooden storage sheds in the process of being busted up and pried loose from their corroding attachment to broken and peeling white stucco. On the sidewalk the men take turns by twos straining to lift and dump sacs and barrels of debris into the open back of a rented "U-Haul" van.

Square of bright sunlight = to whose front or back yard and as glaring and impossible-to-look-at as the white page of typed manuscript Monica is trying to edit out-of-doors. And is it Greg or Andy who shades his eyes and complains to Andy or Greg that the sun (as waves or particles?) bouncing off the white sheets drying on someone's line across the way (or they may be further away then they look) are blinding him every time he reaches the truck and forgets not to look in that direction.

On another undated day (no trucks?) Margaret Brennan passes and silently says "hello", carrying a sleeping Daisy (dress not noted, but Monica makes sure to record Daisy's red socks and chartreuse shoes with surprisingly high heels).

First of many little things that rotate by on this day? A day of little things only?

Monica notes that she may be getting another cold and wishes she had time to go through her Chronicle to count how many colds she's had this winter. Pretty sure she's getting a cold, but denies it to Nelly X when Nelly stops to chat and says at once that she can hear in Monica's voice that she has a cold. Monica can in turn hear Nelly’s disappointment when she says no, it isn't a cold, it's just something, no idea what, that's making her voice sound funny. Nelly says she's surprised it isn’t a cold, because she's been getting a lot of colds and she figures that Monica must be getting them too. She has a theory about it and this is it: she menstruates at the beginning of the month and that's always when she gets a cold! So (doesn't Monica agree?) it's obvious and, if she had more time, she'd do research about it, that colds are related to the menstrual cycle. Has Monica ever paid attention to her own colds and when they occur? whether or not there's a pattern to their occurrence? and if that pattern coincides with her menstrual cycle? And that's one more reason why moving to Australia will be good for their health! She'll get less colds there and if she can convince Philida to join them Phil will get less colds too. She thinks that the men will benefit too, though of course for them it’s not quite the same thing. A private, inward and suppressed, somewhat goofy, bobbing-in-the-throat horse’s laugh, as always.

Monica needs to go to the library and asks David if he'll go to the library for her to do a little of the research he likes to do and she doesn’t. But (later (now)), even with the research, she doesn’t find out one way or the other if the red/brown bird she just saw flying out of the green darkness of the tall Rhinebeck pine onto the white porch railing (beak a pointed little flame that burns away even the finest thread of orange, the purest of red reds, while red of wings is smudged with earthen brown and earthen brown body has surprising flashes of red in it) is a female cardinal or something exotic and out-of-its-range.

Or (because what happened is not noted clearly) Monica never asks David to do the research and it isn't until now, at the moment of editing/typing her handwritten notes (in November or December '76), that she wonders again what other birds the red/brown bird could be.

All on May 29? Happening simultaneously or in sequence? It's possible that things happen simultaneously that can't be written simultaneously or can't be printed simultaneously, so end up being laid out as if walking one foot after the other down the street. It's also possible that related events are spread out over two or more days but only one date is noted, so the wandering and grazing events get herded together and penned up on "May 29".

Monica notes "one red rose" in or through an alley (too narrow to be a driveway) between two houses. "One red rose surrounded by pink roses”. And also notes that these roses are the first, isolated roses of the season (at least here on the cooler beach block of ABC Street) and wonders when, when exactly, the first roses appeared in the same narrow alley last year and if, on May 29 last year, most rose bushes were in the green peppercorn stage of budding, as they are now, or if some were already fat green bulbs about to peel open into color.

Also on May 29 or partly on May 29 and partly on May 30:

Nothing reflected against the thick white curtains drawn completely across the inside surface of the Rosenwassers' north-facing picture window.

This moment of nothing reflected in the Rosenwassers' picture window interests Monica (thinking of all the things that have been ambiguously reflected there), but she has the feeling that there isn't enough time to explore it (more urgent to keep going on) and turns her attention to Elizabeth Garvey.

Notes that Elizabeth Garvey is turning this way and that way on the righthand wing of the Garveys' green and fertile front lawn, posing for a photographer (a family friend without his jacket on) before her church wedding.

The black garbage sacks piling up on the sidewalk in front of the Greengrasses' tight little brick fortress convince Monica that Enos Greengrass is dead.

Artie Tilden spots Monica taking notes about Enos Greengrass, Elizabeth Garvey and the Rosenwassers' picture window in her usual place (the southwest corner of the front porch) and says hello to make her turn so he can tell her a little story that may only be the conclusion of a story or the explanation of a story that was told earlier. He says that he doesn't know if Monica remembers or is even interested (does that ever stop us from telling the story we feel we have to tell?), but he feels that – even though she witnessed some of it — she has no way of knowing the real story of the undelivered couch. To begin with, does Monica remember how ugly it was? A bright mustardy-gold-plaid monstrosity with some sort of hideous brown and green threads stitched across it. What made him order it? He saw it somewhere and something got into him and he thought it was beautiful! Couldn’t wait to order it as a surprise for Anne Marie. Didn’t realize till Anne Marie told him that it's the kind of couch they give a sitcom character to let the audience know he’s a nincompoop. So in love with the stupid thing, in fact, that he forgot completely that they had no place to put it! And no idea if it would end up fitting into whatever apartment they found after they were married. So that — obviously — they’d have to choose their apartment based on the dimensions of the couch! And he also was blind to the fact that he was using up the $1300 his parents loaned him (blind also to the fact that his parents have no money either!) instead of saving it for something they might actually need.

It was Anne Marie who had to remind him of all that. So they canceled the order, but then, of course, the couch got delivered anyway: couch plus matching loveseat plus a set of three enormous couch cushions: huge load of hideous mustard plaid left on the sidewalk and beaming itself all the way to people and dogs jogging on Bay Drive and even beyond Bay Drive to ships on the Bay.

It's not clear in Monica's notes if Artie Tilden waits for Monica to say something or if he realizes that his couch story is a story that leaves no room for anything to be said and that she’s staring at him in order to store up the memory (until she can write it down) of the fact that his red ponytail is drawn a little too tight, pinching the dead white skin too snugly over his already too-small head, making it look shrunken.

The weak force of ping-pong's hollow ticking of paddle against ball and hollow tocking of ball off table, floor or wall makes Monica turn left toward the enclosed front porch and ping-pong room of Greg and Lena's cracked and crummy white stucco and orange brick. And turning moves her head just enough into a zone where it can't help smelling the penetrating smell of earth that's been saturated and living with itself too long. Seems to her it's the stale smell of the earth bordering and forced up through the cracks in the half-paved and weedy driveway and she doesn't want to breathe it in. Whatever’s damp and cold in it reminds her that she has a cold and she moves a little away from the railing.

Monica doesn't wear a watch, but, even if she did, it couldn't count fast enough or in tiny enough units to measure the no-time-at-all it takes Pat Corcoran to pop out her front porch door, tell Monica (as if Monica can listen fast enough to catch the strangely hummingbird-fast beating of Pat's heavy tongue) that her only three dark-haired nieces are visiting today all at the same time! They arrived last night and sometime today (no idea when exactly!) Allison Meehan's sister Margo Meehan will be visiting too. . . .

Monica says that she had no idea that Allison had a sister (hoping that Pat Corcoran will tell her a little more), but Pat isn't listening and doesn't care what Monica wants to know. Heavy tongue is already racing through its next hard-to-catch sentence: so much to get ready, she says, but she's over-excited and doesn't know which end is up.

While Pat Corcoran is popping out her front door (tearing a hole through Monica's writing, as always) and talking too fast (audible tension between speed and thickness of tongue) for Monica to be sure of what she's hearing or scribbling (hearing faster or scribbling faster?), Monica is at the same time trying to pay the right kind of attention to a tiny grey-and-white bird with a startling yellow/orange patch on its throat and tail feathers: so light and tiny it's able to land on a small leaf without breaking its fragile stem and pause there contemplating Monica as if memorizing details it plans to report to someone else later.

David thinks that the bird is most likely a warbler, but he knows that there are dozens of warblers, so which one exactly? A little quick research (then or later/at home or in the local library) and David turns up three possible warblers, none of them exactly right, but Monica has faith that sooner or later someone reading Monica's Chronicle will be able to figure it out, taking into account time of year, location, migration patterns, etc. Could be a warbler that neither Monica nor David have ever heard of, a "Northern Parula" (blue-grey back with bright yellow throat patch over a deep orange bar); the "Audubon's" variety of the "Yellow-rumped Warbler" (yellow at throat and rump, but it would be stretching a point to say that this yellow has any orange in it); and, most dramatically (most unlikely?), the "Blackburnian" (fiery orange throat, but no orange, yellow-orange or even yellow at tail).

David is unhappy with his hurried research and wants Monica to wait until he finds out more, but Monica argues that she wants to sketch in something about the tiny bird's identity no matter what, something rather than nothing, and that all her notes are sketchy and incomplete and that it's exactly this incompleteness, this openness to possible correction, filling in and reshuffling that includes the future in its fabric. Who knows how many years later it will get re-written and re-written again and again later is an argument and a question David can’t answer.

Starting on May 31, as Monica is quickly sketching in the horizontal flow of events as they amble into June or as they pause to tell their stories or go through their invisible changes, rising or plunging vertically through time while anchored in place, she starts to see blots, specks, dashes of yellow here and there (but not necessarily a pattern of yellow), a little like the first wet and sticky strokes of oil paint on drawing tablet paper, a few yellow dashes already determining how the rest of space needs to be colored in.

1. Monica wonders: how can she smell yellow roses — no matter how enormously fat they are — all the way from the Sloths' barren lawn across the street? And why does their sunlit yellow rebound so quickly and blindingly near? This too (and even more puzzling?): why is she smelling dill? as fresh and green — not really foresty, not really spicy, definitely not like pine needles and with no earthen dampness clinging to it, dark yet bright, a fragrant, mind-altering green that might get released by chewing on it — as if she were mincing dill on a cutting board balanced on her lap, right under her nose, rather than writing about dill on folded sheets of lavender scrap paper.

2. Monica asks herself again, but in a slightly different way: what does dill, or the aroma of dill, have to do with yellow roses, even if they’re visible across the way, even if they’re enormously fat and even if, while puzzling still one more time about the poorly explained daily miracle of what’s there arriving here, you’re also smelling something fresh and raw and green being diced for the mind to chew on.

3. Could the cut grass flying up from Nancy Wattle's landlady's lawn as Nancy pushes her way across it with the landlady's ancient lawnmower, stalling and lurching, digging into the lumpy ground as if the lawnmower were a rusty shovel, be the source of the aroma Monica's nose (or the brain's first, second or third nose) thinks is dill?

4. Nothing to do with yellow: Tommy Liman stops by the porch where he's sure to find Monica writing to give Monica more details about the praying mantises he's breeding in gallon Hellman's mayonnaise jars in the basement of the Liman house and to let Monica know that his mother (Audrey) hasn’t left for Spain yet. It's not that she's not going. She's going, but it was postponed and the reason why is exactly the kind of story he's curious about and that they never tell him. So all he's left to report to Monica for her Chronicle is an empty piece of information, a story that isn't really a story. Isn’t sure if he already told her the empty story or if he didn’t (but he’s more afraid of leaving something significant out than of repeating himself): in one of his gigantic mayonnaise jars (clear glass with a blue cover) hundreds of mantises hatched and started eating their cocoon and now there's a pool of liquid in the bottom of the jar. . . !

5. Nothing to do with yellow?: (therefore does have to do with yellow:) Pat Corcoran says that she only has three dark-haired nieces out of all her zillions of nieces and all three dark-haired nieces are here today, right now, at the same time. And later, she doesn't know exactly when, she's expecting Allison Meehan's sister Margo, who, honestly, she hardly knows. . . . (Monica thinks she caught sight of the three dark-haired nieces earlier and noted then or remembers now that none of them is wearing yellow.) This too: after writing about Pat Corcoran and her three dark-haired nieces, and even about Allison Meehan's sister, Margo, who Monica didn't know existed, Monica has the feeling that she'd already written pretty much the same thing not long ago, but decides that she wants to leave it in whether she's written it before or not and doesn't even make the effort to explain why or to search backward to find out.

6. On May 30 Monica notes that there are red roses on ABC Street (for the first time?), white roses on side street lawns and (spotted after returning to ABC Street after a short, looping walk) a tiny Yellow-throated Warbler darting into and pausing briefly in the Rhinebeck pine before shooting southward in a straight horizontal toward what?

Monica settles in her usual corner of the porch with its broad, grey-painted boards to try and get down on paper what-just-happened-but-isn't-happening-anymore before it turns into memory, alternate reality already fading into another alternate reality ready for translation onto paper. . . . She notes that white roses (at least the white roses she just saw while making a short loop around the neighborhood) look like popcorn: very white, large and somewhat loose petals around much tighter, butter-yellow interiors. Look like popcorn but, disappointingly, don’t smell like popcorn (smell oddly like cinnamon).

7. Notes say that Nancy Wattle and her husband (crop-haired, limping ex-Marine corrections officer) have together just mowed the two halves of Mr. and Mrs. Sloth's flat little lawn, just as barren but not nearly as lumpy and stubborn as the lawn of the vast and sprawling brown-and-mustard hacienda-style multiple dwelling where the Wattle family (Nancy, husband, two waggle-headed boys) have an apartment (what size exactly not known) somewhere toward the back of the "hacienda" that, while sprawling, has a great, squat weight to it.

Because the Wattles have mowed (and very likely turned up some earthworms) a robin, unusually large and erect, is hopping through the freshly cut grass, whose fragrance reaches Monica as directly as if she were peeling cucumber.

8. Nothing to do with yellow: at different times that Monica splices together as one time or one time broken and scattered across several pages of handwritten scrap paper Monica observes Al Szarka talking to and about their squat little landlord "W", who lives next door in a boring two story pseudo-modern-rehash-of-what-was-never-modern-to-begin-with and who's at the same time likeable, stingy, good-humored and as wary as if he knows that whatever’s pleasant in his nature could get him killed.

           a) Monica overhears (and sees obscurely through the dark, horizontal layers of the Rhinebeck pine) Al Szarka talking to (waltzing around with) the squat, good-natured, cheap and wary landlord "W" about having the downstairs entry hall painted or — possibly — depending on the price — all the halls — downstairs, second floor, stairwell all the way up to the attic! (where Monica has her little three room house-atop-the-house) and the porch and front steps too! As long as the price is right.

Landlord warns Al in a joking way while hopping around that, ignorant as he is and easy to take advantage of, still he's not a fool (or is a fool, but not a complete fool), so he does have some idea what it should cost. He trusts Al, but wants Al to think carefully before he starts talking about money.

The longer the landlord talks and jokes and haggles in a teasing way the more clogged and strangled with fury Al Szarka's voice becomes. All Monica can make out is something Al may be saying about doing the job with his brother to make the whole thing go faster. "W" has to realize, he says, that that's an awful lot of stuff he wants done: not only the front steps, but the porch itself is big (you have the floorboards and the railings and all those little posts!) downstairs entry hall, stairwell leading to second floor, second floor hall, long stairwell up to the attic, attic itself. . . . Just about anyone else would drag it out forever and exaggerate and keep complaining and adding on to the price. Whatever stupid estimate he gets won't mean nothn'. "W" knows he's not a liar (stupid to lie to your landlord, for one thing!) and, if he does the job with his brother, whole thing'll go fast so's it won't be hard to stick to whatever price they quote. While with some other guy. . . "W" knows all the shit they can pull once they start the job and the customer's behind the eight ball. . . .

Monica can't tell if Al's voice sounds exhausted or even more clogged with hatred, having to spend all this time and energy trying to convince this fat little prick. . . !

           b) Nothing to do with yellow: after the landlord's gone back to his house (even his trotting way of walking has something comical but wary about it) Monica overhears Al Szarka talking to his brother (name unknown or unrecorded) just below the porch steps about the landlord and how full of shit he is. Dances this way and that way about everything. "Wasted your whole fuckn afternoon!" Al's brother says. "Beats your price down t'nothin' then the little prick says 'who knows?, maybe I won't do it after all'. An’ he thinks that's funny!" "Miserable fuck wants 't'put it off till summer?" "Till never, most likely." And they both laugh with the bitter laugh of the always-screwed.

9. Hand-written notes don't say on whose ABC Street lawn there are "yellow un-opened roses", some so furled all Monica can see is a chrome yellow line at the edge of the chlorophyll green casing. And on another unidentified lawn one very pale yellow rose (pale as beautiful Lily Romero's palest pale blonde hair? pale as an artificial grapefruit sucking candy? pale as. . . ?), alone in a scattered flock of roses in a wide range of lipstick pinks. While the very few roses on Monica's lawn are barely bulbs, with absolutely no color showing from inside.

10. Nothing to do with yellow?: "May" slips into "June" yet remains undivided from it, at least in Monica's pursuit of all the dashes of yellow in the landscape that forms and reforms every day? every hour?, sketched in quickly in oily blots and watercolor washes on extra-large sheets in a spiral-bound drawing tablet that gets flipped back impatiently and without revision just so Monica can get on with the next sketch on the next sheet. Is it just by chronicling or is it universal to everyone that every time we open our eyes we sketch in the landscape in order to live in it?

11. At 10 a.m. on June 1 ABC Street is empty and the universe would be perfectly silent if birds didn't need to prove they're alive with their noises, most of them rough and guttural as everyday speech, here and there a song-like sequence as if someone thinks of herself/himself as an artist.

Not a human voice, as if with the flip of a page. . . .

Day has the special atmosphere of all days that are hot and cloudy. Therefore, even though any hint of hot summer should be welcome, if nothing else as a barrier between the present moment and the cold air of her winter notes, which, when Monica re-reads them to edit them, she feels with much more physical reality on her skin than she would a memory. Yet she writes that "an uncomfortable swampiness arrives with June".

12. "A third yellow rose."

     Larger and paler yellow roses (paler because they're larger?) together with pale pink and darker-pink-but-not-quite-red roses against a white picket fence that isn't an idea of a white picket fence but a well-worn one that has all sorts of impossible-to-reproduce accidental scrapes, smudges, imperfections that Monica has no time to chronicle. Monica asks herself: if not wiry Ellen Garvey's (wiry body + wiry red-in-black or black-in-red hair) and daughters Jill, Colleen, Elizabeth, Brenda and Patty ("Twiggy") Garvey's, then whose?

13. Monica's notes say "lush green roses", but (while editing) Monica wonders if there is such a thing as a green rose, let alone a "lush" one, and can't figure out what she meant.

14. Nothing to do with yellow:

      "Good morning, Jack!"

       "Whad'y'a say, Ed?!"

One voice sails and one voice burrows toward the other (tenor and something harsher and with more bottom than a tenor) across the long diagonal from a slight angle south and just across the way all the way to the southeast corner of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard. One more time Ed and Jack prove that they're capable of human speech on a June day it seemed the world of ABC Street might sleep through as if un-dated and un-recorded, leaving it to the birds to remember or not.

A slight movement in what tree draws Monica's attention to a small yellow-throated bird that's only visible for the micro-second something prompts it to have the nagging feeling it's rested too long and it flies out toward its next rest stop.

No more yellow? More yellow of fading or evaporating brushstrokes in the air? Either way Monica's tired of her little project of following the blots and dashes of yellow that seem to make her local universe have some coherence and is eager to get on with something else, whether there’s a natural organizing principle to unearth or not.

Notes (even rougher than usual) mention, in order, piano notes high above Monica's left ear (can't be anyone but Greg Coffin climbing the windblown beanstalk that never quite gets him up out of the everyday); dashes of rose-in-rose color fleshy as lipstick at the edges of swollen green casings; electric saw cutting horizontally through wood and shingle of every massive early 20th-C.-mansion-turned-into-late-20th-C.-roominghouse just above their concrete foundations, yet still not satisfied with its chewing, zzz-zzz-ing up through every beam and knotty sentence, turning every thought and meditative piano tinkle into sawdust.

Monica's notes continue quickly.

On the way home from AAF Street or beyond and walking quickly up Coast Boulevard toward ABC Street with the thought of changing and going to the beach, Monica hardly pauses to take in the park-like World War II Memorial Circle between AT and ABA Streets (large circle of manicured grass bisected by Coast Boulevard and on either side of the Boulevard two benches facing it from a grove of trees) and the odd way the lack of density of what should be the tree canopy causes the bright cloudiness of the expanded space between small, unripe leaves to explode light into a powder that can almost be seen as particles. Monica rushes through it — partly because of the blinding cloudiness of the round circle experienced as a whole — while hurrying to get to the beach.

On her way to the beach Monica pauses to watch (and keep from startling) a bird with a long, twitching tail pointed up at a 45^o angle and telltale white wing patches that she identifies in her mind, and scribbles down when?, as a "nighthawk” digging with aggressive pleasure into the core of a discarded apple. It's a job that's both painstaking and enjoyable and the bird is in no hurry, so Monica may have time to wonder now, instead of later when she's swimming, or even later at her desk, why the brain coughed up the name of a bird she's only heard of, never seen and can't picture, when she can see clearly that the bird attacking the apple core as if it were alive and might fight back is a "Mockingbird", which she knows very well.

JUNE 1976

Lou the rolypoly mailman (after being given instructions by pouchy little Sylvia Greengrass — a little more inward-folded and slow-moving since wiry-and-sundried compulsive sidewalk-broomer-and-hoser husband Enos died — about delivering her mail to next-door-neighbors Al and Joan Regan while she's [inaudible from across the way] ) rolls with his three-wheel two-pouch cart across the street to hand Monica the mail for the house (to spare himself still one more exhausting trip up then down still one more set of 1-2-3-4-5-or-even-6-or-more front porch steps) and to point out to her that someone in Australia's finally responded to one of poor Yvonne Wilding's letters. Take a look, he says: you can see that it's her family because the return address is exactly the house and street she's been writing to! "3912 Alfred Street, Ramsgate," he reads aloud, "New South Wales, Australia 2217. And the name is 'C. Wilding'! "

As Lou the rolypoly mailman is leaving. Artie Tilden is arriving, glum and heavy-footed: front porch steps get pounded with an unhappy tread that attracts even more cosmic weight than Wanda Baer's. Small head and sour face, always with a tired look as if, no matter how tight he ties his long red ponytail, he can't stretch out what's curdling wrinkles into the skin.

Monica notes that Artie Tilden starts crabbing around 11:30 a.m. and toys with the idea of beginning to keep a chart from this moment on of the length of each session, but doesn't do it because even Artie Tilden seems bored with his own griping and whining and doesn't go on too long. Says that he's been laid off. Or, to be technically correct, he hasn't been "laid off", he's been "furloughed" and maybe that isn't the right word for it either. As a Civil Servant he's hard to fire, but they can tell him to stay home if he's not needed and that's what they did. Three days off without pay so there's no pleasure in having days off because he's losing $200 from every paycheck and he needs it. Too annoyed to enjoy anything is the state he's in, as he's sure Monica (who doesn't miss much!) can tell. . . .

Oddly beautiful in the extremity of her whipped-butter-and-beaten-egg-white-blondeness Lily Romero passes (heading south ←) with her new best friend, gelatinous Melissa Aiello, and they stop to look around and sniff the day sailing unnoticed through the air.

Lily wants to know if Melissa Aiello agrees that this spring the roses are suffering because they seem trapped in their casings: nothing but huge green buds getting fatter and fatter.

Melissa agrees that that may be true in general, but — can Lily see? — there's a burst one all the way over there, all the way in the distance, as far away as possible and not easy to see. Not a red one — one as white as whipped cream that's been beaten so much a little yellow of butter's begun to show up in it.

Monica spots Fionnuala Regan across the way walking hand-in-hand with little Matthew Regan, back and forth under the Regans' enormous elm, still in its early stages of leafing. Though Monica can see Fionnuala and little Matthew clearly, it's obvious to her that Fionnuala hasn't given so much as a glance across the way and has no idea that she (Monica) is there, trying to sketch in the topography of what's moving sideways too slowly to pass as if she could run the long side edge of a soft pencil across the ridges of the moment. And Fionnuala certainly doesn't have any idea that Lily Romero and Melissa Aiello are — while having a quiet conversation about ABC Street's roses — sniffing currents that have circumnavigated the globe just above the surface of ocean and pavement.

Monica doesn't record what Fionnuala Regan is wearing, but her notes are careful to say that yellow-haired little Matthew is wearing a green shirt brighter and greener than the first green of the greenest grass meadow of April-May-June and that he's carrying and trying to bounce a big, squishy rose-colored beach ball.

Monica, Lily and Melissa all can't help hearing Fionnuala Regan say with startling sharpness "don't you dare!" to little Matthew and can't help seeing her give him a stinging slap across the face and then (as if suddenly afraid she's being observed) lift him up at once as if to comfort him before setting him down in the new and elegant dark blue cloth and shiny chrome carriage where his baby sister (name not noted or not known) is already sleeping. Fionnuala wheels the carriage around and out from under the enormous elm, down the driveway between the Regans' three story shingle (white and clean as if brushed with a toothbrush) and the Arlington/Rosenwasser deep and boxy pseudo-modern one-above-the-other two family with picture window and small, fenced-in back yard.

Twins pass twinning invisibly (Monica can't see them or hear them), but David returns from following them at just the right distance and says that he has to find a quiet corner to unburden himself of the next-to-nothing he's memorized for her. It's a code that keeps re-forming every time he thinks he's broken it. Might as well be a crow or an infant: think we know what it wants, what it's cawing or babbling is about and every once in a while get lucky and guess right.

"Around noon" Nelly X passes headed N → toward Coast Boulevard, wheeling a bent old shopping cart (pulling or pushing not noted) and looking (as usual) put together out of mismatched or home-made patches. A long gait without rhythm or fluidity that stops going forward for no apparent reason, leaving Nelly to idle in one spot as if she's standing under a thought that drifted off and got stuck in the trees on another day at this exact spot on ABC Street's sidewalk. Husband Bill Kropotkin is with her, neither side-by-side nor in step, looking in some way different from what Monica is used to: shadows shaved out of their permanent nesting places in Bill's lean yet foldy and unhappy face, clothing crisper and possibly even newer, portfolio under his arm, like a man with a job to go to and fully in harmony with the job he has to go to, rather than a man who long ago fell through the floor of what he was good at (life of the mind, scholarly research and writing) and has worn himself out to the point of depression searching unsuccessfully for the location of the hole he fell through on the offchance it might be a two-way portal he can climb back up through.

Happy about his new job or embarrassed and depressed by his new job as a taxi driver? Monica can't get a good enough look at Bill Kropotkin's always darkly-shaded face to see if it's lightened or darkened in some new way, because — it seems to Monica — Nelly X has spotted her working behind the pine and is hustling Bill over to Coast Boulevard so Monica won't have a chance to ask him questions and depress him by reminding him that he's already depressed. Isn't exactly sure what questions Monica would ask, but worries that something will make him think about the grant he didn't get and of the plunge he's about to take into the wide and shallow world, the depthless depth, the never ending horizontal puddle of workaday trivia, entertainment and boredom. And that might make him stop him in his tracks, turn around and make a beeline for home and bed. . . . Right now, Nelly feels, Bill is in the grip of the odd euphoria of complete and certain failure, but it's a fragile state and one question from Monica could ruin it all. . . .

Heavy rain at 5 p.m.

Weak sunlight at six drying into a dazzling, golden residue in the gutters.

Hollow tok-toking of ping-pong balls next door at Greg-and-Lena's feels in harmony with slow dripping from the eaves, gutters, leaky drainpipes of rainwater that's become thick and syrupy working its way through the permanent mush of rotting leaves and random debris that, if catalogued in detail, would add up to an urgently needed new kind of novel.

Slow dripping from roof drains

                       from roses

                       from black clouds and

                       from bright clearings =

                       "dripping summer days".

Around 7 p.m. remaining droplets on green leaves of every flower, plant, bush and tree lose their sunlight and sound of ping-pong next door gets louder and more violent: new arrivals playing an aggressive game whose rhythm gets complicated by the pleasant sound of Lily Romero laughing. Laughs with pleasure every time little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin goes "ah-wha!" and Lily realizes that the code she thought she'd broken might just be a beautiful eruption of the senseless.

On June 2 Monica sees a constellation of two (talking on the sidewalk just below the porch) forged in an eighth or ninth heaven of put-upon sourness and crabby misery. Al Szarka is listening without sympathy, bitterly impatient because he hasn't been able to get a word in about his own deeper agony, to Artie Tilden whining about the money he lost because he works for the government: the stupid civil service, the fuckn bureaucracy, the stupid fuckn government civil service bureaucracy that laid him off ("furloughed" him!) for three fuckn stupid days!

Al ends up angry at himself for not being able to find a way to shut Artie up and make him listen.

Chronicle says "milky yellow" roses, but doesn't say where they are until a few handwritten and folded pages of fully-scribbled-on scrap paper later when she finds them (again?) at the intersection of Coast Boulevard and ABC Street. Milky yellow of the Coast Boulevard roses is nothing like the buttery or corn kernel yellow of the ABC Street roses on the fat rose bush on the Sloths' lawn almost directly across the way from the porch where Monica is writing.

Evening of the same day is warm, warm evening gives way to cold night and cold night brings heavy rain (also cold ) and cold rain, cold night, warm evening all equally help vegetable fragrances rise from wet earth: street smells like fermenting plant life all night long, through warm and cold.

Flashes of lightning easily visible through Monica's cheap bamboo blinds burn off vast tracts of night so that the chilly brightness of morning seems to arrive before it should.

Not noted if it's on the same bright and chilly morning that Monica hears the voices of two women outside her "red studio" southeast-facing windows. Looks out and sees Lena Coffin's plaintive oval once-pretty-and-plum-like face with its curly halo of dark hair. She's sitting at Andy and Nadja's weathered little second story back porch wooden picnic table talking to Nadja, whose always-suntanned, happy and attractive face is as open and untroubled as Lena's is anxious and oddly stretched as if wound around a peg hammered into an impending event.

Nothing recorded. Can't hear what they're saying? Or, for once, doesn't bother to write it down: deliberately lets it slip out of the Chronicle, therefore out of memory and (the same thing or different?) the secret history of the world.

Pale pink roses against (whose?) white picket fence.

Dark red roses against darkest of dark green leaves.

Still on June 2?

Monica must be on the beach in grey weather, trying to be careful to distinguish one grey from another without falling back on the usual lazy language of color (i.e. our language for anything to do with the senses, lazy language for sex the same as lazy language for green, orange and so on): grey of ocean on a grey day with no sunlight lighting up sparkling traces of vegetable/animal/mineral matter. An absence of color given a name because there's nothing else to do: little bits of lavender and green heaving in the magma form some barely sunlit angles with an oddly oily iridescence to them.

And against whatever grey the "grey Atlantic" actually is the far darker grey (grey that's really a smudge of black?) of a freighter or tanker not exactly "sliding" — more of a slow and bottom-heavy up-and-down wallow — through shallow swells that break up the line of the horizon and give it its saw-toothed edge, all its enormous bottom weight sinking it easily, the slightly weaker or stronger counter-forces dredging it up again with difficulty.

Sky's grey seems white by contrast with grey of ocean or ship, whose black is as near-black as a wooly board eraser erasing line after line of scribble from the chalky darkness.

Monica says something about the twinning of the Twins as they amble grumbling across the Earth as a way of mapping the neighborhood (if she or David were to follow them and their eccentric path) and draws a parallel with the space of Ozu's world where the idiosyncratic narrative passes across and plays itself out inside a set of shifting frames, mapping the lives of the characters in this peculiar way without any hint of what may or may not be a concealed formal rigor. As if the horizontal flow of events within a universe of sometimes-invisible frames is as natural as driving around your neighborhood.

This too: trying to sketch in a complex idea with a few sentences (therefore a caricature of an idea) and well aware of her own borrowed and uncertain knowledge of Wittgenstein's Tractatus or "Notebooks" (almost completely and absurdly reliant on Cora Diamond's section about Wittgenstein in Borchert's Encyclopedia of Philosophy), still and all Monica finds enough resonance with her own thinking in Diamond's capsule summary of Wittgenstein's so-called "Picture Theory" of the sentence (or of language) to copy out a few lines:

" 'What makes it possible for a combination of words to represent a fact in the world?' " (Borchert's or Erik Stenius' question, not exactly Wittgenstein's, as far as Monica can tell.)

" 'Wittgenstein's explanation consists in the striking idea that a sentence is a picture, not merely like a picture. . . . ' "

And Borchert's direct translation of Wittgenstein in one of the "Notebooks": " 'A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we think it to be.'"

And again: "Wittgenstein's great conception was that when we put a sentence together we construct a model of reality. 'In a proposition a situation is, as it were, put together experimentally.' "

There's a lot more to it, of course, but Monica quickly sickens of the language of philosophers, was only initially struck by a certain resonance with thoughts that have come up in the course of obsessively chronicling the world that passes the porch where she generally works. And since, of course, nothing is the world but the world, she knows that what she's doing on paper isn't the world. Where she wanders away from Wittgenstein's elegance a little into uncertainty is in not being convinced (not caring?) that the Chronicle is a model of "the World", or even of the world of ABC Street, is a model of anything, in fact, no matter how faithful and accurate her sketching. Wonders a little if she's being ruthlessly honest with herself if she says that it's enough for her that the Chronicle be a coherent world on paper.

"Working outside at 5 p.m. in the chilly autumn of an early June afternoon" Monica hears the lazy tok-toking of an indifferently played ping-pong match next door.

What else on June 2?

While Monica is working to the irregular rhythm of poorly-played ping-pong, blond-blond little Timothy Corcoran stops to tell her a few things he feels need to be told on his way to the Corcorans' porch door in the southeast corner of the porch.

He's confused by something and he'd rather ask Monica about it than his mother: Yvonne lives on the second floor with Al in the two room apartment right over part of his family's apartment — isn't that true? But, if that's true, why did he see Yvonne coming downstairs with Artie Tilden? Why did Artie Tilden have his hand on Yvonne's hip? and why did Artie and Yvonne drive away together in Artie's car, laughing? Were they laughing at Al Szarka? He doesn't know why it bothers him. Why should it matter to him what any of them do? But it does bother him that Yvonne Wilding can be married to Al Szarka (if you're living with someone in the same apartment that means you're married, right?) and be Artie Tilden's girlfriend at the same time!

Monica has a hard time convincing little Timothy Corcoran that Yvonne and Anne Marie are not the same person. He never knew that there was an Anne Marie. He's seen Anne Marie a zillion times, of course, but whenever he saw Anne Marie he thought he was seeing Yvonne Wilding and that Yvonne Wilding was a horrible liar leading an impossibly complicated double life with two men whose apartment doors are a few feet from each other and it's been confusing and bothering him as long as he can remember.

Monica can tell that, no matter what she says, for Timothy Corcoran Yvonne Wilding and Anne Marie may always be the same person, even though she sees no resemblance and is able to point out a dozen differences. She can tell that it doesn't matter to Timothy that Anne Marie's hair is straight and auburn/brown and shiny and Yvonne's is almost black, tight and curly around her head! She's left with the knowledge that she'll never know what Timothy sees that blends Anne Marie and Yvonne together.

He has this to say too: he saw his first lifeguard of the season over the weekend and then today he saw another one all the way down at the lifeguard station on AAG Street.

What else on the same day? Lowell calls to remind Monica that tomorrow is the day he's leaving for two months (working at a hospital in Montreal) and then for another two months at the Wilhelm Reich Institute in Rangeley Maine.

June 1 in June 2: David tells Monica that the research she asked him to do was pointless and can't even be called research: both birds (the one Monica spotted yesterday, the 9-11" one with white in its tailfeathers and white wingbars, singing a complicated song that — the more you listen to it — isn't one song but dozens, most of them translations of other birds' songs, and the one he saw himself right in front of him, just a bit shorter than Monica's bird, brown with uncertain orange/red-orange embers glowing there as if a pile of drying leaves were on fire, only flaring to life at the beak and, more purely red, in the flame-like crest, but not the tail, even when the feathers flicker and fan out) were exactly the mockingbird and female cardinal they thought they were before he looked anything up.

On June 3 (time not noted) Mikki calls to say that the lock broke on her apartment door and she can't deal with it! Can't deal with the idea of spending the day worrying about a break-in. Or sitting and waiting for the landlord to decide whether or not to pay for a locksmith and then having to wait for the locksmith and then, if and when the locksmith actually comes, having to hang out with the locksmith, etc. etc. Another wasted, hellish day on East 10 St. So she'd like to come out and have a healing day at the beach.

Also on June 3 (might even be at the same time Mikki is calling from East 10 St. to invite herself out) Margo calls Monica's mother Betty's house because Lowell told her that he'd be there, but forgot to tell her that Kitty would be there too, though he knows or should know that they despise each other. Kitty answers and passes the phone to Lowell without saying anything.

Later Margo complains (to Monica? to someone who repeats it to Monica "for your Chronicle"?), as if surprised, that she was "hurt and offended" by Kitty's coldness. And later, or even later than that, Kitty laughs harshly and says with contempt that's meant to be noticed (directly to Monica or to someone who repeats it to Monica "for your Chronicle"?) "what's wrong with that woman? Is she nuts?" She was Margo's therapist for two years, for god's sake, and Margo knows only too well that she (Kitty) could barely tolerate her incurable lying then and never liked her as a patient or as a person, so why would Margo be "offended" now? She only hopes it doesn't take Lowell too long to figure out Margo's game. A few lifetimes could go by waiting for Margo to string together three truthful sentences. . . .

Pat Corcoran doesn't have a story to tell but, as always, doesn't care whether she has a story to tell or not (as if she has her own idea of what story-telling is) and just knows that she needs to recite to Monica as fast as she can whatever's forcing its way through from her mind to her tongue. Says she bets Monica never realized that she and Philip and Timothy are all Gemini! Let's see: Timothy's birthday is the last (doesn't come till June 11), Philip just had his on May 31 and hers was on the 29th. This is what she got for her birthday: they all chipped in and got her a bicycle (doctor wants her to exercise, but it'll be a miracle if she ever gets on the thing) then (because that's their level of comprehension) they took her out for the one meal they knew she couldn't help stuffing herself with: steamers with drawn butter, fried clams with tartar sauce, warm buttermilk biscuits with butter, boiled or broiled lobster with drawn butter, buttered corn-on-the-cob, french fries or baked potato, cole slaw and potato salad, chocolate cream pie or rice pudding or strawberry shortcake or all three and coffee (and a couple of other things she's leaving out) at Paddy's Clam Bar and then they went dancing (if you can call what John does "dancing") because Allison's dating one of the musicians in the band (instrument not named or not noted).

Oh yes! this too! (Pat Corcoran is happy to have remembered something else): Monica's apartment is so high up and out of the muddled flow of everything that goes on below that Monica probably thinks she's still seeing Themis or Themis-and-his-girlfriend arriving and leaving at the usual too-early and too-late hours. True, there's a youngish Greek guy living in Themis' apartment, but it's not Themis! Must be a buddy of Themis', maybe another guy who works in the kitchen at the Cornucopia Diner, but nowhere near as handsome or as charming as Themis! And the girlfriend's thin and pretty and blonde enough, but not like Themis' girlfriends, who were almost always almost-beautiful. The new Greek guy and his girlfriend moved in at 6 a.m. the other day (can't be bothered to remember what day exactly), tested the strength of the inner-springs for two days and drove off together early this morning in a car she could have sworn was Themis'!

Monica notes that last night, around 10 p.m., she heard Greg Coffin and Andy Forest's band practicing and today "at 5 p.m." she sees all four band members loading a U-haul trailer with equipment and (after they pull away) hears Lily Romero complaining cryptically to Lena Coffin: "I know why they're playing! So now you have to do the bungalow!" No answer, so Lily Romero's complaint remains pleasantly free of the sentences and stories and all their meanings that would have been added by any answer from Lena.

How many stories, for example, would follow from an answer to the question: what "bungalow" could Lily be talking about? whose bungalow? where is it? what would the existence of a bungalow Monica's never heard anyone in the Coffin/Forest galaxy refer to have to do with Lily and Lena? and what connection could there possibly be between the band playing (most likely at the "Monte Carlo" near the airport) and Lena having "to do the bungalow?" What does "to do" mean in Lily's sentence? etc. etc.

Pages and pages that don't have to be written because Lena didn't answer.

Not noted which X (Monica assumes it's Nelly X) stops to tell Monica that the doctor is getting mad. They've been trying, but haven't been able to pay off little Jimmy's bill as fast as the doctor would like and it seems (can Monica help figure out how it's possible?) that, with all they've paid, they still owe $8000!

How long has it taken Monica to come to this conclusion: the larger the yellow rose the milder and milkier the yellow, the smaller etc.

This too, but about two hours later, "around 7": whatever residual light was resting quietly on the lawn has now gathered itself quickly and straight upright into the yellow of the forsythias, where it blazes brighter than any yellow lampshade.

What else on June 3?

Sylvia Greengrass has been dragging heavy garbage sacks from the brick fortress's side door to the curb, down the too-narrow driveway shared with the Sloths' spotless white-shingled twin structure, where they're either piled up where she's dragged them or hoisted up and stuffed into metal cans. Garbage disposal and all of the driveway and sidewalk activities — brooming, hosing, raking, inspecting, etc. — were always exclusively Enos Greengrass' province and now, since his death, it's Enos' second or fourth self as accumulated crap Sylvia's dug loose and swept up from Enos' upstairs and basement lairs being dragged down his beloved, no-longer-perfectly-clean driveway where Monica still can easily summon up Enos' eternally tanned and leathery bald dome, shirtless-and-tanned-chest-stomach-arms-and-shoulders, all brown and wiry in peculiarly taut skin above blue shorts washed out to an indescribable beauty, the whole thing a propulsive little machine of brooming. . . .

Monica can't quite unravel a few tangled sentences about a little constellation of friends whose relationships are even more tangled than they seem to be.

One sentence seems to say that Kevin Douglas, a close friend of the Lenehan family and of Nora Lenehan in particular, visited big Ambrose Lenehan Sr. in Bayview Hospital today at or around the same time that Nora, Ambrose Jr., Ryan and little apple-faced Finnley Lenehan were already there.

Monica isn't sure how she knows anything she knows unless the source of her knowledge is clearly noted and in this case she thinks, but isn't certain because it's not clearly noted, that it's clear-eyed and intelligent, brown-haired and handsome Ryan Lenehan who stops to chat because he thinks Monica needs to be filled in about how — exactly how — his father ended up in the hospital with a busted nose and jaw. But it seems to her that, at different locations in the scribbled landscape of her scrap paper notes and their crowded, topsy-turvy margins, he tells different stories about the same event with only this much the same in all versions: Ambrose Sr. got into a fight in or in front of Slattery's Bar & Grill and ended up with a badly broken nose and busted-up jaw and now he's in the hospital all bandaged and wired up.

In one sentence, toward the top of a folded-over lavender page of quickly-scribbled pencil and/or pen sentences bound-to-be-nearly-illegible x number of years later, Monica has Ryan say that big Ambrose Sr. stupidly got into a fight coming to Kevin Douglas' defense against who or how many and for what reason not noted. Ryan reminds Monica that his father and Kevin Douglas go back a long way and that they were even in business together. Can't remember who told him and has no way of knowing if it's true, but he's pretty sure that someone told him they were in the music business together, though that seems like just one more gob of senseless muddle in the gobbed-together muddle of useless stories that are like a swallow's nest of mud and twigs and whatever goo gets it to stick to the wall of a garage in the shadow of the pitched roof-overhang. The nest of senseless, muddled stories that add up to a street, a neighborhood etc. It's his mother, not his father, who's a musician. Kevin Douglas is a musician. And the only thing his father knows about music is that he likes to watch his mother (Nora) perform, with or without Kevin Douglas.

What any of that has to do with the fight is a mystery.

This much is certain: the fight started as an ordinary argument in the bar: shouting, cursing and insults. And then something escalated it and it went outside and got violent.

Sentences lower down on the scribbled page — adrift in completely unrelated sentences about other things on the same day — say that the fight was between Ryan's father and Kevin Douglas! Considering how much a part of the Lenehan family Kevin Douglas is that would be a deeper mystery than anything else. In this version nothing much was said. Any language that would explain anything is missing. In this version it started as a physical fight: someone pushed someone and then someone punched someone and then they started wrestling inside the bar and then it rolled outside and got crazy.

All he can get out of his mother is bullshit like she's going to sue Slattery's. Or sue the bartender, who (according to his mother) "never got off his chicken ass". His mother knows Slattery's inside out and knows for a fact that the "the skinny coward" keeps a shotgun behind the bar, so, according to her, what kept him from lifting a finger is another mystery. Monica knows what his mother's like: the more noise she makes and the more stories she tells the more you wonder what's going on. He thinks Monica knows that he and Monica have this in common: they both hate exaggeration. They both know that no one's going to sue anyone. So what's it really all about? Is there someone out there who hates his father enough to stomp him like that? Hard to believe. Did something actually go wrong between his father and Kevin Douglas? Why is his mother distracting everyone with all this noise and nonsense instead of trying to get to the bottom of it? He's going a little nuts trying to figure it out on his own and his only prayer is that Monica can get his mother to tell the truth. . . . .

All in the same day or scattered through different days and ending up acting like little simultaneous sequences on the same day.

Monica doesn't like the crazy look in Al Szarka's eyes today. Eyes always cold and inanimate, as if the brain can't even bother trying to look out through the two mineral marbles implanted in the skull, today they have an even-more-disturbing transparency that gives Monica a quick look onto a stage where a feral and bloody drama seems to be dimly snarling its way into being.

Monica wonders if it's worth recording the fact that, for days, there's been nothing worth recording in or reflected in any of the windows visible at various sideways and diagonal angles west, southwest, south with the possible exception of movement in a never-before-seen green and yellow floral curtain in what direction and in which window not noted.

Squat landlord's squat daughter Ellie passes in white shorts, headed south toward the beach, a big radio on her right shoulder, listening to what?

Even though Monica's walked around every side of the house endless times since she's lived in it, today, for the first time, she finds a vegetable garden near the fence dividing it from the landlord's two story boxy pseudo-modern. Tries to determine if the earth is freshly dug-up (never saw it because it wasn't there?), but there's no way to know for sure or to know either what vegetables are growing there or who planted them (can only assume it's the squat landlord-wife-and-mother, Minna W.).

One red rose with a startling pure black center (another idea of a universe we can burrow through, if only we can zzz our way deep enough in) David picks in a neighbor's backyard and which Monica finds the next morning completely filling a small green pottery vase (asparagus green with faint coppery veining) on her big oak breakfast table/desk in the green front studio. Also on her desk and against a lowered set of cheap, rollup bamboo blinds an unidentified plant — wild and dark green with spikey leaves — Lowell stopped by to give her the night before he left for a long stay in Montreal (plant had apparently just been given to him as a senseless going-away present by his girlfriend-or-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, the too-kind-and-sweetly-pretty radiology technician, Grete).

Notes say that it feels like the end of summer at the beginning of summer. "October chill/October light/October melancholy" is one way of explaining it, but Monica isn't satisfied and tries to find out what the Chronicle means by "October melancholy". In bright sunlight without warmth (useless sunlight for the eye only, gives no warmth to the skin or the soul) an unhappy child's voice calling a name Monica can't make out from her west-facing green studio, on a street where there's no other child to play with. Coldness of sunlight reinforced by sound of wind rushing through channels in the trees that weren't there until today and by violent flapping of the frayed borders of faded awnings on the second stories of the neighborhood's seaside-mansions-long-ago-turned-into-multiple-dwellings. Unhappy child may have gone indoors to escape a wind- driven angle of October sunlight travelling toward it and is now visible in warm silence of interior sunlight in the Coffins' enclosed downstairs porch ping-pong room where a solitary game is in progress.

Cold October sunlight dissects all elements of any given moment — color and objects in angled sections leaning against one another along the crossing lines of a diagram that's exceedingly clear and sharp, yet still doesn't manage to add up to a coherent totality.

Themis-who's-not-Themis and his not-so-pretty-as-Themis'-girlfriend take off in a little green sports car with as much noise as if the sidewalls of the tires were stuck to the curb.

Little Riley Liman (thoughtful brown eyes, angle of soft brown hair across forehead, slight overbite and cleft in chin) says to Jojo Coffin: "you told me yourself that you're eating supper at your aunt Grete's, but you're eating more than your share of our Whammy! You're gonna get in trouble and I'm glad!"

"No, I WON'T!", Jojo says, sounding worried.

"Will so," Riley comes back weakly, too weakly for Jojo's older brother Joshua (already showing signs that he's going to be tall and graceful like his father Greg), who feels he has to put in his two cents.

"He's right, Jo. Give the Whammy to Riley and let him finish it."

"No!" angry and only a little tearful.

"Well, stop and think about it Jo. If you think about it you'll see that it's only fair." Voice couldn't be more calm and reasonable. "a) you shouldn't be stuffing yourself with a Whammy before supper and b) Riley split the cost of the Whammy and you're not giving him his fair share. Look at yourself honestly, Jo. You're being a selfish little pig."

Monica would rather use signs than words for Jojo's sobbing and Joshua's persuasive tone of voice, but can't come up with either.

Jojo (managing to talk while sobbing): "Why should I give him my Whammy?! He NEVER . . . !" Language swallowed by sobbing, then, "I NEVER stay over at his house. . . . NEVER! They never. . . . He wouldn't even. . . invite me!. . . he wouldn't! they wouldn't!. . . never-ever. . . !"

"Oh yes they would, Jo. Why wouldn't they? Riley would. Tell her, Riley. Of course you will, right? Just tell her so she'll stop blubbering and give you the Whammy."

Riley looks away and doesn't answer.

"See? He won't! I know them! I know what the Limans are like and so do you! He NEVER! They NEVER. . . !"

"Let's be honest," Riley says. "I don't want to and I won't. I just wanted another bite of the Whammy."

"What a dummy you are, Riley", Joshua says, "you don't deserve my help."

Around 7:30 in the evening light begins to withdraw from things as if into a cave where it plans to make a cozy little campfire to ward off the depressing darkness approaching over its shoulder.

Notes say "a melancholy couple on the boardwalk", but while translating her notes into typewriter Monica wonders what's melancholy about them. Strolling too slowly to ever reach home? Heads bowed while strolling slowly as if weeping together over the withdrawal of light? Hastening the withdrawal of light with their reluctant strolling together, the odd bowing of their heads, etc.?

At approximately the same time on the same June day (June 3 at 7:30 or just a little later) as the "melancholy couple" is helping drag light down the boardwalk with bowed backs, Margaret Brennan's joined Lena Coffin on the cold cement steps of Greg-and-Lena's small front porch (orange stone with old wrought iron railings and bannisters leading into the wide, enclosed front porch with its ping-pong table) and they're enjoying doing nothing but watch Rosamond and Daisy take pleasure in their ice cream (flavor and type — pop, popsicle, sandwich, cup, etc. — not noted). Just a little inaudible conversation after Margaret Brennan's friend Wendy (solid, carved block of black hair, attractive but somewhat parrot-type face, full, well-shaped body that always draws attention inside its tightly buttoned uniform, blouse or sweater) arrives from the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the end of the ocean end of the block and stops because she has a story to tell.

Monica makes a note to remind herself of the importance of paying attention to the cosmic goo of what doesn't happen, hard to distinguish through the goo of the almost-nothing that does happen.

Margaret, Lena and Wendy chatting in low voices, no more audible than the faintly zzz-ing hum of the blended voices of gnats swarming in the deepest black hollows of the tall Rhinebeck pine, in the cool air that has something to do with the crispness of the light as it drains out of the world just as Monica is startled by the loud, barking laugh of Al Szarka exploding out an open south-facing side window of Artie Tilden's small second floor rear apartment.

Notes say that rose-colored buds open into "heavy yellow" roses and/or roses whose milk-white interiors take on only the mildest yellow wash of color as white flows out toward the petals' outermost lip: rose-pink of unopened buds side by side on the same bush with fully opened yellow and milky-white washed-with-yellow flowers. Notes also say that both buds and flowers are or will be the same flower.

Early June on the ground, September in the trees. Top of the human head divines a colder region circulating at a middle distance above it, not meant for humans. Up there there's waning light and the chill of early autumn.

Later on the same day (still June 3?) notes talk about "a new green plant" on top of the ancient refrigerator crudely painted with orange all-weather paint in the west-and-north-facing green front studio and notes also — getting sketchier, crowded, tiny and vertical in the margins of what's already marginal — try unsuccessfully to define the darkness, aroma and exact shade of the rose of a single dark rose and its black center. (May also say that Monica thinks she sniffs perfume residue of dark rose's dizzying rosiness all along ABC Street for days.)

Even though on Friday June 4 September's descended from the tree zone and made the Salem Avenue back yard an uncomfortably chilly place to write, Monica spends a good part of the afternoon there because she needs to escape from Philip Corcoran's off-key wailing and tuneless strumming to endless Beatles records.

Not clear in Monica's notes whether it's before or after her cold and uncomfortable time writing in the Salem Avenue back yard that she "spends the afternoon" chronicling random lengths of overheard conversation, linked or unconnected, continuous or overlapped, intercut and tangled.

Also not noted whether Monica is sitting on the ABC Street front porch, if on the porch whether toward the north end close to the landlord's ugly pseudo-modern, south end near Greg-and-Lena's massive orange brick/cracked and peeling white stucco or in one or the other weedy gap between the massive cocoa shingle multiple dwelling where she has her little house-atop-the-house and the landlord's or between the cocoa shingle and the Coffins'.

An afternoon of voices only.

Babette Coffin's pleasantly Viennese?-accented voice calls out from somewhere not quite in the middle distance of ABC Street south of where Monica is writing and a little below her at sidewalk level: "I've got her, Lena dear!"

Lena's voice, much closer, taut and wiry, accented only by stress, words too muddled for Monica to record, clear enough for Babette to answer.

"I have Jojo — she's with me! Nothing to worry about."

Lena: ". . . ."

Babette: ". . . ."

"I said [Lena says], ' SO THAT MEANS I'D BETTER CALL HER UP!' "

"Call her up? Call who up? I don't understand. . . ."

"Call her up and find out. . . . Her. The mother — the one with the name I never remember. . . ."

"Oh. Call her up and find out what?"

"I promised that I'd feed him."

"Promised her what?"

"That I'd FEED him!"

"Well, if you promised his mother that you'd feed him, Lena, then you should feed him. That's simple enough."

"But now I'm worried that I opened my big mouth and forgot to make enough food. . . !"

Monica thinks she hears Jojo's voice as she comes closer, running toward home and dinner. Thinks she doesn't hear or see, but only assumes (as if seeing and hearing) that Babette is shaking her head and laughing in a certain way about Lena being Lena.

"But Tommy doesn't want to go to a party at Gaga's house! He just wants to sleep", Jojo says, tearful with anger.

"Tommy doesn't want to go to a party? He'd rather sleep? I'm going to call his mother, Jo, cause something's missing from this story."

Too long indecipherable or unrecorded lines of argument that end with Jojo yelling at her mother and crying "HE JUST WANTS. . . !"

TWINS TWINNING = PASSING/TALKING SIDEWAYS ON ABC STREET

"How y'doin?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Ah there smiley . . . !"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Cleanin it up?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Oooh stinky!"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Still runnin? Eh?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Still goin! Heh?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Piece of shit!"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"There you go! Up the stairs! Headin for the Queen's chair with your fat ass!"

"Hi Gaga! Going bicycling?" Joshua calls out to Babette going by at medium speed on a thick-wheeled old bicycle. Gets no answer, unless it's a nod Monica can't see.

"HEY TINA!" Joshua tries for a response in another direction.

"TINA!"

Still no answer.

"TINAAAAH!!!"

"Joshua?" Lena says with a quiet quiver from near-at-hand. "Are you trying to call Tina all the way from here? Do you really expect her to answer you?"

"Well," Joshua says, "if she doesn't answer me I need you to explain this: how come I can hear Tina's voice all the way from the beach — I can almost make out what she's saying — but she can't hear me at all? Is the porch farther away from the beach than the beach is from the porch? Or is it just a day that isn't a day for me? I took a wrong step and landed in a dead spot in the universe and no one can hear me from any angle. . . ? Is that possible, Ma? Does that happen. . . ?"

Because it's far away (south) toward the ocean end of the street, Monica can't say for sure if it's Tommy Liman's voice or his brother Riley"s (though their voices are as different as their hair color and possibly different in the same way as their hair color) or even someone else's:

"HEY VICKY!

"We went to MACDONALD'S!

"We have BIG MACS for supper! So. . . ."

Closer and oddly attached to an unfamiliar, pleasant and pleasantly accented woman's voice that should belong to Nadja, but which Monica can't say is Nadja's with certainty on this day filled with language (unamplified and with no particular band width) travelling through air that seems to have unusual auditory dead spots.

"No? it's not? it's not the hardware?"

"It's the "

"And I promised to make the "

"Why is it always the food shopping?"

"For me it's the stupid question I'm always asking myself: 'did he like it? did he really like it?' "

"Well, you know, I'm not like that. I always say 'I suppose he liked it well enough' and if not. . . well, what then…? "

". . . but I'm never really. . . . "

" 'eh' is sometimes the best philosophy."

"Did he like it?"

"Really-really?"

"eh!"

"He liked it! Oh, goody-goody!"

"A little red ribbon."

Again Monica thinks it's Nadja, but no way to tell for sure who it is that says "A little red ribbon in your mother's hair" or who answers irrelevantly (or relevant to something unrecorded) "and what about the two shelves?". Same voice or second, similar voice says "two blue shelves" and wonders why she's never been able to get him to build them.

Same voices or different (does "different" mean "a little further away"?):

"No, before that.

"Before that too.

"Before before that?"

"When we say casually 'all this', do we really mean 'ALL THIS'?"

"Who's the first one to say 'The Normal Abnormal'?"

"A little salad."

"A little water once a week."

Another way (no matter how directly and accurately chronicled it sometimes remains scrambled and unclear and Monica feels free to reshuffle it in any way that pleases her): Still one more time Monica thinks it's Nadja, but no way to tell for sure who says "A LITTLE RED RIBBON" or who answers "AND THE TWO SHELVES?" And again fairly close at hand Nadja's pleasant and pleasantly accented voice that may or may not have a little paprika stirred into it once it starts simmering: "AND THE TWO BLUE SHELVES?"

"Did someone say 'A salad?' "

Monica wonders: is it only her? Is it all passing through her and her alone? Or are all audible to all? There are days that may not be days at all when no voice can carry farther than three feet from its starting point (certainly can't reach anyone unintentionally overhearing or possibly even someone deliberately listening next door), immediately condensing out of the atmosphere and puddling on the sidewalk. Voice doesn't carry, no one hears it and all day long one person or another can't help asking if she or he didn't just hear someone call or if someone nearby did or didn't just say something. And there are days like this one when not everything, but almost-everything said carries in bits and pieces to any ear tuned properly along the N <—> S three block length of ABC Street between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

"OW-WUH!" Rosamond wails with the extra dose of reality, the special exaggeration called "hyper-reality" that flames up now in the Age of Performance in any child who’s spent her/his life watching sitcom children on television (even one person watching/listening is as good as a tv camera).

Voice doesn't carry and someone walking down the block calls out as if lost in a fog: "DID SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING?!"

"ONE QUICK GAME OF AIR HOCKEY . .?"

"I'D RATHER GO BACK TO THE BEACH AND SLEEP!"

"GOTTA TAKE A SHOWA?"

"GOTTA GO TO WORK!"

"JUST ONE QUICK ONE?"

"JUST A QUICK ONE!"

"JUST ONE?"

"WELL, ONE AN' THEN WE'LL. . . . "

Laughter while running.

"I FELL ASLEEP?"

"I SUPPOSE SO."

"FELL ASLEEP ON THE BEACH, 'AS USUAL'?"

A woman Monica can't identify (age not noted, hair color not noted, type and/or details of face or body not noted — all that's noted is that the unknown woman is wearing a cherry red polo so brilliant, so vibrant, that within the clipped outline of the short sleeved polo Monica can see electrons at the red end of the spectrum jumping out of their skins like little red pocket lighter fires) calls out to someone Monica can't see: "How ARE you?!!"

And then another woman's voice (the voice of the unknown woman whose red polo flames out to the eye even at a distance of four, five, six or more houses) answers irrelevantly:

"THE OCEAN!

"OH!

"THE OCEAN!"

"No, Mommy, I won't eat my Nabiscos!

" I won't eat my Nabiscos for lunch if you don't let me go out NOW!

"And I won't eat my Nabiscos for supper if you don't let me go out NOW!"

Seems to Monica that she recognizes Johanna Coffin's voice (conjuring as always her happily-swimming-toward-you tadpole face and even the clear water streaming through and around her). Easy to hear the sweetly streaming little voice through the door (when it's open, as it is now) opening onto the Coffins' raftlike second story porch, windblown and sailing quickly into the bluest interior blue of the sky's blue, away from the direction of Coast Boulevard, and it's obvious that Jojo's in a miserable, angry mood. . . .

"I WON'T EAT!

"I WON'T EAT!!

"I WON'T EAT!!!

"I WON'T EVER EAT!

"I WON'T EVER GO OUT!!!!

"YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT ME!

"NO!!!

"BECAUSE!!

"BECAUSE YOU WON'T LET ME GO OUT!

"NOBODY! NOBODY! NOBODY!"

Anger —> sobbing? (Hard for Monica to hear clearly, voice travelling out through open door, across windblown porch, scattering toward beach.)

"Yesterday I had a Whammy, BUT JOSHUA AND TOMMY TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME!!!

"THEY TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME AND THEY ALWAYS TAKE THINGS AWAY FROM ME! BUT DO I TELL YOU ABOUT IT!? NO! BECAUSE YOU NEVER DO ANYTHING! YOU NEVER HELP ME! BECAUSE YOU DON'T CARE. . . !!"

Monica can tell that it goes on and continues going on (can still make out Johanna's anguished voice tone, but anything like a distinct sentence, even a word, is wound into the grinding gears of a Gremlin having trouble pulling in reverse out of Lena's cracked and weedy driveway). Monica gets into position where she can read "DOPE-SUPPORTING TURKS GET OUT OF CYPRUS" on the Gremlin's bumper sticker.

Seems to continue as before on the same June day or another with the difference that Jojo's despair has deepened to a point that Monica can't fathom.

"SHE WANTS ME TO DIE!

"NO!

"SHE WANTS ME TO DIE!!

"AND SO DO YOU! AND SO DOES JOSH!"

Anguish and anger inexplicably aimed at little melon-headed Rosamond?

"NO! NO, I SAID! I SAID GET AWAY FROM ME!! GET AWAY FROM ME, ROSAMOND!"

Now Rosamond is wailing while Jojo's voice has taken on a different, less amplified timbre, as if she'd run out onto the raft of the second story porch still sailing out over the street toward the ocean and everything peripheral to her and her voice has been cut away by stiff breezes pulsing between bay and ocean.

"JOSH! JOSH!!"

And then Lena's anxious, quavering soprano that nevertheless still has some appealing sweetness left in it: "Get back in here, idiot! Don't let them see you!"

Joshua and Tommy Liman are approaching the Coffin's massive old multiple dwelling from the Limans' newer and smaller one or two family at the ocean end of the street and Joshua's heard Jojo weeping and calling his name from the overhead porch.

"I WANTED TO GO OUT. . . .!" (Sobbing.)

_______ (JOSHUA, with a voice that may be sympathetic (or maybe not), words indecipherable.)

"I COULDN'T GO OUT. . . !" (Whatever's deeper than sobbing.)

Joshua must be close, because he's clearly audible for a second.

"I STAYED AT TOMMY'S OVERNIGHT. I WANTED YOU TO COME! TOMMY SAID IT WAS OK IF YOU CAME. I WOULD NEVER DO THAT TO YOU, JO. . . !"

On the same undated day or another ("another perfect spring day") Monica quickly gets down a few key words and phrases (to be expanded on later) from a tv news bulletin about an explosion in Hewlett Bay Harbor spilling raw sewage into the ocean. Bulletin cuts into a film and splices out a small sequence of dialogue Monica was trying to memorize just well enough to be able to copy it out in the slightly re-invented way that makes it feel like her own.

"What must you think of me?" Basil Rathbone says with incisive but nasal forcefulness. "Dropping off to sleep in the midst of our most interesting conversation."

"Oh that's quite alright Mr. Holmes," the attractive, red-haired woman in emerald green suit with subtle white polka dots says in a similarly ambiguous way, "you were sleeping so peacefully I tried to be quiet so as not to wake you."

"So kind of you. But we were talking about your roses, I believe."

"Oh yes

"My roses!

"I'm proud of my roses

"Sinfully proud of my roses, I’m afraid."

"Curious isn't it," Holmes/Rathbone changes the subject abruptly, "that two people are found at opposite ends of London with their backs broken and their bodies surrounded by a litter of smashed china. What do you make of it? I'd be most interested in having your opinion."

Dialogue lost to news bulletin here.

A brief letter dated "June 2 1976" from Bill Fox of West Coast Poetry Review arrives while Monica is on the porch copying out the overheard words "OH! THE OCEAN!" or "NO, MOMMY! I WON'T EAT MY NABISCOS!"

"Dear Monica and David —

"Thanks for the letter and as it returns.

"I'm very glad that Paris Review is running the text — if I remember, which is unlikely, I'll mention that in the magazine when we run the documentation.

"Yes, do try and get me some photos of text close up. I know the problems involved, but it's worth a try.

"And yes, there will be a next time in the city and I'll try and give you plenty of warning.

"So, till later

Bill."

On an undated evening in June Nicole Renard is playing ping-pong or watching others from the Coffin/Forest galaxy play ping-pong (sharp or dull tok-toking within a complex plasma of noise and laughing) in Lena-and-Greg's enclosed downstairs front porch ping-pong room and Nicole must catch sight of Monica in the twilight behind the pine in the near corner of the next-door porch, because suddenly she's there, telling Monica little incomplete fragments of the story lines of her life-out-of-view.

Later (as soon as Nicole goes back to the ping-pong game next door) Monica notes Nicole's story fragments down, re-scrambling and re-splicing what was already spliced and scrambled.

Let's see: two fragments stand out. She doesn't know when "summer" actually begins for her, Nicole says, but she'll be staying here (that is with Grete, Andy and Babette) for the summer so, hopefully, she'll finally get to spend some time with Monica and David: it will take multiple conversations for her to tell all the stories she has to tell. Second: she joined the Museum of Modern Art and she's been going there a lot, partly because she knows that Monica and David go there all the time to see films and she figured that they were bound to run into one another. But of course that hasn't happened.

She's just here for the night. Tomorrow she leaves for Toronto to spend a little time with her mother. . . .

Conversation is cut short by someone (voice, familiar but mangled, could belong to Grete, Lena, Allison Savas, Lily Romero, Nadja, Melissa Aiello or who else?) calling to Nicole through one of the ping-pong room's two side windows facing the cracked and weedy driveway and the corner of the broad porch of grey boards where Monica and Nicole are talking.

Conversation resumes the next day and Monica's notes don't make it clear whether Nicole explains that she didn't want to leave, but had to leave when Lena called because — absurd and stupid as it sounds — someone in the house (thinks it was either Ralph Aiello or Jacky Savas, but she really doesn't remember) had the genius idea to have a ping-pong tournament. So, even though she hasn't been here, is only here for the night and may not be here again for weeks, they found a way to rope her into it, so. . . . Or notes may pick up the conversation where it left off. Nicole says that she's trying to sort out her own confused emotions about seeing her mother and she's hoping that talking to Monica will help. Misses her mother and wants to see her. That's never an issue. But she's not looking forward to going to Toronto. How does that add up? Why would she so much rather see her mother in Florida? Of course (doesn't Monica agree?) her mother's mood probably affects hers. Mother's always tightly wound and bad-tempered in Toronto, relaxed (or relatively relaxed) and cheerful in Florida. Some reasons are obvious, some are not, and of course as always there's a lot (what's truest?) she doesn't know.

Let's see: her mother for sure is cheating on her third husband. Doesn't hate him, may even like him, certainly doesn't and never did love him, has no intention of divorcing him, calls him "convenient" or "a convenience", but she (Nicole) doesn't know what that means. Convenient because he lives in Toronto and the main office of most of her mother's business interests is in Toronto — so no avoiding Toronto entirely and that makes it "convenient" to stay married? On the other hand: she loves her life in Florida. She's outdoors, she's athletic, she's tanned and her new "little romance" (i.e. her young lover) is there and there's no question that he makes her happy.

There's one more wrinkle to the Toronto situation that Monica might find interesting: her mother's second husband (the only one she (Nicole) likes!) is back in the picture. What "back in the picture" means exactly is also, of course, hard to figure out. Mother's dropped a few hints about going into business with him again and she (Nicole) hoped that was code for something else, but then, when they were together and she was observing them closely for those tiny little signs that tell you everything, there was nothing there. There was something, but not what she'd hoped for. Childish disappointment, as usual. . . .

Let's see, Nicole says, there's something else. Didn't plan to talk about it, but now that it's crossed her mind she wants to make sure she gets it out before they find a reason to call her, the way they always do when they realize she's walked over to see Monica and David. It's a stupid thing, but she thinks she needs Monica's advice. Allison Savas has been hounding her forever to meet a friend of hers, "this incredible guy" who lives and works in Manhattan (as if that gives them an automatic bond because, naturally, they're the only two people who live and work in Manhattan!). He's wonderful and interesting for this reason and that reason. Kept after her and kept after her and she doesn't have to tell Monica that eventually she (Nicole) overcame her own experience and instincts and gave in. Didn't take ten minutes to find him ordinary and boring: an endless, pointless dinner, nothing in common, the nightmare date with no spark, no attraction, nothing. But apparently not the same for him. Never stops calling. Tries every way she knows how to discourage him, but can't. Even re-interprets her rudeness as some sort of reverse sign of interest. So maybe he's just dumb or maybe he has a screw loose, but either way she thinks (and this is one of the things she needs to know if Monica agrees about) that Allison was thinking about him, setting her up for him, not doing anything for her at all. His friend, not her friend. So now (and doesn't Monica agree about this too?) she has to rethink her relationship with Allison Savas (not that there ever was much of a relationship) or, really, and this is a little disturbing, has to rethink who Allison Savas is. Who exactly do they have in their midst?

What else? Madison Avenue guy (the too-well-groomed one with money) keeps calling her too. A story there, but no time to tell it and she thinks she may even have already told it. The only one who interests her at all right now is Alan, but of course he lives (and works) in D.C. She and Monica see each other so rarely and there are such long intervals in their conversations that she can't remember what she's already told her and what she hasn't. So it's up to Monica to stop her if she's starting to retell her stories . . . .

While Nicole is waiting to find out what Monica has to say, Fat Agnes, passing on the other (west) side of ABC Street, stops and waves. Seems to Monica that Fat Agnes is waving at Nicole, not her. Fat Agnes and Nicole Renard know each other! Fat Agnes is happy to see Nicole! These facts alone are stunning. Stunning revelations, but of what? What exactly? Simply that a link exists in Monica's local universe where she had no idea there was a link and would have, if she'd thought about it, assumed there would never be a link?

Link where there wasn't a link (shouldn't be a link?) re-aligns other, established links? Suggests the possible existence of other surprising (unthinkable?) links and alignments? Whole scheme of Monica's local universe unhinged in an instant, like a glance back across six or a dozen blackboards of dense equations that catches sight of a tiny but fatal miscalculation toward the beginning? Or is the unexpected, even the mistaken, an integral part of what should be expected. An asymmetrical universe, always tinkering with itself, full of links that shouldn't exist but do.

A discovery about the workings of the local universe doesn't have to be profound to be profound to Monica.

Not quite so stunning, but also slightly deranging: Fat Agnes and Nicole Renard are chatting about someone they both know, but Monica doesn't know, named "Joanie". Therefore there's someone in Monica's local image world, someone on ABC Street, that she never noticed or even heard of, who others she does know know well enough to be chatting about. For her part Nicole seems surprised that Fat Agnes knows (and she doesn't) that "Joanie" was on ABC Street "yesterday or the day before" and also that she's "no longer married" and working "at St. Vincent's in Manhattan".

Nicole says that she'd love to stop in and say hi to Joanie, but she never heard of "St. Vincent's". Assumes it's a hospital, of course, but where? In Manhattan? Is she out of it if she doesn't know. . . ? "How can that be?" Fat Agnes says (rasping harshness muted because she likes Nicole?). Stupid hospital's on 14th Street between (according to Joanie) 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue and even she (Agnes) knows that that's Greenwich Village or some stupid place like that and — is she wrong? — doesn't Nicole live down around the Village too?

"I'm at 5th Avenue and 11th ", Nicole says, laughing at herself. "And I never heard of it!? How's that possible?"

Monica's not sure that she hears Fat Agnes say, with more warmth than Monica would have believed Fat Agnes had in her: "why should a beautiful young girl like you give a shit about some stupid hospital — even if the ugly thing's right across the street from you!"

While Nicole Renard and Fat Agnes are going back and forth about "St. Vincent's" and "Joanie" Monica can't help being distracted by the odd link she thinks "St. Vincent's" is going to make, when she has a chance to chronicle it, with Ambrose Lenehan's broken jaw and busted nose, wired and reconstructed there after he got into an argument with some guy in Slattery's and was beaten and stomped badly by the guy's buddies on the sidewalk right outside the door while the skinny bartender, supposed to be a friend of Ambrose's, and all Ambrose's other pals stood there and did nothing.

Can't be while she's thinking about the future link she's going to make between St. Vincent's and Ambrose Lenehan, and therefore half listening/half-talking-to Nicole Renard and Fat Agnes, that Laurel Lenehan passes, pausing for only a minute to apologize to Monica (as if Monica would know) for being drunk. "Only slightly drunk", she says, "on Seagram's". (As if that's not exactly drinking.) But, if she'd known she was going to run into Monica. . . .

On the other hand, she knows that there are a lot of things Monica wouldn't do herself that she doesn't judge her for doing. . . . Is she wrong? She'd like to tell Monica the whole story behind her drinking, but it's too long a story and not all that interesting. Not her usual thing, as Monica knows, but she has her reasons (does Monica already know her reasons?). Seems like a reasonable explanation to her, but probably sounds stupid to Monica, that there'll be a lot of drinking later down at Paddy's Wagon. They'll all be there and they'll all be drinking. So this drink will drown in that drink? Laughs at herself while she continues on down the street. . . .

"Paddy's Wagon" sets Monica remembering (and wondering if she's remembering accurately) something chronicled only weeks ago and already forgotten: "Paddy's Wagon" is the place Philip Corcoran took Pat Corcoran for her birthday. Not clear in Monica's memory (therefore not clear in her notes?) whether Philip took his mother to Paddy's Wagon for drinks and snacks because they had to be in that part of the neighborhood to fix something in their bungalow or because, of all the bars in the neighborhood, Paddy's is the only one that's right in the middle of the enormous local amusement park.

"Out of body" memories-about-memories brushed aside by old Rae Ryan's voice singing out from the handsome porch of the Regans' spotless seaside three story white shingle (where old Rae Ryan has a narrow little groundfloor rear studio) diagonally west and south (left) at no more than a 25^o angle.

"I'm up here!", as if she's invisible to a woman (age not noted) passing in a straw hat. "Oh! oh it's you, Mrs. O'Connor!" Woman passing in straw hat must have said something inaudible to Monica but profoundly reassuring to old Rae Ryan, giving her reason to believe that she's still visible. "Well, that's very nice of you! Thank you very much, Mrs. O'Connor, I'm feeling fine. I look at it this way: even if my hips lock up, I'm still alive. And I thank my lucky stars that I ended up living in a house with such good people."

Out of order, but will have to be re-assembled by someone else/some other time. Nicole Renard says that right now (can Monica tell?) she has a terrible cold (even her glands are swollen) and that reminds her (doesn't Monica remember?) that last time she was out —last time they were able to see each other — it was Monica who had a terrible cold, but Monica's terrible cold expressed itself as laryngitis — so, in the short amount of time they had together, they had trouble talking. . . .

Also out of order (happened "earlier" but noted only now: short term memory passing as direct observation or scribbled, marginal notes discovered only now or direct observation therefore without memory, unmoored in time): Artie Tilden's thin and pretty girlfriend/fiancé Anne Marie is headed off toward the intersection with Coast Boulevard where she'll need to make a sharp right turn toward AAF Street, pulling a nice new shopping cart (without a spot of rust or corrosion or a bent or detached rod or wobbly wheel like 99% of all shopping carts loaded or not-yet-loaded with groceries or laundry being dragged from or bouncing toward AAF Street, one of two local north <—> south shopping streets or beyond AAF Street to the supermarket in the isolated zone of gas and auto plazas on Bay Drive) bulging with Artie Tilden's laundry, pretty much at the same instant Allison Savas is unloading laundry (hers and Jacky's) from her old car (name, year and model not noted) in the cracked and weedy driveway right below the corner of the porch where Monica's trying to write half-hidden.

Returning from a long walk together around the neighborhood David remarks to Monica that he noticed something he'd never noticed before, but which may be obvious to her or to anyone who pays attention to such things: no matter what color a rose is before it opens there are always some traces of red in the outer petals when they start to spread. On their walk they saw red roses, white roses and yellow roses and after a while he started to notice that even the yellowest yellow rose had traces, sometimes splashes, of red in the largest, open outer petals. . . .

1. Sunlight burning through breezes makes the long path of the street (arrow of time straight through you to or from the sun) impossible to look at. Still molten caramel glaze just hardening: sticks to the eye that touches it and burns it shut. Look where then? At petals pulled apart by force of light (light as a force and not the effect or shadow of something else) deeply absorbed, deeply saturated and pooling there in red? in yellow?

2. Intensity of yellow in roses reminds you of the sunlight focused and burning on your skin.

3. Some sunlight burning in red and yellow (and in red in yellow) on the long path of the street shot toward the sun burns up there in long coils of skywriting quickly combed out into something furry and oddly tarnished yet opalescent.

4. Eye occasionally travels upward from saturated red, yellow, white of roses to the darkness of the dark green tree canopy where what's cool and what's burning are parcelled out into sections along with light and dark: dark as pine, dark as the seldom-seen nocturnal reptile and in some parcels light enough for breezes to pass through.

5. Monica notes (on June 4?) that there are "fat green rosebuds everywhere", but doesn't say anything about seeing any red in them.

Lena Coffin's voice (words not noted) calling out and drifting down from Lena-and-Greg's vast raft-like second story porch out over ABC Street to Babette Coffin on the sidewalk looking up (what she's said/is saying to Lena "now" also not noted) prompts Monica to follow Babette's gaze and see Lena bending a little over the unpainted railing in a washed-out terry cloth robe whose blue is light enough to look pale against the sky's pale and scumbled blue.

Also visible on Lena-and-Greg's second story porch: Nadja's beautifully tanned and pliant skin in little orange bikini, stretched out in a lazy horizontal on a cheap, armless plastic basketweave and oxidized aluminum tube beach chair made to fold open low and flat for sunbathing. Nadja is partially blocked by Lena's faded blue robe.

Bright, synthetic orange of bikini.

Darker orange of small chinaberry bush (berries, just popped out of green, hold the fire of their electrons close to their skin instead of wasting energy on radiance).

Looking the other way (north): Monica's squat landlady is in the foreground of her little brick porch square next door, standing on a small stepladder, hanging a green roll-down sunshade from their permanent awning (without looking at it directly, Monica remembers it as an ugly off-white plastic with picket-shaped slats, but actual color, material and style not noted, therefore not "remembered").

Dark green sunshade being hung by Monica's squat landlady seems to have something to do with the dark green shadows in the hollows of the tall Rhinebeck pine and green shadows cast by the Rhinebeck pine.

"Pale green background" of what?

Monica wonders if her quickly sketched, hard-to-read notes really say something about "the green of the evening sun": green sun that lost itself yesterday in the infinite hollows of the pine's massive wingspan of matted needle-pads and layered branches.

Guy whose Chronicle-name is "Themis' Replacement" (for the obvious reason that he's living in Themis' small, second floor rear apartment, may also work in the kitchen of the Cornucopia Diner, may keep similar ungodly hours and even have some similar habits), but who seems to be stupider and/or angrier than Themis because Themis never knocked on Al Szarka's door to complain about Al's occasional late-night guitar-playing.

"It'd be annoying enough if you actually knew how to play. . . !"

Al Szarka slammed the door in Themis' replacement's face with a "fuck you!" and now he's playing late-night guitar ten times more and a hundred times louder than he did before.

Not noted how Monica knows that Joshua Coffin slept at Riley Liman's house last night and that Riley Liman is eating at Joshua's tonight. She reasons (when typing her handwritten notes?) that the information must have come from Riley because she also knows-without-knowing-how-she-knows-it that Riley's mother Audrey just left for a vacation to Spain.

On Saturday June 5 (at what hour exactly not noted) Monica (walking west on Coast Boulevard) thinks she sees (but can't make sense of it later) "fuzzy green peaches" in the soft green glow of a fading twilight that has something oddly radiant in it. A little closer on Coast Boulevard and it's less certain that the pale green shapes — hard and round yet fuzzy, embedded in green leaves in green light — are peaches.

At around 11 a.m. on Saturday June 6 it's hard for Monica to feel that she's on ABC Street in the attic apartment of a massive multiple dwelling, in her quiet red room facing south over one broad slope of Lena-and-Greg's sprawling orange tile roof and west toward near-distant facades and scrappy, half-paved back lawns of multiple dwellings on ABB Street. Nonstop rain on roof and windows (multiplied by sound like columns of integers (1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 +1 + 1 + 1
etc., etc,. for example) stacking, linking, pooling, telescoping, branching, replicating in every direction) is tropical, not northeastern: makes jungles spring up in minutes. And, lying on her back on Wanda Baer's hardly-used, left-behind mattress, Monica finds herself looking up at what seems to her a suddenly-sprouted jungle growth of dark green avocado leaves from one or two of the home-grown avocado plants that Lowell's given her.

Also in the red room?: lavender hydrangeas from the landlady's lawn (snipped secretly by David): not fully bloomed, so a wash of young green throughout the flush of lavender.

What else on June 6?

Sunlight cuts a clearing through stiff froth of white clouds straight down to Earth like a straw forced down to the bottom of an ice cream soda. Warms the eye with cold light. Wind springs up in the chilly warmth of this clearing: blows clouds apart from their original grandeur and density into individual puffs and, correspondingly on Earth (on ABC Street), roses (white and silky-smooth as what? what exactly?) can hardly hold on to their petals.

Later in the afternoon sunlight warms up (not only to the eye) and even gets a little fading melancholy orange of late afternoon into it. Uselessly falls on Andy Forest's car (what color?) and attached "U-Haul" trailer backing quickly out of the Coffins' driveway and swinging quickly north on ABC Street toward Coast Boulevard and beyond. Greg Coffin, Andy Forest and Leo Romero are having fun making noise as they pull away.

At the same hour or even later in the afternoon the same fading orange falls on the peculiarly dark red brick of the Greengrasses' tight little fortress and smell of sun on brick, smell of after-rain in air and on sidewalk sourly cutting through freshness of washed air, smell of leaves drying out in warm sun, sparkle of all objects that have any possibility of sparkling: all seem to confirm the fact of Enos Greengrass' death in May.

June 7 is finally a day in June that feels like a day in June. For example: while walking around the neighborhood trying to commit a superficial catalogue of roses to memory, Monica makes a mental note that for the first time cool breezes (which may or may not be ocean breezes) have an inside to them and that that inside is warm. Superficial chill easily gives way to interior warmth impatient to blow out through it and start the season.

Clouds are soft and easily pulled apart, with no more resistance than a dinner roll.

Sun shines through at once and warmth from sun, happily absorbed into the interior of any surface it falls on, may have something to do with the unexpected heat —similar to the heat radiating from the hood of a car that's been idling too long — but Monica doesn't think so.

Overheated engine of onrushing summer burning through fragile coolness is fragrant with grass and flowers as if the whole outer world about to bloom is already fully developed within and only choosing this instant to flow out as an exterior landscape of lawns, houses and sidewalks. Asks herself if it makes sense to force the structures of complete sentences onto fleeting experiences that may not even have a sentence-length of existence among them. Therefore decides on the spur of the moment to make a sketchy catalogue of colors of roses and a few other flowers and colors of other creatures or objects on June 7, 1976:

1. Fragrance of flowers because of

2. red and yellow roses and possibly because of

3. lavender hydrangeas, though not noted whether there's the aroma of lavender in warm June air apart from possible

4. aroma of hydrangeas, if hydrangeas have any aroma at all apart from

5. spicy green of hydrangea leaves (hard to distinguish from green leaves of trees or densely woven green leaves of hedges necessary to make

6. blood red blot of cardinal stand out as if popping off the page, first in tree, then briefly in air, then in hedge on the same side of the street — (but cardinal near or not-near hedge not noted))

7. sweet potato orange bar/cobalt bar/orange bar/cobalt bar/ etc. etc. repeated how many times of one or more thick cotton bath towel/towels submerged yet somehow visible in darkness-in-darkness in Rosenwassers' north-facing second floor picture window between 25^o and 45^o southwest and across the way from the southwestern corner of the porch where Monica is writing

8. Yellow roses on what lawn on what street that have a peculiar amount of pink in them

9. A solitary coral rose: not exactly coral pink and not exactly coral red, but — if it's accurate to say such a thing — a pure coral there's no truthful analogy for (Monica experiments with "cinnabar" and "salmon" in her mind, but isn't satisfied and dismisses them)

10. Same or different cardinal now looks to Monica (because of solitary coral rose?) more coral than blood red, though that makes no sense, unless it isn't a cardinal at all but some other unfamiliar bird it would take David time to research.

Not noted whether this June day turns into another June day when Monica's little catalogue of colors ends or if it continues, but as if the sentence and its little illusion of coherence has been broken and started up again on another track.

Let's see: Planetarium-dome-headed little Rosamond Coffin is wandering around one of the wings of Lena-and-Greg's flat and barren front lawn following an eccentric, looping path, as if she’s her own dog sniffing out traces of something alive only for her/him/it or searching in dried, pebbly mud and sparse and clumped-up grass for the thousand mini-crumbs falling from the sweet crackers round, Rosamond's self’s stuffing by the fistful into her mouth as she wanders.

This too: Yvonne Wilding, dressed as if against a cold ocean wind in heavy sweater and/or jacket (color, material, pattern, texture of jacket and/or sweater not noted) slouches up front stairs and through front porch entry door and surprisingly quickly is out again dressed for a different season in white t-shirt and cut-off dungaree shorts, eating a thick, dripping wedge of watermelon.

Ping-pong in the enclosed downstairs front porch next door (as usual) at 5:30 p.m.: spastic rhythm of violent eggshell tok-toking and sharp knocking of solid abruptly smacking hollow arrives at a different rate and from a different distance and angle but pretty much at the same instant as the sensation of sharply cooler air on skin of face and forearm and aroma of smoking charcoal and charring meat in brain: meat smoke and wood smoke as far apart as belly and soul, but braided together by deep penetration of smoke into self-and-selves so that soul is drooling while belly is filled with longing. Arriving from how many porches and yards? Very certainly and clearly from a porch where a family Monica doesn't know is always barbecuing (breakfast, lunch, dinner, late night snack and what else?) on the next block east (ABD Street) and from how many other streets within what radius exactly.

Tok-toking/cool or cooler air on cheek and forearm/complex, braided barbecue aroma — the atomized animal perfume of rendering fat flaming up in fire — fragrant and burning.

It can't be (Monica argues against what she really thinks) Fionnuala Regan — walking toward home from Coast Boulevard (heading south ←) and pushing the handsome, darkest dark blue baby carriage with blond little Matthew sitting straight up in soft cardinal red shirt, little Becky holding on to the carriage and trying to keep up with Fionnuala, who isn't paying attention to her because she's waving hello to old Rae Ryan, sitting without rocking, as usual, on the Regans' front porch — who calls out: "doesn't the world look incredible today, Mrs. Ryan?!" And it's even more unlikely that old Rae Ryan in royal blue as always would allow herself to answer, even to herself, "well, yes, Fionnuala, but I'm over eighty years old and you're twenty-six and you're strolling home to your parents' house with your son and daughter while I'm sitting here alone and considering myself lucky and happy enough if someone I hardly know from the block or from the neighborhood stops to pass the time of day before I go in to my tiny studio at the groundfloor rear of your parents' house, Fionnuala! to spend the rest of the night doing what? So the world probably looks a little more incredible to you than it does to me, Fionnuala. Or I can look at it exactly the opposite way: it's because the world looks 'incredible' that sitting here as long as I have, rocking or not rocking, is fatal. Sooner or later you're bound to wear a hole in it. Wear a hole in it, Fionnuala, and then you're nothing but a coin that's eaten its way through the lining at the bottom of a handbag. It's disgusting down there, but you make a life for yourself with the unhappy hairpins, the melted sucking candy that long ago became a part of the fabric, the bits of wrapper, gum sticks and the beautiful lipstick that's been missing so long you've stopped searching for it. . . ."

If the next date Monica sees (glancing ahead through folded sheets of lavender scrap paper notes) is "June 8" does that necessarily mean that the undated notes she's transcribing (editing) "now" were written on June 7?

Let's see: at 7 p.m., in late but warm and golden sunlight on an undated day in early June, when Monica is sitting on the front porch steps, leaning against one of the two low, shingled walls (the lefthand (southern) one) that flank and frame the porch steps, writing about the harsh winter of '76/'77 ("coldest winter in fifty-nine years" (therefore coldest winter since 1917/18?)/snow after snow, each layer squashed down and frozen by pressure from layers above it, and, after how many days and layers, sky also seems to have its weight, its pressure and its accumulation of dirty layers and all of it, continuous from sky to ground, welded into one frozen, soiled mass by 30-40 mile-an-hour winds dropping temperature on skin and on skin of snow-and-sky-mass down to 25 below. . . .), a man described in Monica's notes only as "a man in muddy blue 'B. F. Goodrich' garage uniform" walks through Monica's winter-in-June notes by introducing himself as "Mr. Szarka" and asking if Monica knows if his son Albert is home. Monica notes that it's the first time she's met or laid eyes on Al Szarka's father, but still something keeps her from recording any details of his appearance other than his uniform. Also notes that Yvonne Wilding appears in time to answer Mr. Szarka's question — as if she'd been watching for him from one of her second floor front windows — and that she seems to have nothing to say to him.

Impossible to know if Yvonne Wilding appears indifferent, bored and flat because she wants to signal dislike and may very well have good reason to dislike Al Szarka's family or if she's indifferent, bored and flat because she's depressed as usual, in her particular spiritually slouching, ambling way.

Yvonne says that Al isn't home and the father turns and leaves with nothing else said.

On the same undated June day (or on an undated day soon after) an un-named blonde young woman in jeans and high heels exits through the front porch door, crosses the front porch/bounds down the steps noisily, pausing only near the front door to drop a little envelope (Monica doesn't explain how she's able to note that the envelope has the name "Silvio" inked on it) into the deep communal mailbox. Makes a dull, metallic clank (sound of keys on a key ring softened only by the thin padding of an ordinary envelope). Quickly down the stairs and into a little car (color, make and model annoyingly not noted) impatiently away from the curb in a jerky way and at the intersection with the Boulevard in one violent motion.

Not noted if on the same early June day and whether continuous or not with what was written immediately before and not noted either which familiar ABC Street child's voice Monica hears calling out with medium-but-urgent volume:

"Johanna's sister!

"I say: "Johanna's sister!"

"I didn't know Johanna had a sista!"

"Oh yes.

"Johanna's sister, Rosamond."

"Johanna's sista, 'Rosamond '?"

"Yes.

"Sister Rosamond."

"But how can that be?

"I didn't know — in the first place — that Johanna had a sista.

"And I sure as hell didn't know she had a sista 'Rosamond '! I never even knew there was a name like 'Rosamond'!"

"Well, now you know and now you learned something new and every new thing you know changes every other thing you ever knew before."

Let's see: what else happens (if "happens" is the right word for what happens) for what's left of the day, which, Monica figures, may be June 7 (next date she sees, leafing ahead through folded sheets of hastily and densely scribbled lavender scrap paper, is "June 8").

Sun, unusually strong all day, is setting "with burning strength" and the endpoints of this burning strength (drawn back into themselves like infinite quiver after quiver of yellow → yellow/orange arrows as sun goes down) appear in two places that catch Monica's attention.

Burning yellow line (arrow whose force helped it escape outward and carry into this room — this room only — on ABC Street) that until that second was a strip of white molding in Lena-and-Greg's downstairs front ping-pong room next door.

Odd pink (pink-yellow? pink-orange?) light on ancient pebbled green-grey shingling (what roof of what house not noted) and a solid bar of this odd pink-yellow/pink-orange replacing the white railing where Monica is sitting and trying to keep up with the quiet, horizontal explosions of sunlight fading from her tiny shaft of the universe that might as well be the whole universe.

Pat Corcoran walks through it, as always, and has at least three things she feels she absolutely has to say:

She gets $93 phone bills! Some of it is because Allison has to call her mother so often. Has to call her mother because her mother never calls her. Mother could call easily (she's a super in the Bronx and she (Pat) knows, because she used to be a super in the Bronx herself, that they give you a phone, three phones, so you can do your stupid job!), but she doesn't.

Another ridiculous expense: John Corcoran's appetite! He's not thin but certainly not fat either — and you'd never know that he stuffs huge quantities of food into his stupid face as if he's afraid she's going to grab his plate off the table!

Notes say she has one more thing she has to say, but either Monica finds it boring or just forgets to write it down.

After Pat Corcoran goes back through the Corcorans' porch door in the south/southeast corner of the porch Monica can hear the irregular tok-toking of ping-pong being played next door and darting and zzz-zzz-ing of insects around and into the layered green darkness, the unexplored world, known only to insects, of the tall Rhinebeck pine.

More roses in June (noted on Thursday, June 8): a bush of yellow roses on Coast Boulevard, between what cross-streets not noted, but Monica does note that the yellow roses are so pale they might as well be white and also have features that may not be unusual but seem unusual to Monica in her ignorance of roses, such as beautiful lavender staining and streaking through the white end of the yellow spectrum. Only where yellow acquires a layer of more saturated yellow to make a true yellow (Monica notes) does she find a stabbed spot of deepest crimson buried in yellow as a weird purple.

Monica speculates that it's the heat that's opened all the unbudded buds and also notes (without making clear how she could have such a panoramic perspective) the uncommon "softness" of this June's — and this June's only — rose petals.

Artie Tilden — small, tired eyes in a small, white face drawn smaller and tighter by the tightness of the cinching of the band holding his long red ponytail, as always — eases out of doors from a drugged slumber, half-sits on the thick porch railing and starts crabbing to Monica about what? Not noted clearly, but unclear notes go like this: "Who invented lawns?! What's the story with all this lawn grass and all this obsessive mowing? Even stupider, why is everybody so in love with roses!?" Not just on ABC Street — on every stupid block in this neighborhood and probably every stupid neighborhood in the United States — you can't walk two feet without stubbing your toe on a rose bush! Monica must see these local gardening crews — not just this "Ianni" character whose trucks are all over the place, but every single one of them! They all do exactly the same thing! Where did they all learn it? Rose bush, azalea bush, rhododendron bush, rose bush, azalea bush, rhododendron bush. . . . It drives him looney. Same patterns and arrangements again and again and again. Lawn square slopes up to block of color against the brick. Is that the way he's headed? Isn't he allowing his own life to become just as boring and predictable? Headed toward his own lawn square? His own row of azalea bushes? Tries to talk to Anne Marie about it, but she's not interested. "Just because it's nature doesn't mean it's natural." Looks at him as if he's crazy. "Nature in its natural state is a mess and we're meant to be messy too. . . ."

Artie's crabbing never ends and the more he crabs the redder his eyes are getting. Says the problem is that he can't sneeze just once: every sneeze opens the door to forty-nine more. Even the mist coming down the street from the ocean, he says — which you could find "beautiful" if you look at it a certain way (the way it makes everything seem as if you're imagining the street, not seeing it in your everyday way) — in the realest and simplest way is just another pain in the ass that makes him sneeze. Stupid mist-and-breezes blowing from the ocean through grass and roses: call it "nature", but might as well be a thousand sacks of chemical fertilizer, milled finer than cake flour, someone's ripping open and pouring into the wind at the end of the block.

What else is there for Artie Tilden to crab about? Let's see.

Laid off again (would "furloughed" be more accurate?) for the rest of the week. Can only happen in the U.S. Postal Service, but no need to go into the idiocy — all the minute idiocies that all add up to the epic idiocy — of the PO.

Left with nothing to do and no money to do even that nothing with. That's the real reason (not the lie he told Monica the other day) he couldn't accept delivery of the stupid couch! So right now (with no money and nothing to do) he's pretty much spending his life on his motorcycle.

What else on June 7? Only this: writing on the porch while smoking one cigarette and then a second, fragrance of cigarette smoke doesn't keep her from paying attention to what's in front of her on ABC Street or what she's choosing to put on the page. Smoke is fragrant and pleasant, but as thin as tea vapors and blown away easily in the sub-tropical breezes that don't belong here in New York but nevertheless sometimes are here in summer as if Bermuda snapped off its roots and stem and is drifting somewhere off Sandy Hook. What does keep her from chronicling summer is her self like a finger deep in the thick green jam of it concentrated around her. Mashed paste of what leaves exactly? Ground up by what? Oily enough to paint with it. Little green saucepan on the stove keeps it warm and has a little spout so it can get poured straight into the brain where it pleasantly takes the place of writing. . . . Distant voices in the open air add to the summeriness of the moment, even if Monica thinks she's able to recognize one of them — from the beach? — as Jimmy X's always hoarse and wounded pleading (or is it "bleating"?).

A problem that's only a problem at the rare moments when Monica sees it as a problem: path of "red sun on June 8" is not necessarily chronicled in the order that it occurs, because Monica has to ask herself whether to be faithful to the order of chronicling (realism in relation to the act of writing) or faithful to the actual chronology of the red sun's progress.

As chronicled (with the thought that the orderly reader can always straighten out the disorder as she/he sees fit) Monica first records "red sun burning through cheap bamboo blinds at 8 (p.m. or a.m. not noted), but Monica does note that first, interior view of red sun — stepping into green front studio — is of red sun burning through darkest dark green of Lowell's winding and curling avocado stems and leaves and then through dense and broken rods of bamboo blinds.

Only then notes first sighting of red sun "from the boardwalk" as a blinding line of light straight from five, seven or all nine panes of glass in one of her own third story attic west-facing casement windows cranked open at an angle that beams light directly into eyes gazing toward it from the boardwalk. Light beamed from small panes as red as if her enormous oak desk/breakfast table and all the papers on it are on fire. Another way: writing turned into red flames beamed as a line of blinding light right into eyes at a distance Monica would like to have measured.

Red fire aimed straight from her windows (and from no other windows along the length of the street) to her eyes makes Monica hurry home quickly.

Inside looking out: red sun (not as blinding or as blazing as it was from the boardwalk, sending out rays more round, contained and precisely cut out) through dark avocado leaves and imperfect bamboo rods, etc. and then, closer to the windows, a more diffuse red sun burning in (through) charcoal grey clouds smudged with whatever red breaks down into.

On June 9 David walks 1/3 of the length of ABC Street north, makes a right turn at the intersection with Coast Boulevard, continues six long avenue blocks east (some leafy and shaded, some bare and ugly) to AAF Street, right turn from Coast Boulevard a short distance — approximately 1/3 of the way south toward the ocean — sharp right turn into the famous Peninsula Bake Shop (eggy French crullers and cinnamon-sugar coated donut-type cruller twists and iced coffee instead of normal breakfast).

Hot summer day when even the thought of food adds to the weight of the day.

A little later Monica is alone in the cool circumference of the Rhinebeck pine. Whatever breezes may have been passing across the wide space of the porch and the open world implied beyond it seem to take pleasure in passing and circling within the little ellipse of shade where Monica is now, alone with her tall glass of creamy iced coffee, excellent Peninsula Bake Shop cruller and solitary cigarette, while David is back indoors as usual, laboring over and worrying about whatever he's writing at the moment in the isolation and silence he needs.

Sounds of ping-pong tournament continuing next door. Someone (identity not noted), conscious that Monica chronicles such things and wanting to help (to collaborate), lets Monica know that Wanda Baer is the only tenant not in the tournament (uncertain whether left out or refused). Let's see: Andy and Nadja (same "collaborator" says) are supposed to be playing, but aren't (reason not known): two un-named tenants appear to Monica only as shadows moving this way and that, jerky but athletic, in the half-light of Lena-and-Greg's enclosed first floor front porch ping-pong room.

Monica notes that Alyosha stops by on the way home from Brooklyn: says only that he had to go there for blood tests, but the streets were over-heated and the trip put him in a bad mood. Should have said no. Probably be better off if he always said no, no matter what the doctors order or Betty wants. He sees that Monica is working and waits patiently in a rocker on the other (northwest facing) side of the porch until she's free to talk.

Later (after Alyosha's left) Monica notes that the curtains to the next-door ping-pong room have been pulled closed and there are no moving shadows and no tok-toking.

Also on June 9: Monica starts to count roses and cars seen within a span of time not noted and also not noted from what perspective — that is, within what visual limits exactly, though she assumes later (when editing her handwritten notes) that she chronicled only the roses and cars that could be seen from her usual chronicling position in the southwest corner of the porch on June 9.

Starts to count roses and, out of all the roses she can see (most of them red roses, of course) she counts only 24, 25, 28, 29, thirty that are yellow.

All at once or separated by what horizontal increments, like the 1/16 or 1/32 inch markings on a yardstick:

Yvonne Wilding passes in shiny one piece silver-blue bathing suit, blue towel around neck, pausing only long enough to ask Monica if she's seen a Saks truck. Or, if she hasn't seen a Saks truck yet, could she keep — would she mind keeping? — her eyes out for one 'cause she's expecting delivery of a new bed. And oh yeh (as she's going down the steps, eager to get to the beach) if it's not too much of a pain, could Monica tell the Saks guy that she just ran over to the beach for a quick swim and she'll be back in a few minutes. Gone before Monica can answer yes or no.

Tall and muscular Andy Forest behind the wheel, taller or slightly-less-tall, slender and elegant Greg Coffin beside him, both heads coming close to touching the unpadded roof of the old and faded one, two or one-and-a-half tone blue Chevy, backs quickly out of the driveway and wheels sharply away north → toward Coast Boulevard and beyond.

Nadja and Andy in their shaded monochrome olive green VW follow soon after. Notes mention "another couple", Lena-and-Greg's tenants, but are ambiguous on this point: un-named couple seem to drive off in the back seat of Nadja-and-Andy's olive green VW, but notes also talk about a tenant following "in a white car". Same tenant or a different one? Solitary tenant or multiple tenants? And no one identified.

Another tenant (Melissa's husband, short and bubble-haired Ralph Aiello) zips northward in his not-too-shabby red Volvo, trying to catch up to the others, as usual.

Red

White

Olive green

Blue (how many shades and what blue exactly) not noted.

Chevy

VW

Unidentified make (or known but not noted).

Jump backward in reverse, quick, sharp turn → north, then another fast, violent turn ↰ west at the intersection with Coast Boulevard.

While Monica is trying to figure out if she spotted Lena's curly hair around the wan oval of her once-plum-like face in any one of the cars passing right below her, someone calls out: "Aren't you coming? Not now? No? And not later either? Not going to the Fair at all?" Someone may add something about the Fair being in the municipal park at or toward the western tip of the peninsula. And the same voice or another strangely similar voice may add that, because everyone's going, Monica more than anyone needs to be there. . . . And someone with a deeper, rougher voice adds: because at least that way there'll be some hope that some day someone will have a clue that they all existed.

But Monica doesn't go and knows that only the Chronicle knows what it does and doesn't need to do.

Let's see: Yvonne Wilding returns from the beach looking awful. Swimming didn't lighten her mood, it depressed her, no real idea why. Could it be because it's a stupid waste of time? Back and forth like a fuckn moron. Once upon a time when you jumped into the water it was like splitting your stupid skull open and pouring in a cold new brain, but this is not — repeat, this is not — "once upon a time". Why'z everyone so nuts about the beach? Does Monica know? Could it be that everyone's a liar and they're all able t'do the same stupid boring thing over an' over an' over as if they never did it before? Or they're just so brain-dead they can't remember the two billion times they did it before. . . .

Yvonne isn't done complaining. She knows there's more to complain about, but doesn't know exactly what and intends to find out by complaining. Can't believe — no, she'll go further — she's disgusted by the fact that the stupid Saks truck never came. "Get'n a new bed — so I guess that's our way of lettin' ourselves know that we're not goin' anywhere", she jokes sourly, as if she wants Monica to know that she knows herself what her life must look like. Tone also says: "It stinks, but it doesn't matter."

Now or earlier: Monica notes that "a worker " (working for whom?) carelessly yanks a rope across someone's garden and, trying to jerk it free from wherever it's stuck and not caring how, pulls it right through the center of the only rose bush with yellow roses. Most of the yellow roses get mutilated, some of them ripped in half and their yellow petals shredded and scattered all over the grass and front walk of which ABC Street house not noted.

Nora Lenehan passes, ageless strawberry blonde, waving hello, pink-cheeked and laughing with private pleasure as if joking at someone's expense, while at the same time deeply engaged in superficial story-telling with Kate Crosley, downtrodden but happy to be downtrodden? Can "happy" be the right word, Monica asks herself while writing quickly, for a peculiar pert perkiness and light, fast-moving feet in pink sneakers of an oddly elfin, no-longer-young woman with a strange and brutal husband?

Alyosha stops by around three p.m. after Monica (deceived by ocean breezes?) took an uncomfortable walk around the neighborhood in hot sun. Has a tiny fragment of a story he needs to tell Monica for her Chronicle: not here on ABC Street, but on some other sidestreet in the neighborhood where he had a little job to do for a friend — can't remember exactly where — he saw the two weird men Monica calls "the twins", even though they don't look like each other at all. This is the way he'd sum them up if someone asked him and he wonders if Monica sees them the same way: "one is always carrying the package and the other one does all the talking!" The "package" is sometimes a big, sloppy mass of loose brown paper tied with string, sometimes it's just an old messy bag and one day he (Alyosha) would love to see what's in one of those ugly "packages". . . !

Alyosha's fragment of a story reminds Monica that she saw the Twins herself this morning at 7 a.m., in the brightest instant of the summer's day's brightness, looking down by chance through the green studio's cheap bamboo blinds and feeling surprisingly pleasant breezes, cool and flowing over her skin like water, making their way with difficulty through the matrix of dense but broken rods.

All Monica sees is this: slightly taller twin who does most or all of the talking overdressed in 90^o heat in an old and too-long black raincoat, smudged and chalky as a blackboard, and the other, shorter and silently grumbling twin in a hideous gold corduroy sports jacket, cut in the style of another era, threadbare but not torn or filthy, and a sunbather's wide straw hat with a few good bites out of its unraveling brim.

Seem to be carrying nothing and saying nothing.

What else on June 9?

Yvonne Wilding returning (again?) from the beach in the same one piece silver-blue bathing suit: lazy strides and the usual bored and energy-less complaining (in this case to a male friend (appearance not noted) returning from the beach with her).

Pouchy-faced, seventy-ish Sylvia Greengrass is leaving her house in a thin and youthful summer print dress. Surprisingly red red lipstick is vivid even from across the way as Sylvia comes out her front door and down the brick steps of the brick mini-fortress and through the black iron gate in the black iron fence around the two barren wings of the front yard. A well-dressed man of a similar age is leaving with her, an oversized shopping bag stuffed with neatly folded clothing (Enos's'?) in either hand.

Tall and graceful Greg Coffin is cutting the grass of his front lawn. Monica tries to but can't remember ever seeing him mow the lawn before — yet there he is now, distractedly pushing an old lawnmower as if it matters to someone if he evens out the sparse grass on the two halves of his small ugly lawn. Monica doesn't know Greg Coffin well enough to know where he is really while he's forcing the antique mower through the lumpy ground.

Again the cool green fragrance of freshly cut grass, but (and Monica wonders why) the grass of Lena-and-Greg's lawn doesn't smell like dill or like cucumber, it smells like lime.

Monica overhears (neither trying to overhear nor trying to not overhear) Philip Corcoran pouring his troubles out to Al Szarka and to a woman whose voice she doesn’t recognize as they all fall out of an old car (make, model, color, etc. unrecorded) in front of the house. Drunk, near-drunk or something else Monica can't think of a name for. What's Philip's problem? "Believe it or not", he's wailing, "tonight is Prom night!" Prom night and he has no money! "Money for what?" the unknown woman asks, laughing to herself while egging Philip on to more wailing. "Are you kidding?" Money for flowers, of course! And money for food and money for the band and for booze. . . . "Haven't you guys ever been to a Prom?!" Answer is probably "no", but Al says "well, no money for booze is the only thing I can see mattering." Not too much fun on Prom night without some booze. . . .

Couple who pass from time to time, but with some regularity when together, at different hours when separate and presumably on their way to or from work (that is, to or from the subway station on AAF Street) and who Monica — because she's never met them and doesn't know their names or what their voices sound like —has named "Agnes" or "Gloria" and "Dave" (aka "the Clock" or "Clockface" for reasons she has a feeling she's already explained and doesn't feel like explaining again) are passing now and looking particularly awful. "Clockface", from across the way, appears dangerously thin, face ravaged and suffering — yet there he is, going to work, ever-present briefcase in hand.

Yvonne Wilding returns from the beach — again? Also looking awful.

Spylianos' (or "Steve"'s) surrogate lives in Spylianos' second floor rear apartment, may also work in the Cornucopia Dinner, seems to have some or many of Spylianos' habits and similar hours, leaving alone (at what hour of the early morning not noted). . . . Monica notes that he's been leaving alone for days or, more accurately, since he retrieved an envelope with a card and a clinking set of keys from the mailbox, left there by the blonde young woman in high heels and jeans who used to leave with him early every morning and who carried herself as if she saw herself in her mind's eye as attractive whether or not she actually was attractive —a distant attractive image-for-others no matter what.

Monica can't see Babette Coffin, but she can hear her distinctively accented voice (a voice that has thick caramel flowing through it, but also some pleasant grittiness, possibly from having stirred some ground pecans or walnuts into it) call out "Hi Daisy!" to beautiful and weightless Daisy Brennan skipping by alone, a transparent being drawn in water.

And then to whom?

"PEACHES"

"Peaches, yes — and TERRY CLOTH too!"

Monica assumes it's Lena Coffin answering, except the voice doesn't seem quite so plaintive or anxious and quavering as Lena's.

"YES — VERY LIKELY!" is the senseless reply that makes its own kind of sense.

Now Monica can see Babette for a fleeting instant, looking quite beautiful, quite Simone-Signoret-ish, in silverblue silk kerchief and pale coffee silk blouse.

On Thursday June 10 (at what hour of the day not noted) cool breezes cross the porch while down below, a distance of only a few feet in altitude, there's nothing stirring in hot sunlight. And in between, on the steps where Monica is working, hot sun is blinding off the page, though the skin in cool breezes doesn't know how hot it is.

Decision to work on the steps (as she knows very well) puts her in the path of all her fellow tenants passing up and down. Interjection of mini-conversations, story fragments that can never be pieced together into anything that can be called a story, etc., etc. of course break her concentration and poke holes in the fabric of whatever coherent narrative fragment she's chronicling, but these broken bits of accidental tales or not-even-tales — the irreparable tearing, erasure and shuffling of what she intended to be coherent — have over time turned out to be the natural fabric of the Chronicle.

The bright blue distance in the Rosenwassers' picture window has some strokes and splashes of a beautiful green in it (beautiful green of light on leaves/glowing green sunlight in leaves), odd streaks of rust, not-quite-green outline of green leaves against a few towels (white or rust or white with rust edges).

John Corcoran passes (heading down) and — almost always silent, so rare to hear his tenor voice coming from his sharp and ruddy, handsomely-weathered face — comments on the surprising coolness of the porch. Wishes he could sit himself down in one of these porch rockers, put his feet up, maybe even read a book, instead of heading into the middle of boiling Brooklyn — up on a pole all day and even closer to the sun! But he has to put in his time today, make sure he can get tomorrow off for Tim's sixth birthday. . . .

Anne Marie, in a fresh white uniform (nurse, doctor's-or-dentist's assistant or something else that requires a crisp white uniform not known or noted), is not as sharply visible as she should be standing in front of Monica, because she's framed against the whitest white fresh paint of the Sloth's house directly across the way. Not evenly fresh white because it's getting painted right now — under Mrs. Sloth's supervision — while Anne Marie pauses in front of Monica because she thinks she has something to say that might be the kind of story-like something she thinks that Monica likes to hear.

"I wish I didn't have to go to work today," she says, "so beautiful here on ABC Street I'd be happy just being here, doing nothing. . . ." That seems to be all Anne Marie has to say and she also seems to feel that that should be enough to = "a story". But she abruptly changes her mind as if something's made her aware that she told a story that doesn't quite make it to being a story and adds lamely that she said something similar to her boss the other day and her boss admitted that she has feelings like that all the time! And they agreed that everyone in the world could probably get the same amount of work done just working in the afternoon, stay home in the mornings and enjoy living. . . .

Anne Marie may still be there (Monica's notes aren't clear on this point) or may have left: if there, may still be talking or may shut up when Yvonne Wilding drags herself up the steps (shooting Monica a look about Anne Marie behind Anne Marie's back), headed for the mailbox, as usual. Takes out and examines the same letter from "Capital Adjustment Service Inc., One North Broadway, White Plains, New York" she's taken out, examined and put back three, four, half-a-dozen times before and now puts back again as if it's not addressed to her and someone else will take it.

Also on June 10: Monica's notes make reference (for the first time?) to fresh flowers "in the glass vase again". And again, a little later on June 10 and separated by notes about other events, Monica instructs herself to remember to keep paying attention to (to keep chronicling) the unchanging object ("the vase") and to the changing flowers in it and, at the same time or later (separated by notes about other events, etc.), says that she sees the task she's assigning herself (of paying attention to the changing flowers in the glass vase) as a new element in the Chronicle. Puzzles her a little later ("now") that she didn't bother to make it clear which glass vase she needs to pay attention to, unless she didn't bother because the only glass vase she owns at this moment is a smoky Czechoslovakian crystal one she's described in detail before.

Fresh flowers in the vase are open single, double or even triple roses despite the fact that roses in full bloom and unbloomed rosebuds are growing together in such tight clusters on every lawn on ABC Street and on every other street that Monica's passed on her frequent walks around the neighborhood that she can't imagine how David was able to disentangle the solitary or even double or triple stem roses in the glass vase from the tangled families of buds and 1/2-1/3-2/3 open roses they're embedded in.

Lon Gurion buttonholes Monica, appearing out of some invisible crease in space, as usual, for no other reason than to tell her that a friend in Manhattan called to tell him that it's in the nineties there and for some reason feels even hotter than that and it's unbearable. So, if she's planning to go. . . .

Red roses replace wilted, browning and/or fading-to-colorless purple hydrangeas (from what lawns on what street?) in the glass vase.

Working on the front porch steps (back against the left-hand of the two framing buttresses, shingled and topped with 3/4" or inch thick white-painted rectangular boards, supporting long stone flower tubs with dry earth and no flowers) Monica knows from long experience that she's putting herself in the path of "Pat Corcoran" and every other Pat Corcoran, but also learned a long time ago to stop herself from seeing what wants to walk across the page and through her mind as it's working out its sentences as a blot on experience like a pillar you happen to get seated behind at a baseball game. Began to seem more interesting (and truthful about writing) to look at "Pat Corcoran" as an unfamiliar leaf that's dropped down onto her folded sheet of scrap paper from five or three streets away or an insect that's landed there to sun itself for 12 seconds or 7 minutes. More interesting and truthful, she decided, to pay attention to the leaf or insect and sometimes even to make the effort to describe it in detail rather than brush it off so you can get back to work. . . .

Philip's prom was last night, Pat Corcoran says, at "The Terrace in the Park", and then Philip and his girlfriend and a bunch of other kids from the prom ended up at the Statue of Liberty of all places and god alone knows where else! Didn't get in till 9 a.m. and somehow has to get himself ready for work tonight, while his girlfriend and all the others are sleeping it off or watching tv. . . . Monica knows what a good-natured dope Philip is: never thinks of himself and has no mind of his own — all nice and tenderized, ready and waiting for some girl to sit down at the table. . . .

Red-faced John Corcoran, face sharper and leaner above no-longer-quite-muscular body, arrives with little blond-blond Timothy, both wrapped in thick beach towels (color not noted), Timothy shivering and chattering while John surprises Monica by stopping to talk.

This is the way he loves it, he says. Wouldn't want the ocean one degree warmer! Oh, he's not saying the ocean's not cold. It is — cold, cold, cold — but that's how he's always loved it. Needs to store it up. He's working the midnight shift the next five nights in Manhattan where the pavements are bubbling right now, so the only way he's gonna survive it is to get his bloodstream down to ocean temperature — fix it in his mind that he's filled with icy seawater and then turn himself into a thermos! Pat thinks he's nuts, but he really can do it!

Pat Corcoran says that John is nuts. Forget about thinking he's a thermos bottle: gotta be nuts to dive into the Atlantic before July. Monica's got the right idea: hot sun and ocean breeze right here on the porch. . . .

Red of red roses is different indoors from the red of red roses on lawns outdoors, but how exactly? Notes say that red is "deeper", but Monica knows while writing the word "deeper" that that doesn't account for the difference. She notes (at the same time or later) that the centers of the red roses in the glass vase (of any red rose indoors?) are more velvety to the eye and also — only if the mind allows itself to think it — almost black. Red of centers is still red, but a different red than the red-red of the other petals and absolutely different and far darker than the outdoor red of roses on ABC Street lawn after lawn. Does this fact (the darkening of red to almost black at the center (at the core?)) make roses the most mysterious of flowers despite being so popular the rose is more of a cliché than a flower? An idea, an intention, a symbol, even an ideal, not a thing with interesting flaws and variations to be examined closely.

Themis' replacement is also Greek and also (Monica believes) works in the kitchen of the Cornucopia Diner, but Monica knows enough to know that there are also differences, not enough to know exactly what the differences are. Wonders if a little catalogue will help: a) replacement is not as handsome or as polished and charming as Themis; b) replacement's girlfriend is blonde like Themis', but so good-looking even up close that Monica is tempted to write "beautiful", unlike Themis' whose good-looks only held together as an idea of good looks from a distance. Catalogue of similarities and differences must be much longer, but nothing else is noted here in Monica's hard-to-read handwritten notes, so she promises herself (while wondering if she'll remember to do it) to keep an eye out for others.

Pink roses and no other kind of roses in the wide driveway between the Garveys and the Rosenwasser/Arlingtons.

Since its first vaseful of forsythias "the glass vase" has been empty for how many days?

Date of first vaseful of forsythias already forgotten.

After forsythias, lilacs? (But how many vasefuls of lilacs?)

(Monica notes parenthetically that her decision on June 10 (first vaseful of roses) to pay attention to what is or isn't in the glass vase can only include what's already happened if she's willing to stop going forward — to resist the Chronicle's imperative of going forward — and spend time leafing backward through her notes. Therefore unlikely to happen?)

No matter what Monica wants, the Chronicle stalls (though the argument could be made, and could even be true, that whatever "stalls" the Chronicle is then the Chronicle as much as any forward-walking sketching of events as they occur and pass) because she stumbles on December '75 notes being typed and inserted into June '76. She toys with the idea of bypassing the inserted December notes, but hesitates because of some puzzling resonances.

For example: December '75 notes talk about "sunlight in 'the glass vase' " on her enormous oak desk/breakfast table in the green front (west facing) studio and — at least one of the casement windows cranked open with difficulty despite the fact that it's winter — fragrance of roses oddly flavoring the aromaless landscape of cold carried weakly inward.

Illusion that sunlight on roses (indoors on desk) is warm enough to melt snow.

"Leaves and rose petals floating on the bright surface tension of vase water" may be written on June 10 about June 10 or may be part of a December '75 sentence typed on June 10.

This too: sunlight on water and earthly-unearthly warming of cold air with its melting-ice-from-sodden-earth aroma through the open windows of Kitty's boardwalk apartment (in the ancient and crumbling yellow brick apartment building that's like a wall at the end of ABC Street that slices a deep shadow diagonally through Grete-and-Babette's mother/daughter right below it) give Monica an end-of-March sensation (everything indoors yearning to be outdoors and leaning so far out its own window it's about to fall out of itself). Monica's not sure — in notes hastily scribbled on two small sheets from a memo pad with Kitty's name printed at the top of every sheet — if the heady ambiguity of the day makes the stuffy dreariness of Kitty's apartment less bearable/more bearable than usual.

Let's see: what else is there to add to the uncertainty of when notes were written/when inserted (intercut) into other notes or typed sheets from other times.

A brief notation about Lowell and his car, also compressed into one of the small squares of Kitty's pharmaceutical company memo pad or at home later on a folded sheet of Monica's fibrous lavender or slick green-banded white scrap paper (long story of how Monica came by her endless supply of scrap paper of unusual sizes and colors won't be told here). Monica notes briefly that she's been driving around with Lowell in his ugly Chevy Nova — around the neighborhood and then out of the neighborhood (where, where exactly, not noted) to get something to eat and, surprisingly to Monica, not noted either one word of what they talked about.

Moon — oversized, white and hard — is trying to force its knucklebone through one of the busted gaps in the broken rods of Monica's cheap bamboo blinds.

Moon and blinds are to the left of the enormous oak desk-and-breakfast-table where still one more isolated red rose (unusually large or looks unusually large) has a weak presence in "the glass vase".

Harder and harder to unravel, but Monica thinks her scribbled notes — arrows leading from marginal inserts, overlay of darker on lighter pencil, etc. — legibly say "Dec. '75 being typed in June '76: another warm day in December: too warm, too moist equally on the boardwalk and in the green studio: one unbroken sensation through the whole neighborhood, inside and out". And: this is what the task and the pleasure of obsessive observation can be reduced to: paying attention to a new leaf unfurling on the bottom 1/3 of the long curved stem of the third avocado plant given to Monica by Lowell now, alongside the other two on her desk between the two west-facing casement windows of the green room studio.

Monica notes the slight dissonance when apparently simultaneous events don't align perfectly when listed vertically:

Blistering crackle (probably from one floor below) of food being fried in oil burning over a high flame.

Stench of what's being fried to a blackened crisp.

Sensation of a second or third hot breeze on the skin of at least one forearm.

Breeze from where? Doesn't seem to be arriving from the direction of the green studio's west-facing windows that catch breezes when one wing of the two panel casement is cranked open with the ancient and difficult crank, fully extended into (at right angles to) any breeze passing from ocean to the south or, other ½ cranked open instead, anything blowing from the north and across the ruffled bay. Seems to be coming up the stairs and down the hall to the green room door, from a direction no breeze should be coming from (same airstream carrying stench of scorched oil and food?).

Also not quite simultaneous: Yvonne Wilding complaining to Al Szarka in her bored way, "what fuckn edible food that used't'be, Al? Shit smells like y'r fuckn ass hair caught fire. . . !"

Al is offended and his voice is too clogged with fury for anything he says to be understood.

"Well, Al, you really like the way y'r shit stinks so much whyntcha see if a couple've beers help y' get it down while you watch tv in the bedroom. . . ."

Welcome coolness in the green room, as if lime green walls and dark green avocado plants really are [unreadably faint].

Velvet of roses so dark it's like the aromatic plush of old movie theater seats. Does not add to the green room's coolness, but rose aroma does give Monica a desire for David's French toast (saturated milk-and-egg interior, crisp, buttery surface) with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on it and Tiptree "Little Scarlet" strawberry jam on the side.

Roses, roses — roses on how many crowded, scribbled pages? Roses seem to travel through days and pages and even over seasons and Monica is getting tired of writing, then reading and re-reading about them in vases and on lawns, red, black-red or otherwise.

Earlier in the day (what day not noted) Monica decided that the hot pink roses on one of the lawns across the way smelled like cinnamon sugar and now indoors — later and with less sunlight — roses in her heavy Czechoslovakian glass vase are so dark and ripe — darkness seeping into their red from a mysterious center —that rose aroma becomes thick, sweet and chewy, a cherry-like fruit syrup the mind pours over what?

Ryan Lenehan stops to chat in June '76 about something that seems to have happened in December '75 (or this is one of the tangles created by December '75 notes being typed (edited) in June '76 that Monica doesn't feel like untangling). Ryan says that he meant to tell Monica before, because he knew it would interest her and can't explain why he didn't, but Carla Ray Carlson seems to be in a nursing home, if that's the right term for the final garbage truck to the morgue.

Monica didn't know her, of course, and all he really knows about her for sure is what he saw with his own eyes for the last few years, so the Carla Ray Carlson he knows is a fat woman who spent her days in bed with the tv on (for Monica's sake, wishes he'd paid attention to what she watched) smoking one cigarette after another, probably four, five packs by the time she conked out.

To have any real idea what Carla Ray Carlson's life was like before she landed here, Monica would probably have to squeeze it out of his Mom.

Pale blue sky of June.

Pale blue sky of a hot June day.

White clouds (still embedded?) in a pale and yielding blue that Monica hesitates before calling a "summer blue": blue of June-July-August only? Made pale and receptive by what? Yields even for the no-pressure of clouds that idle and dissolve there, no breeze in their sails.

Lena Coffin is crocheting with anxiety and purpose, not to pass a casual hour or to try and wind something out of herself. Monica doesn't remember (hadn't noted) how she knows this, but she knows that Lena and Grete have a plan to make and sell craft items in the vast parking lot of a municipal park at the far western end of the peninsula.

Hot sunlight around 5 p.m.: "floods the world" in how many directions and from what center that is not the sun?

There it is in the darkly radiating spindle of the Rhinebeck pine: Monica for once can't find refuge behind it: heat seems to have lodged in its dark core and even the light behind it — an oddly bright shadow — is just another name for heat. Conical tower may be the Rhinebeck pine or its anti-double: Monica would have to count the needles in each broad, shaggy pad of needles and then begin multiplying all the way up to the tip that just about touches the tip of the roof to have some idea of the number of units of heat and light that should be a source of coolness and shadow.

Flashes from the two curved surfaces of Greg Coffin's silvery royal blue aviator sunglasses all the way — in less than a light-second, if such a thing is possible — to the undersides of waves that are also glassy and curved and a silvery royal blue (or not exactly royal blue, but a blue that's an unnamable fizz of mineral blues unlikely to get captured in the glass of a pair of commercial sunglasses). Impossibly bright beams travel back and forth between source and target at a rate of speed that may diminish but not for an observer in Monica's position.

After a while Monica has to retreat indoors from it all.

"The unbearable amplitude of the day."

Monica's lost track of the date she's been chronicling or, more accurately, the date of the handwritten (scribbled, crowded, pencil-written and badly faded) Chronicle notes she's trying to put in order.

In her handwritten notes June 11 vanishes then reappears. At least one point on June 11 seems to change places with an instant on June 12 and days — Friday and Saturday, for example — seem to change places with one another as well. June doesn't seem perfectly stable or sequential, as if the plane of paper [to be filled in later]. . . .

Annie Rosenwasser (who married a Dane and now has a family with him in Copenhagen, physical description of any kind omitted, though on re-reading notes later (when?) Monica reminds herself that she's sure that Annie has a round, possibly freckled little face with cropped but flossy hair, like her mother's) is visiting her parents, Fred and Naomi, with her two children. Sons or daughters not noted: only noted that the oldest is 2 ½ and the youngest was born in December, '75 in Denmark. Annie's younger sister (name not noted) timed her break from medical school in Pennsylvania so she could visit at the same time.

Monica wonders in advance if more, equally shallow information will turn up on another page crowded with scribble — not really dislodged or mistakenly dug up by the roots and replanted in the wrong spot, just chronicled by convenience at the first opportunity with more urgent notes intervening, or if this empty note about the Rosenwassers and their visiting children and grandchildren (far emptier and less interesting than anything that might randomly be reflected in their big, side, north-facing picture window) is all there is. (Shallowness of notes as realistic and detailed a picture of the Rosenwassers as Monica is likely to sketch?)

"I just have to finish this!" Lena Coffin is saying while knitting, nervous about what? Talking to herself or to someone whose voice Monica doesn't hear (no other voice noted). "Why am I having so much trouble finishing it? It's not hard. It's easy. It's really only a matter of copying. . . . What happened to my brain? Once-upon-a-time I could have done this in three seconds. . . !"

A little later there's another woman's voice saying "Oh" with no inflection Monica can interpret.

"Oh. OK. Do you have the number?

"Do you know the number?

"Should I call for you?

"I could call for you if you like.

"No? Then when are you going to call? Now?"

"No, not now! What's got into you all of a sudden? Why are you nagging me like that? Have I lost my mind or is it you. . . ?"

Another woman's voice entirely.

"A nice place on the water and near the bridge. But is that the first bridge, the second, longer bridge or even the third bridge along the same road but further north. . . ?"

Notes clearly say "June 12", but is that just a different way of saying it's another day in June differentiated only by what Monica is about to chronicle?

When handwritten notes for "June 12" begin Daisy Brennan is asking her mother Margaret "Does that make you die?

"I mean, is that the secret thing that makes you die? Not a million things that make you die, but really only one — and it's a secret everyone is sworn to keep . . . ?

"If not for that, no one would ever die?

"Then I don't want to sleep anymore.

"I won't go to sleep anymore!"

No answer from Margaret recorded.

Not noted who comments on the exaggerated and luminous green of the waves today and then wonders (if out loud, to whom?) if the particular green of today's waves is just a matter of seaweed and then continues the argument with herself/himself, wondering how seaweed is a possible explanation when the green of the waves has a brilliant but scuffed and clouded kind of light in it — a green soda that sends the brain fizzing — not the sodden midnight green of seaweed. . . .

Someone else says not soda, but soup. The original green soup that sometimes appears. . . .

Yes, someone agrees, spinach or sorrel. . . .

. . . simmering forever with diced or quartered potato, chopped onion and chicken broth, salt and pepper of course. . . .

. . . but what other herbs and spices. . . ?

. . . you can't remember and neither can I. . .

. . . cream added later? and everything sautéed in butter, of course. . . .

. . . pureed in the blender. . . .

. . . or just mashed coarsely in the pot with the back of a strong serving spoon. . . ?

. . . well, even so, at some point it has to be pureed to blend the potato into your base. . . .

. . . and that's green enough to remind you of today's ocean. . . ?

. . . well, just add more sorrel or spinach then. . . .

Now notes clearly say "June 11" and Monica wonders if there'll be any evidence, as she keeps skipping ahead and editing, that will help her figure out if what seems "out-of-order" is just the end-product of a small, careless error in arithmetic or if all the hopscotching of days and dates is deliberate and meant to look careless and mistaken.

Lowell calls just after midnight (therefore on June 11 → 12) to tell Monica that he's rented an apartment near Mount Royal and that he thought it would be chilly in Montreal, but it isn't. Maybe not quite as hot as when he and Monica were walking along the shore trying to find a breeze and they did find a little breeze, but the heat of the day was visible in the water as a second or third yellow-orange sun burning in the waves. Made the ocean seem hot and uninviting . . . .

Let's see: white butterfly follows a path that Monica would love to diagram: an unpredictable connect-the-dots path through sun-in-spray as Lena Coffin is spraying her big black Newfoundland, Grendel, trying to cool her off.

Sun burns in thin screen of spray, in the darkest dark recesses of the pine tree and in the pine needles themselves, surprisingly more than in the yellow-orange of the roses, which are relatively cool to the remote touch of the eye, oddly similar in color to the yellow-orange burning in the waves, but closer to the temperature of a weird tropical fruit Italian ice than to the scalding sun flare in the water.

An unfamiliar old woman, overdressed in a heavy wool jacket despite the blinding heat of the August-in-June day, stops to chat with Lena while Lena continues to scrub, lather and wash off big black Newfoundland, Grendel, stoically allowing herself to be lathered, etc.

What the unfamiliar old woman has to say startles Lena a little.

Says she rents the same apartment every summer. She has all sorts of reasons for returning to the same not-so-beautiful apartment, of course, and some of her reasons make more sense than others, but the one reason that should interest Lena is probably her most compelling reason. "I've been watching you. Not really you so much as the children. You yourself are boring. You're nervous and you move around a lot — so much nervous, stupid movement between sink and stove/sink and stove/stove and sink/stove, sink, table and dish cabinet — a life of wasted, agitated seconds I already know and it bores me — but while you're doing all your boring nonsense I've been watching the children grow up. My kitchen window looks right down into the side window of the big front room studio where for some reason your husband practices his piano and you have your sink and your stove and your dish cabinets. . . .

"I love the little one with the round head and fat cheeks, but I'm not so in love with the other one. . . ."

"You don't like Jojo?"

Lena seems genuinely offended by that.

"Not the little girl. I've always liked the other little girl: not so sweet, but probably smarter than the fat, loveable one. The tall little boy's not interesting to me. Looks and acts like his father and he'll probably end up finding his own private corner in life doing something that reminds him of his father being able to tell everyone to be quiet and to leave him alone as if he's some sort of artist or genius who can't be disturbed when all he's doing is practicing for some crappy lounge in Queens or Nassau County. . . . It's the other, stupid-looking one I don't like — the little Howdy-Doody who makes all the noise. . . . "

"That's not my son," Lena's happy to say, "that's my nephew, Hank."

"Don't you sometimes have the feeling when he's making all that racket — don't you just sometimes think 'noisy little dummy!' and have the impulse to squash him like a weird-looking bug that's just landed on a leaf right near your face — squash that thing before it bites me!'?"

Same June day or another.

Green (but which green or greens exactly?), brown (how many browns?), yellow (pure chrome yellow for sure, but other yellows too), maybe a little black and a little simple red, as concentrated as tomato paste.

Eye scans the level sunlit plane that may be one windblown page and the sticky streaks of color that are all there, but certainly nothing like a painting, or even a sketch, yet.

Let's see.

Question can fairly be asked if the sun burning in the green needle-leaves of the massive cone of the Rhinebeck pine (green, that is, so long as you keep your eye trained only on the movement of the heavy pads of the outer boughs and not on the dark core and the light there flowing up into a green that's luminous and pure (a green that is light, not yet smeared by the flat palette knife across the edge of the oily gob of color squeezed out next to it)) is what Monica's thinking about when she writes the word "green".

Not noted if little "Matthew Regan" is "across the street" being carried or strolled or trying to walk without being held: only noted that he's wearing "a yellow shirt and green pants" (shade of green also not noted, but Monica must have a reason for thinking that the green pants are a pine green).

Apropos of what Monica wonders: when the world is not beautiful and even seems to be operating on a principle of not-being-beautiful, would the arrival of something beautiful spoil everything?

Let's see: Grete says almost under her breath (yet Monica hears it from her corner of the porch — her outdoor studio — behind the pine) "it's just too hot for clothing!" and Monica notes that Grete's wearing a black one piece bathing suit though she's not going to the beach and that she's carrying Hank Forest, whose sleepiness seems to be making him heavy or the other way around, color of shorts or bathing suit not noted, no shirt.

David says: a day, despite the heat, sharp enough to draw a picture of itself on glass and Monica wonders why she has the feeling that, if she could flip back through the handwritten scrap pages of the Chronicle, she'd find herself chronicling David saying exactly the same thing in the same words before.

Green paper sun shade pulled down on landlord-one-house-to-the-north's small brick front porch: meant to protect the eyes of the landlord and his family, but, as always, having an unplanned secondary effect more interesting and even beautiful than anything that can be planned: screen of green sunlight that breathes with the day. Sunlit shadow and unshaded light are equally surprised to find themselves there.

"We sold some stuff!"

Lena's tremulous, over-excited voice on her small, orange brick downstairs porch around 4 p.m. Gets Rosamond excited too, speech audible but blurred.

More about the "Fair" or the "sale" later (different ways of thinking about it, depending on who's talking, so not in chronological order, though may very well be in order according to some other law of chronicling).

Is it now that Monica notes the shadows floating up the other side of the landlord's blazing green shade and somehow divines their earthen coolness? This too: somewhere — on this page or the next — Monica's written that the landlord's sun-shade (filled and blazing with sunlight exactly the same way and to the same degree a sail is filled with wind) is "lime green" and Monica notes to herself that that's different from what she'd written before.

More colors and events on the same June day: brand new and unfamiliar pickup truck — hard-to-name red between fire engine and tomato — parked in front of (not in) the cracked and weedy driveway of Lena and Greg's battered and enormous old white stucco orange brick. Red of truck shines the way objects shine only for the few seconds before even that is changed by humans consciousness.

Coral skirt, white polo, blue car: Nicole Renard passing on foot in summer sunlight. Also: Nicole driving slowly south on ABC Street in her sky blue little Mazda on her way toward the ocean end of the block and Babette's.

Sensory impressions are strong, but out of order. Power of sun on coral skirt and white polo is so great that as Nicole goes gracefully by the aroma of warming cotton reaches Monica on the porch. On the same day or another just like it Nicole slows down, honks and waves as she goes by slowly in her blue car. Not perfectly clear in Monica's notes whether Nicole drives by on the same day ("yesterday"?) that Johanna and Rosamond are helping Lena load chairs and merchandise into the trunk of her old car (color, make and model not noted) for the afternoon's adventure trying to sell stuff at the fair in the park at the western end of the peninsula. Nadja and Lena plan to drive to the Fair together. Nadja says she can't figure out why she went to so much trouble: up all night soaking her handpainted paper in water to create the marbleized effect she sells as "handmade stationery" in sets of twenty sheets for two dollars. But she only had the time and energy to make a few sets! Laughs at herself and says that the story of how she arrived at the point in life where she'd be willing to be up all night painting and soaking stationery just to make a few dollars is a long one, probably much longer than she realizes, so too long to tell now. . . .

Nicole Renard goes by (again? again on the same day? same event resuming in Monica's notes after one distracting interruption or another?) before or after Monica chronicles the fact that Nicole's blue Mazda is parked in Babette Coffin's driveway. Monica's assumption is that Nicole must have paid a very quick visit to her mother in Canada: left ABC Street on Saturday, back today or even yesterday.

Blue Mazda parked in Babette's driveway.

Blue Mazda goes by.

Nicole goes by on foot with Martina ("Tina") Lima and Jojo Coffin.

"On our way to Baba's for some lentil soup!" Jojo calls out to Monica.

Tina, needing to make something known about herself (assuming that Monica's going to chronicle it?), calls out in a low, sweet voice Monica can only just hear: "Lentil soup for dinner! Not one of Baba's best ideas!"

"Don’t like lentil soup?"

"Don’t like lentils in or out of soup!"

Anything else about Nicole Renard? Only this: suntanned as always, summery and beautiful (also as always and with enough force to imprint her beautiful summeriness in some more permanent way in time then in the sugar cube of memory (can only dissolve once, in one person's mug of coffee), so that no matter what, 20 or 40 years from now, this summery view will remain the image of Nicole Renard in Monica's brain, possibly also with its aroma of sun and water carried by breezes down this street like every other street just off the beach): long coral skirt of lightweight cotton and white cotton polo (geometric pattern of stitches forgotten) showing off suntanned arms. (Noted for at least a second time to help Nicole imprint this image of herself where? where exactly?)

Monica wants to know how the Fair went and Nicole says flatly "not well". No matter what anyone else tells Monica, no one sold anything. Couldn’t sell anything; too windy! and in that huge, open space. . . all their stuff blew away before anyone had a chance to look at it. . . ! Can't imagine how much beautiful stationery Nadja lost or how far away those sheets must have travelled. . . . This much is definite: Nadja only sold one set. The stationery is beautiful, but (she (Nicole) knows from experience) laborious to make. Much too much time invested for the few cents she made. If it were her and she only sold one set and saw all those sheets flying away across the parking lot she'd be miserable. And might even start to question her life. But — does Monica find this? — Nadja's "happiness" and "unhappiness" are impossible to read and maybe even impossible to tell apart.

"This is possible too," Nicole says. "It's a thought I've had before. Maybe the era where people are charmed by all this handmade craftsy stuff is over." She herself has made stationery like that. And maybe everyone in the world by now has made stuff like that so everyone in the world is sick of looking at it and sick of not making any money either. . . . Nadja is a beautiful woman and not stupid or uneducated either, so it's almost shocking to see her acting like a child with a lemonade stand. Does Monica agree?

Out of order.

Monica runs into Bill Kropotkin (deeply unshaven, as always) on the boardwalk. On his way to the Fair, he says, all the way over at the municipal park toward the western end of the peninsula just before the entrance to Windy Pass. Monica probably has as little interest in the Fair as he does, but he couldn’t talk Nelly out of going. She thinks it's a good place to sell her paintings. To him it's just another wasted day. The things we do when nothing we do matters! So he dropped her off with a load of paintings and easels and other stuff and now it should be about time to pick her up. "It doesn't matter" should be his new guiding principle: time wasted on all the stupid stuff that makes a day go by used to drive him nuts, but it really doesn’t matter anymore. He's still driving a cab and, it may not sound like it, but he's starting to get comfortable identifying himself as "a cab driver". He's argued with himself ten million times and now one side has finally won the argument and he accepts the fact that the likelihood of getting a grant is practically nil: ten grants were awarded, he's an alternate (out of how many alternates he has no idea) and no one's ever going to turn down a grant. So he's a cab driver, not a scholar who got swept by all sorts of historical waves and forces out into the wide, stupid world of the everyday. Needs to stop dreaming that there's a tiny mousehole somewhere that he can squeeze his head and ass through to crawl back into the life of the mind.

A long series of undated days in June. Undated, but not undifferentiated. There are signs and details that suggest chronology. Night and then morning, for example, but since her handwritten notes don't bother to mark one day off from another clearly, it seems to Monica that the Chronicle has a responsibility to be faithful to the truth of her notes and shouldn't concern itself with dates and sequences either. For example: notes talk about "yesterday's poisonous heat" and about the fact that Monica's had to keep her enormous, old and noisy floor fan going "till daylight". Woke "at 6 a.m." and found cool breezes blowing through all three rooms — entering through both west-facing green studio windows and south-facing red room windows then circulating through blue room (kitchen), swirling there, then sweeping back down the hall to the green front studio — so that she was able to shut the fan.

Dazzling morning light in the tall Rhinebeck pine makes the pine a green torch that lights up the green studio. Not clear if her notes say that studio becomes a bright mint green or if the sky becomes a bright mint green or if either or both have anything to do with the dazzling light in the Rhinebeck pine.

Let's see, what else?

"Burning haze of yesterday" with its ugly lack of color gives way to sunlight in real green and real blue.

Noted already or noted twice that Monica sees Johanna and Rosamond helping Lena Coffin loading folding chairs into the trunk of Lena's old coffee-colored stationwagon for "the Fair".

"On Sunday" (new date though undated?) Monica and David are eating sandwiches (what kind not noted) on the beach. Not noted either what they're drinking with the sandwiches, but Monica's guess is that the sandwiches are her favorite beach sandwiches, David's crisp and buttery grilled cheese sandwiches with bacon and extra grilled tomato and that they have two old thermoses and that David's drinking super-strong black coffee and Monica's drinking hot chocolate made from scratch by David with Droste's cocoa, granulated sugar and near-boiling whole milk.

Because Monica notes (and then says out loud to David) that she hasn't seen Margaret Brennan's ex-husband Ernie for a long time she runs into Pam Leary walking with husband Ted's younger sister, Erin, on AAF Street and the first of a few tiny fragments of not-even-beginning-to-be stories Pam has to tell is that she's been wondering and still wonders now if Monica knows if Ernie and Margaret are back together again. Been seeing so much of Ernie in the neighborhood lately that she couldn't help wondering. . . . Let's see, what else? The beautiful sweater that Erin's wearing (she can tell that Monica's been admiring it) is Nora Salerno's handiwork. Very nice of Nora, of course, but not exactly moving. Hard to be moved when you know for a fact that Nora does exactly the same thing for practically everyone. So knitting is just something Nora likes to do and one lesson she's learned is that it's stupid to sentimentalize things like that. . . .

Apologizes for looking so lousy. She's just getting over something — no one's named it — and she's always tired. Pretty sure she got it from Teddy (who's still got a sore throat, swollen glands, infected ears and diarrhea). "Lasts at least a week and it's painful." Not sure if it started with Teddy or with Marian Woolsey. They spend so much time together who can tell who gave what to who? Marian's in terrible shape, but won't go to the doctor. Won't see anyone but Teddy so she's pretty much trying to turn Teddy into her doctor and that could easily be the way he got sick since — as Monica knows — Teddy's too "nice" to say no even if Marian's nose is dripping on his arm. So Ted and Nora are stuffing Marian with over-the-counter garbage and the official story is that Marian won't take anything from a doctor because she blames doctors for her husband's death. "I'd just as soon try'n cure cancer with Robitussin as swallow anything Dr. Dumbo prescribes!" Meanwhile she's getting worse and worse: coughing so much, throat so sore she can't even talk. "So I guess you could say we're all a mess and just barely getting by. . . ."

Under the red rose bushes another rose bush, unnoticed till now. Bush is of course smaller, but color of roses is so bright — Monica writes then crosses out illuminated— and of such an unusual (for ABC Street) pink without even enough red in it to be called a "rosy" pink (therefore pink that resembles what exactly?) or to make it stand out against the red if it wanted to, at least not enough to have caught Monica's eye before the instant of beginning to write about it.

The band's drummer, Leo Romero (who gets frustrated easily and not only because of family pressure to quit drumming and work full time for the family carpet cleaning business in Brooklyn) is frustrated now because his car won't start. Bearded Andy is in the cracked and weedy driveway at the same time, kneeling by his old, dull-but-shaded monochrome olive green VW, trying to replace his almost expired Vermont plates with new white ones (from what state not noted) and he says to Leo without much conviction "it's probably something simple, like the battery. . . . " Offers to help Leo push it to the back of the driveway, where it'll be out of the way so they can study it, but Leo isn't listening — to Andy or to Greg either (also in the driveway doing something with hisold car), who thinks he knows why Leo's car won't start. Can't listen because another impatient tenant's parked and barking behind him, making Leo too anxious to pay attention to Andy.

Andy says something's in the air today: everyone's impatient and in a lousy mood. For example: Monica's nasty little landlord (or one of his nasty little children) stuck this note under his windshield wiper this morning just because he had to leave his car in front of their driveway for a few minutes: "If I had an axe I would have smashed your windows!" He (Andy) had left a note explaining why the car was there and that he'd be back in a minute, but everyone's nuts and already mad before you do anything. . . .

In the background Monica can hear Greg saying to Leo "let's see if I can at least get your lightsto go on" and Leo, almost in tears, "aint' got timefor that, man. . . !"

Ryan Lenehan must pass and stop to say hello, as usual, because Monica's notes chronicle the fact that he has a new girlfriend named Breeda and that she's fourteen and — he loves this ridiculous coincidence and thinks Monica will too — it costs her exactly fourteen dollars to have her hair trimmed at Adolph's over on AAF Street!

Sylvia Greengrass, from what Monica can see from her writing location behind the tall Rhinebeck pine on the front porch, who never used to talk to anyone and never wore lipstick while husband Enos was alive, is chatting with animation with one of her west-side-of-ABC-Street neighbors (which neighbor not noted) over a very white and clean picket fence and the movements of her lips are exaggeratedly vivid to Monica at an unmeasured diagonal distance because of the glistening depth of Sylvia's rose red lipstick.

"The red roses are making the air so fragrant" is what Monica thinks she hears Sylvia saying and, even less certainly, Monica thinks the unidentified neighbor answers "well, Sylvia, don't you agree that the air — the whole air of the world — is more fragrant when there's no sun? After the sun goes down. . . . " "That's when we start to smell the flowers and the grass. . . ?" "Pine needles especially, but hardly any pine trees on this block — so the aroma of grass and flowers is what rises up to our noses as if a weight's been taken off it. . . ." "And colors? Do colors get to be more of their real color. . . ?" "Well, Sylvia, I’m not so sure if colors get deeper or truer, but I think colors start to have an aroma after the sun goes down — and probably for the same reason. . . . "

While Sylvia and her neighbor are talking Monica is noting that "yesterday at 9:30 a.m. David was still fast asleep when Lou the rolypoly mailman rang the front doorbell and woke him up": Monica's notes say something about a thick registered letter from Lowell in Montreal and about "two announcements for Monica, two for David", but don't say what's announced. (Does Monica make a note to remind herself to keep a lookout to find out if this hole in the story is ever filled in? And that makes her wonder if all that interested her in this mini-non-story is the fact that Lou the rolypoly mailman woke David up at 9:30 a.m.)

Fat Agnes passes around 11 a.m., worried that she overslept and missed the mailman. She's not satisfied with Monica's story about Lou ringing the bell at 9:30 "'cause a registered letter might be a whole different thing from ordinary, everyday mail delivery". Knows Lou's route and she's gonna go track him down and get her goddamn mail. . .!

Notes bother to record the fact that a woman named "Sherry" (at this moment "now" Monica has no idea who "Sherry" is or was and doesn't know either how she knew "then" that the woman's name was or is "Sherry"), tall and somewhat unstable in high platform heels, is walking her look-alike Afghan.

A line of pastel clothing faded by surface glare that has no measurable depth at all and obscured by a screen of leaves (reflected from what tree?) in the Rosenwassers' north-facing picture window.

Bloodier than blood-red red roses on the Regans' rose bush just on the other side of the driveway from the Rosenwassers' picture window with its almost-impossible-to-see pastel clothing and bright skin of leaf reflections.

Thin Minnie Lyman is walking Sally, the Liman family's giant sheepdog who doesn’t resemble Minnie at all, but may look a little like mother Audrey.

No record of Lou the rolypoly mailman ringing the bell or delivering another letter on the same or another undated day in mid-June, but a letter is delivered and Monica is debating whether or not there's enough significant content in it to justify chronicling any of it: a short note from Hugh Fox in Spain wrapped around a letter from Bill Katz of Library Journal that had been sent (for reasons not known or noted) to Hugh Fox rather than to Monica and/or David directly. (Monica wonders "now", but probably not "then", if the simple explanation for sending the letter to Hugh was that Monica's address isn't listed anywhere Bill Katz is likely to find it and David has no mailing address at all.)

". . . if you actually do a book please send it to me for consideration for the Little Press Roundup in the December issue of Library Journal. . . ", etc., "Cheers, Bill Katz". And wrapped around that "Hope all goes well for you both!/Best, Hugh."

Let's see: what else does the Chronicle pay attention to on this random mid-June day without a center to at least give an illusion of coherence? (Argument could be made, and has been made of course, that its lack of coherence is its only necessary coherence and any more obvious coherence than that would be a structure forced on it like a pudding mold.)

Rosenwassers' daughter Annie, visiting from Copenhagen, is (standing or sitting not noted) in front of the Rosenwassers', rocking her baby and murmuring something inaudible from across the way.

An elderly man (name and precise age never known), chronicled for many years only as an image in the image world of ABC Street, one of this beach community's many summer residents, but always with his wife, never alone as he is today.

Elderly man stops to say hello to Sylvia Greengrass, who's watering her dry but neatly fenced-in little lawn square and (another surprise for Monica) chatting with Andy Forest, who's gone out of his way to cross over and say hello. Monica can't make out everything either one of them says, but is pretty sure she hears Sylvia express almost motherly interest in Andy's news that the band has a new, regular gig at a disco "off Exit 35 of the L.I.E.. . . at The Lakeside Lounge, to be exact". May even (though Monica has a feeling, while writing or later re-reading, that she's embroidering a little on the very few words she's sure she hears) invite Sylvia to drive over and be his guest and she may laugh and say no, she doesn't think that would be for her and then they may laugh together at the absurdity of the idea of Sylvia listening to rock'n'roll at The Lakeside Lounge. . . .

This too: "Sherry" (not with her lookalike dog, but with a tall, wasted–and-out-of-focus guy Monica has seen wandering the neighborhood as if looking for the entrance to something that has no entrance) walks by headed north —> on Sylvia Greengrass' side of the street, but doesn’t say hello to Sylvia or to Andy Forest.

While Sherry's passing and talking to the guy who, no matter how interested he is, is having a little trouble focusing on what she's saying, Sylvia Greengrass' attention may be drawn (distracting her from Andy Forest and whatever tale he's telling about the band, whose adventures Sylvia's apparently been following with interest for years, even when short, bald and wiry, baked-dark-and-dry-as-a-skinny-little-sweet-potato-left-too-long-in-the-coals, husband Enos was still alive and hosing the narrow driveway between their dark brick and the Sloths' pure white shingle) by the illusion of movement in the Rosenwassers' north-facing picture window behind and above her and just in the corner of her eye: white curtains (exact nature of material not known) aren't fully drawn together and the dark space between them changes the degree of reflectivity of the window-surface in a significant way: a tree (which tree exactly?) fills the dark space between the curtains, but not entirely: tree itself is tall (far taller than the height of the window space allotted to it), but embedded in sun or in an aura of light Monica assumes is sun, an acid yellow created by the interaction of two chemicals in a tube waiting for the addition of a third element — even something as neutral as a breeze — to turn acid yellow to poisonous orange.

Glass of Rosenwassers' picture window is sick with chemical light beginning to flame up around the tree planted there.

Monica has to turn away from it and so does Sylvia Greengrass.

Monica writes that it's a pleasure to be writing in the coolness of the porch where the density of what she's seeing and what she's smelling (immediately nearby and carried to her from the immediate nearby by mild breezes) builds up into the density of what chronicling looks like on the page and all of it adds up to a kind of enclosure: "a grass wall of leaves and roses".

A tiny moth lands on the point of the cap of Monica's cheap black ballpoint pen while it's moving and doesn't seem to mind at all that she doesn't stop writing and may even be interested that the pen's chronicling the fact that the red of the red roses appears to be getting more brilliant (red with more light inside it) as sky and sun get whiter. Green of wall of grass, green of leaves, green of everything more smoky and at the same time more removed and glassy as if no longer immediately here around her and within smelling distance, no longer something she can put between her teeth like a sugary tablet of green gum, but across the way ambiguously inside the surface of the Rosenwassers' picture window.

At 10:30 a.m. (on the same or the next day not clearly noted in Monica's quick and sketchy notes with their between-line writing and marginal density), while Monica is taking the time to enjoy reading for the first time, as if from the point-of-view of a reader, "In Doubt", a story or excerpt from a novel-that-may-never-become-a-novel that she and David just published in Chicago Review (volume and issue number not noted), Greg Coffin is playing the piano above her and to her left — that is, behind and above her left ear, miniaturized and concentrated there like an oddly musical insect that's trying to figure out a way to buzz into her ear.

Playing with no enthusiasm. And, Monica notes, it's getting rarer and rarer to hear Greg playing or even practicing at all. Heart's no longer in it? Intellectual and/or poetic dimension Monica was always interested to find there no matter what now seems diluted and decaffeinated to the point where it's boring and undrinkable.

Therefore: something's changed in and for Greg and Monica wonders if the Chronicle's observed its minute changes even if she hasn't.

What's Monica writing about? What she promised herself she wouldn't write about: more red roses! Notes that she herself, not David, cut roses to make another vaseful for her big oak desk and breakfast table and also notes despite her best intentions that the roses in the heavy Czechoslovakian crystal vase seem to be getting darker with each fresh cutting. Monica wonders if it's fair to herself to say that she has as little enthusiasm for chronicling more roses as Greg has for playing the piano in his appointed corner of the big second floor front kitchen/dining room/practice room/children's homework and playroom/etc. etc. . . . .

This too: shorter of Lowell's two gift avocado plants on Monica's big oak desk and breakfast table is sprouting new shoots and seems bristlingly full of life, while the far taller and more sinuous one — growing almost to the ceiling — has only seven leaves left and seems to be alive only because it doesn't know what else to do.

A new leaf on the newest plant and a leafy, green and flowering feeling to the green studio overall.

Timothy Corcoran is trying out his skateboard on the sidewalk just below the spot where Monica is working in the pleasant shade of the Rhinebeck pine's deep and wide shadow on the porch (a shadow with many shadows in it). Monica wonders if this makes sense: Timothy's skateboarding in an unusual, contemplative way, observant and experimental, like a writer testing to see if her/his sentences match what he/she's seeing: or like someone practicing piano to find his/her way into one thing and out of another, rocking back and forth on a scaffolding hanging outside what's suddenly begun to feel unbearably domestic and tedious.

Lena's always-quick gait up the short flight of orange brick steps, under the cheesy orange plastic awning, carrying a good-sized American flag into the shadiest interior of the house.

On June 15, at about 11 a.m., Spylianos' replacement's ambiguously attractive blonde girlfriend, who's always late and in a hurry, pops out the front porch door earlier than usual but behaving as if she's late. Hurries across the porch in skin-tight denim shorts, mini halter top and heels. Quick out, across and down. Hair, never neutral, either just-washed and in curlers or already combed, brushed and set for a night out, is in curlers today.

Monica looks ahead through folded pages of notes but can't find anything else about Spylianos' replacement's girlfriend and notes that, no matter what, there's never enough about the smell and feel of the moment. Girlfriend, for example, passes quickly and not perfectly clear or certain in Monica's notes whether or not there's a faint, pleasant perfume, shampoo or even perfumed soap aroma. Moment goes by, even when recorded, because what comes after chronicling no matter how much we may long for it, proves to be impossible. (Can't actually eat tree, bug, aromatic earth under tree or green underside of seawater in order to know it, can't squash it into the paper either, though the idea of doing it never goes away entirely. . . . )

From a hidden and narrow internal slot in space Lena Coffin appears, mopping: diligently and very seriously mopping her way forward across the ping-pong room floor, like someone trying to read a difficult novel very carefully, with her index finger following the lines across the page as if they were the well-traveled rutted furrows in her forehead.

In danger of twinning with her skinny old mop?

Stops for a few seconds, looking up, as if weighing whether or not to tear down the blue-and-white streamers still hanging from the ceiling (from what celebration neither Monica nor the Chronicle has any idea). Can't seem to decide between walking away because of the effort required to take them down or grabbing hold of a streamer to start the jolt of pleasure she'll get from ripping them down. . . .

Works her way out to the small orange brick porch under the orange plastic awning and is a little surprised by her sense of freedom and happiness just from being in the open air, sniffing unusually concentrated pine aroma and more subtle and floating rose aroma giving shape (at least for the nose) to unexpectedly cool breezes blowing in steady puffs S ← N or S → N not noted.

Grete, Nadja and another woman Monica doesn't recognize, all in silky athletic shorts and colorful sleeveless tops, wave to Lena (still holding her mop handle) as they bicycle by.

"MIXED COMBO in TIJUANA BLUE AND SWAP" on the flat panel marquee of the porno house in the little strip of automotive supply and repair shops on the North side of Bay Drive (bay backs right up to the wire fences of their hidden parking lots) almost directly across from the old orange brick Post Office building, the laundromat and Chinese take-out place.

Same day (which day of how many continuously chronicled days?) or the next (no Lena in sight) blue and white streamers are still hanging from the ceiling of Lena & Greg's enclosed front porch ping-pong room.

Brief section of long and ambitious (novel-length) visual, not-exactly-"concrete" narrative, Green Inventory, based on Monica's Chronicle (or ur-Chronicle) (Monica & David's first attempt of many, in fact, to arrive at an organic book form for Monica's endless Chronicle, seeing if some of the complex numbering systems, formal strategies and page designs of their smaller chamber fictions could be expanded to include the far more human and daily mini-narratives of the Chronicle) sent to Edgar Zacharias together with a note about work on THE BLUE HANGER Space Novel.

Apropos of nothing Monica notes that Spylianos' replacement (Monica knows his name or she doesn’t, but in either case his name is not noted here) does his own laundry, while Spylianos had his done for him.

Never clear to Monica where Lon Gurion appears from. Suddenly he's there at her elbow or right in front of her, suddenly he's there on the page, almost hidden in the crease of a folded sheet of lavender scrap paper or trying to hide behind the green stripe down the length of an oversized sheet of slick white scrap paper.

Lena surprises Monica by materializing with her mop-companion again, but what is there left to mop? Seems to Monica — unless there's a new visual distortion in the short space between the two porches — that Lena (having run out of interior) is mopping her small cement front porch square, pausing for a lengthy interlude of leaning on the companionable mop handle to breathe in a complex aroma. Rose aroma floats up so high, as high as piano notes at the highest end of their scale, that, even standing on tiptoe and using the support of the mop handle to help her do it, aroma could float over her head where she couldn't inhale it if its roots weren't tangled in the dark green pitch of pine needles ground into earth. Every footstep mashing pine needles releases a green syrup thick as paint or spackle that could fill in Lena's cracked and peeling exterior stucco walls.

Space filled in with a deep bed of mashed pine needle aroma and hardly at all of rose aroma for someone reaching for something on tiptoe.

Leaning on her friend, the mop handle, breathing in the rose-and-pine-scented air of the afternoon, is Lena having a moment that no one else on ABC Street is having?

As usual when Lon Gurion appears at Monica's elbow or right in front of her, as if from a crease in ordinary space and with no transition from not-being-there to being-there he arrives with what he wants to say fully formed. Having a tale to tell to Monica and its having already shaped itself is what compels him to appear. His appearance at that moment, forcing a rift to open in air as if in water. . . . Monica can tell there's another turn to her thought, but can't quite see how it will get where it's going so lets its blunt back end disappear into the mind's next tunnel.

Still one more time Lon Gurion has something to say (and makes Monica wonder if she once made the mistake of showing even a little interest in the subject) about the uncommon breed of dog known as the "papillon" and Monica has no way of remembering, without looking back and finding the exact spot in her hard-to-read, quickly sketched notes, if Lon Gurion had told her before, maybe in exactly the same words, that "the papillon is the oldest breed of dog". . . (not noted whether he said "in America", "in North America" or "in the world").

Notes also seem to say that Lon Gurion refers to the papillon as a "panella", but David's research for Monica fails to turn up any reference to a "panella" breed of dog or to the term "panella" meaning anything at all.

Let's see: what else does Lon Gurion have to say about papillons? Will remain visible as a coherent entity in space only so long as he has a coherent tale to tell Monica about papillons? Story includes his daughter, of course: daughter-in-Connecticut's papillon is now thirteen and weighs 31 lbs. Her first papillon died (Monica isn't certain whether her notes are confused or she's confused or Lon Gurion is confused, because she has no memory of a "first" papillon before the "thirteen year old papillon" who's apparently still alive), but his daughter was extremely lucky — though he probably shouldn't call it "luck", because such events are predicted in his "Third Theory of Coincidence", which he's written about at length and certainly discussed with Monica before — when she met, by random "coincidence", a woman on a railroad station platform in New Haven. who she fell into conversation with and discovered is somehow (notes not clear or Lon Gurion not clear) connected to the American Kennel Association or is it Club or Society? Not only that: this random railroad platform Kennel Society woman was able to put his daughter in touch with the only two accredited papillon breeders in the country! and one of them is right there in Connecticut! Daughter wasted no time, of course, and immediately after the death of "the first papillon" got herself the papillon who's now nine years old! (Weight of nine year old dog not given or not noted.)

Anything else? Lon Gurion seems to have said everything about papillons that he'd already formed in his mind and disappears without any account of his disappearance, the way a name or a sentence disappears when a sheet of scrap paper is folded.

Monica notes say that "yesterday (Tuesday night)" Nancy St. Cloud stopped by for the first time in a long time (research required to find out exactly when). Monica notes at once that Nancy "looks much better" and Nancy says that if that's true all the credit (as Monica knows) should go to Dr. Beechnut. Issue of assertiveness is mostly what they work on. The "emotional stocking mask" Monica used to talk about is almost gone. Meaning of it should have been obvious, but it took Dr. Beechnut a long time to get her to understand the significance of all that flattening: obvious flattening of nose to face, lips pressed down so hard they were like chewed-up chewing gum sticking to her skin and the flatness of everything a perfect match for all the things she hates in herself now that men used to love about her: no point to listing all the nauseating qualities that Monica knows: men used to swoon over the so-called sweetness of her whispery voice and pliant nature. (Would have really swooned if she ever let them see her murderous rages, like the time she blacked out and nearly killed her grandmother, horrible old bitch that she was. . . .)

What else about Dr. Beechnut? There's something she's forgetting. This isn't it, but Dr. Beechnut is encouraging her to write songs again and she brought a new one to show (or sing to!) Monica. Something she hasn't done since she was twelve and writing was like having someone to talk to about her father. So she thinks it's all working, but it's important to know that the results of what Dr. Beechnut is doing are visible.

Let's see: what else about Nancy St. Cloud? Notes say for the first time that she brought little Tristan with her (but nothing chronicled about him) and that Monica drove them home. Monica hasn't seen Andre for a long time and notes say that he doesn't look like her memory of him: handsome, stylish, well-groomed, like an officer on a cruise ship. This Andre, not her memory-Andre, looks lousy: pudgy, unshaven, sloppy and grouchy, like someone who got up late (hour not noted) and isn't fully awake yet. Not fully awake, but the 25" color tv is awake for him and in the middle of a loud war movie, while half-awake Andre concentrates on pinball. One eye and ear on the movie (Monica regrets, or it's only the Chronicle that regrets, not being able to pay enough attention to the tv to figure which war movie it is and about which war, what actors are in it, etc. etc.), but the central, wedge-like section of Andre's being is oddly forward leaning and energized, unlike the rest, pointed with as much concentration into the heart of the maze of the pinball landscape as a springboard diver just leaving the board and aiming at the pool.

Nancy says that there's a little story to tell about the pinball machine and she feels free to tell it because Andre's too pre-occupied by pinball to pay attention. Andre's been a pinball fanatic since childhood and, if it wasn't so expensive, might have bought himself one by now if owning a pinball machine hadn't been illegal in New York since Fiorello LaGuardia. Now Mayor Beame's changed all that because he's looking for additional revenue for the city and her Uncle Vinnie Salerno immediately gave Andre this stupid, expensive gift. Now that it's right here in the house Andre can't stop playing it and it's hard to get him to do anything else. He's obsessed with it (he's already scored over 117,000 points — something he's proud of, though she has no idea what that means) and obsessed with the 25" tv (sports and war movies only). Never thought Andre would care about any sport but soccer, but, since there is no soccer here, he's become addicted to baseball. Monica just has to look at Andre to see what the stupid tv and the stupid $800 pinball machine have turned him into. . . . And look at the apartment! Looks and smells like him (the Andre he's turned into, not the one she married), as if she weren't living there: his bed isn't made (she refuses to do it anymore!), his clothing's on the chairs and the couch (won't pick up after him either) and the air stinks of adolescent masculine slobbiness. . . .

Anything else about her visit from and to Nancy St. Cloud? Before Monica leaves Nancy wants her opinion: when Tristan was born Nora Salerno took it on herself to send out announcements about the birth. Does Monica agree that it wasn't Nora's place to be sending out birth announcements for her child? And doesn't she have a right to resent it and to be angry? And, if Monica agrees that it's ok to be angry, doesn't she need to say something and not hold it in? And if that's ok then how much anger is she allowed to express without looking nuts? Really needs Monica's advice before she leaves.

Let's see: one more sentence about Andre "out of order": that is, Monica comes across it by accident, leafing forward through her rough notes to begin outlining "what comes next".

Andre is frustrated: he wanted to show off his great pinball ability for Monica, but couldn't because he bites his nails and has a badly infected finger.

Also "yesterday" (whether before or after the visit from Nancy St. Cloud not noted) Monica is in the Salem Avenue backyard, though notes are confusing on this score and Monica as always isn't certain if it's "right" — that is, either realistic or honest in relation to the Chronicle's natural patchwork and digressive nature, its meandering, horizontal gaze across the surface of the earth — to try and make order out of its methodical disorder.

Let's see: notes say that "on Saturday" Monica takes a break from typing her Chronicle outside on the ABC Street front porch (open to everyone, therefore with no privacy and with the chance for anyone to stop by and chat or to walk right through whatever she's writing) to share a breakfast with David of barely ripe brie cheese, three kinds of honey (buckwheat, wildflower and David's favorite Tasmanian leatherwood), iced coffee (tall glass with lots of heavy cream for Monica, heavy bar glass of strong coffee with next-to-no cream for David) and what kind of bread not noted from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street.

Hot in the Salem Avenue backyard "later", at the same time that strong breezes (too strong, in fact, to be called "breezes") on the ABC Street front porch make it almost too cold to work or even to have breakfast.

Also in the Salem Avenue backyard "later on the same day" as chilly breakfast on the ABC Street front porch: growling and grinding car engine noises and noises of heavy automotive tools trying to bang and wrestle corroded metal to go in directions it doesn’t want to from Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-West. Noise-to-the-West raises a question Monica's asked herself many times in different ways: is the banging and/or scraping of a heavy automotive tool an annoying interruption that wipes out whole sections of the Chronicle, therefore something to avoid, or is the banging, etc., exactly what the Chronicle can't avoid. Writing and reading not a screen to hide the passing world, but an element inserted into the passing world and always porous enough for the passing world to step right through them. Therefore: banging of wrench on metal no different from someone spotting Monica in her not-really-hidden spot for writing and stopping to tell her a tale while she's working, forcing her to digress from what's probably already a digression from something else. . . . And all of it keeping Monica on the writing path she's been on for a long time, an alternative narrative principle she tries to talk about whenever she can, though she knows that, like every other principle, it may turn out not to be a principle at all, just what she likes to do.

This too: father-to-the-West (neighbor Blanche's husband) is a precious gem cutter who commutes to and from the Diamond District in Manhattan every day, who doesn't hate his work but whose first love was and still is cars and car engines in particular. Would have loved to be a mechanic and enjoys nothing more than buying a corroded old car, dismantling it and bringing it back to life according to an ideal of beauty as all-consuming as any other. Obsession totally bypasses older of two sons, but is passed on to younger and every weekend finds father and younger son in the narrow hedge-divided driveway together, working with fierce concentration on one car or another.

Not clear in Monica's notes if it's when typing outside on chilly ABC Street front porch or when working in hot Salem Avenue backyard "later" that she's absorbed for the third or fourth week in gathering and editing material from the Chronicle and from David's notes about all members of the X family — Leila, Nelly, Ma, Jimmy, Philida ("Phil") and even Amy who disappeared a long time ago — for an X family narrative that doesn't seem to want to come together.

Is the Chronicle made up of nothing but what interrupts the Chronicle?

"The rough, irregular sound of a car engine being tuned on a breezy spring day through all the hours Monica is working in the Salem Avenue backyard. Neighbor-to-the-West, of course."

Monica notes the contradiction between different hastily written sentences within the same paragraph or just paragraphs apart. One sentence says "breezy spring day" and at least one other says "cold on the ABC Street front porch, hot in the Salem Avenue backyard".

If there's a contradiction, does it need to be resolved?

Ping-pong is being played "at night" in Greg and Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room: hard and precise tok-toking, shadows of human bodies crouched, unfolding, springing sideways through lighted curtains, dense ring of happy human voices cheering until it's late. But who is it that tells Monica that "it’s the last night of the tournament", then doesn't tell her who played in the final match or who won?

"Let's see": What else on ABC Street Monica wonders to herself and then leafs forward through folded sheets of handwritten notes with crowded margins, cross-outs and add-ons and sees many-many little events on ABC Street on the same date-not-remembered June afternoon. An afternoon filled with one-two-or-no-more-than-three-sentence paragraphs, each paragraph its own tale and all little-paragraph-tales hopping, skipping or just rolling like bicycle wheels down ABC Street.

Two un-named and unfamiliar guys are having trouble carrying Greg Coffin's piano out of Greg-and-Lena's house and down the front porch stairs. Good-natured grumbling and sweating, more puzzled than annoyed. Too heavy? Treads on sneakers worn to smoothness? Piano slides and feet slide as if everything's about to fall. Have to keep changing their grip and their footing. Allow themselves to laugh when they finally set it down in front of the cracked and weedy driveway and then absurdly (seeing before they do it that it's absurd) struggle to fit the piano into the small trunk of their car.

Monica's not the only one observing their struggles. Wally (the Lenehans' inquisitive and intelligent calico mutt (cinnamon patches on pure, flossy white fur of medium length)) has trotted over from the ocean end of the block for one of his long afternoon visits with Monica and is in his favorite position: stretched out not too far from where Monica's working, dozing a little, reading the horizontal narrative of the street as it ambles or bicycles by and accepting the warm greetings of everyone who know him from ABC Street or from his wanderings. Finds the struggles of the two guys with Greg's piano entertaining and waits for the next unpredictable turn of events.

"Pretty stupid" one of them says and goes off to see if he can borrow a truck. Guy left behind keeps his eye on the piano from Greg-and-Lena's front porch steps.

Still another unfamiliar guy pulls into the Regans' driveway (at a slight southwest diagonal across the way) in a small pickup truck (color, make and model not noted) and calls out in a friendly way to the guy left watching Greg's piano from the steps. Sorry he can't lend a hand, he says, but his mother-in-law asked him to come over and move some stuff! Seems to Monica that she sees him give a between-buddies, what-can-a-guy-do? kind of shrug and then it's easy for her to deduce that the guy in the Regans' driveway must be Joan Regan's son-in-law (Fionnuala Regan's husband), someone Monica has no memory of ever having seen before (someone unchronicled) and can't see clearly now.

Thin and overlayed reflection — too bright and too shadowy — of a white pickup truck (not Fionnuala's husband's, because color of his truck isn't noted and, in fact, not noted either whether a "pickup truck" or something else) in the Rosenwassers' north-facing second floor picture window: truck may be (though doesn't seem likely) parked toward the back of the wide, divided driveway shared by the Regans and the Rosenwassers-and-Arlington-sisters or may be situated at an un-dreamed-of angle somewhere else entirely, even in a driveway on ABD Street.

At exactly the same time (or one of a sequence of tiny events that only seem simultaneous because they're separated by seconds or less and are recorded as equal units in Monica's systemless method of note-taking that only gets called "random" out of laziness and/or lack of imagination) as Fionnuala Regan's husband is standing by his truck in the Regans' driveway and having an across-the-street conversation with the left-behind guy guarding Greg's piano a car with no description is pulling into the tight undivided-but-shared driveway between the Sloths' and the Greengrassess's pure white shingle and darkest dark brick and black iron identical structures with pyramid roofs and small front porches.

Unidentified man gets out of car with no description and barks irritably at someone still in the car who Chronicle identifies as "his son" or "the son". "Told you to put the air conditioner on! Get it on now, dummy! Don't want to get back into this hotbox!"

Not inside the Sloths' house long: then surprises Monica by making an immediate beeline for the porch where Monica's working. Veers right at the last second and quickly across the lawn and around the house through the cracked and weedy driveway as if he's familiar with it. Only seconds pass before he's coming back down the driveway astride a motorcycle (make and color not noted), kicking it forward with his boots and with loud little mini-explosions of a long-slumbering engine being forced to suddenly come to life.

Car and motorcycle speed off together in the direction of Coast Boulevard and beyond.

Through the burning haze of the street at what hour of what day exactly and then through the too-bright triple or quadruple glaze of the Rosenwassers' north-facing picture window with all the internal shadows, double images and ambiguous reflections of its sandwiched layers Monica thinks she sees a child's face staring out to the north — over the Regans' and other tiled or shingled roofs in the direction of Coast Boulevard and the bay or beyond the bay or down at what exact angle into the street or a backyard — at what object exactly Monica would love to know. (Easy for Monica to deduce that the child must be one of Annie Rosenwassers', visiting from Denmark. But which one, how old, and with what sense of where he/she is she can't even guess.)

Is the moment weaving itself together in some way that may or may not have meaning? If no meaning, that lack-of-meaning-yet-with-a-sense-of-something-weaving-itself-together another kind of meaning that Monica prefers to any other?

Wally, for example, still seems to be enjoying the way events — which inspire him to stretch out and follow their horizontal evolution even at a squashed and sideways angle rather than reacting to them with a bark — have a way of ping-ponging off each other some days but not others. A certain mirroring, repetition and random internal harmony someone writing or enjoying an interlude and sniffing air on her porch either has a taste for or doesn't.

Not noted when Andy Forest goes out of his way to tell David (David working on porch, Andy, tall as he is, still having to look up from rough driveway and talk through porch railing) that the recording and playback equipment David was looking at the last time he was over cost $10,000! Needs to sell it and upgrade, but — the usual story — he'll be lucky if he gets three! David has very little or no interest in the value of recording and playback equipment or in how much profit or loss Andy stands to make or suffer, but Andy doesn't seem to notice and goes on at length about it.

Let's see: when does the second piano-moving guy return with a pickup truck that the piano still won't fit into? Piano has to be put on the truck, then taken off the truck and set down again, though not necessarily in the same spot on sidewalk or in driveway. Two guys do the same thing as before: one goes off again to find a deeper truck, leaving the other guy sitting on the steps, bored by the street and everything not-quite-happening in it.

John Corcoran, red-faced and full of enthusiasm, rushes out through the Corcoran's porch door (opens out from a dark, den-like room with drawn wooden venetians onto the southwest corner of the porch where Monica always pulls a porch rocker into the relative solitude behind the wingspan of the Rhinebeck pine). Has to get over to Timothy's school in time for the beginning of the school play! Timothy's in it. . . !

Chronicled at the same time (on the same page of quickly-sketched notes) as Monica is recording what she and Wally are seeing and hearing on ABC Street, but obviously something that occurred on an earlier June day: Monica is in a booth in the Cornucopia Diner near the window wall that looks out at Bay Drive, the bay and Brooklyn and Manhattan beyond. By herself or with David or someone else not noted. Spylianos comes out of the kitchen in stained apron and stops at Monica's table to say hello. He has a long story to tell, but no time to tell it so he'll only say this: his move to Brooklyn is a disaster. It isn't working out is a nice way to put it. In fact, he's miserable. The landlord hid the fact that the house is filled with children. He must have known very well that the noise never stops. Knew his schedule as well and promised that he'd be able to rest after working hard in a busy kitchen all night. No sympathy or understanding! And no honesty either! Why are people that way? Can Monica answer that? Won't even stop them from rollerskating over his head! So many things to tell her, but must get back to the kitchen. . . .

Chronicle says that a "RIZZO'S PACKAGE DELIVERY" truck pulls up, but no description of size, shape, type or color of truck or color and style of lettering. Not certain either if "Rizzo's" truck is delivering something to Millie Greengrass directly across the way or to Artie Tilden. One sentence talks about the fact that, with Enos Greengrass dead, the Greengrasses's iron front gate seems to open much more easily and certainly opens far more often for visitors and deliveries. Another sentence talks about the fact that Artie Tilden (who must have stopped to tell Monica a tiny broken fragment of a story as he likes to do when passing or spending a little interlude lounging on the porch railing) is not getting a new couch from Macy's. That whole possibility — that whole potential narrative — died. He's getting a used chest of drawers from Sutter's New & Used Furniture out in the middle of Brooklyn somewhere! The long story of how the couch from Macy's turned into the chest of drawers from Sutter's will have to wait for another time . . . .

Around 7:15 p.m. on the same June day that may have been dated when chronicling of the day began, but isn't dated on later folded scrap paper pages (not dated in Monica's memory either) Greg and the band are in the driveway, packing the car, about to leave for a gig in a different club than the lounge near the airport.

"Remember," Greg says almost sternly, "this is an important gig tonight!"

No one seems impressed so he tries something else.

"Do we at least have our colors coordinated? I’m red, obviously. . . . "

Leo says "yellow" and adds something about his "blue bass drum".

Andy Forest says, seemingly without any point, "drums, horns and . . . " inaudible from Monica's position on the porch, but nothing about color.

Bass guitar player "Mike" (who never appears while there's daylight and who Monica's never spoken to, unshaven and dressed in black, as always) says "Jesus, aren't we ready yet?"

"Anybody thought about gas? Or is that too mundane." (Andy Forest.)

"Don't we have gas?" (Greg.) "Cause I could use a pack of. . . ."

"Are we stopping for gas?" (Leo.)

Mike says "these fuckn wheels are made for a kitchen floor!"

Someone asks how come the cool smell of air tonight is earthy? And Monica notes that it's true that the cool air tonight doesn't smell like ocean or even like inter-stellar space, but exactly like earth in flower pots even hours after she waters her plants.

"Keep all that other shit on the floor till I get my guitar in!" Mike says. "That shit's heavy. . . !"

Leo wants to know where "Leenie" is. "Leenie! Where's Leenie? Always sees us off. . . ." Not seeing Lena is making him nervous.

Greg (not nervous about not seeing her) calls out without warmth or any other emotional shading Monica can isolate and identify. "Hey Lena! Can you get that?"

"Shut that off and turn the air conditioner on!"

"Do I hear a piston rubbing?"

"Where the fuck did Greg go all of a sudden? Rushing everyone else, so now could someone tell Greg to hurry the fuck up?!"

On what June day at what hour does "a penetrating coolness" slide through the warmth of the Salem Avenue backyard while father and younger son are revving a car engine in the driveway next door, mopping their faces as if it's hotter on the other side of the thick hedges.

Jojo Coffin and Daisy Brennan go by, dancing along the boundary line of what?

It goes by with them, dancing, skipping, walking, peddling or driving.

Horizontal narrative of the street is always going by between one artificial horizon and the other, but only if Monica is there to look up from pen and paper?

Notes on June 17 aren't easy to sort out. "Around five in the afternoon" Monica, who's "working in the blue room for the first time" (first time this year or first time ever not noted), seems to say (though notes appear to be systematically "out of order") that she's picked up where she left off and is again working on something repeatedly interrupted (by what also not noted): typing notes about ABC Street neighbors and transient residents transformed into characters named "Donald Green", "Rudi Jolley", "Pam Leary" (born Jolley) and "Ted Leary", etc.

Among all sorts of confusing and "out of order " observations, notes seem to indicate in a shorthand way that "now", on June 17, Monica's in the blue room typing (and editing) notes taken on folded sheets of lavender scrap paper in March about a constellation of neighborhood people she and David know well who are in the process of being re-imagined as "characters." The adjustment is slight, but changes everything. Even the tiniest drop of added color, blending and concentration of personalities and biographies, filtering out and reshuffling changes life-as-it's-lived-and-chronicled into something else. "Only life is life."

Folded sheet of lavender scrap paper she's typing/editing is numbered "1300" and Monica notes (while typing/editing in the blue room or "now"?) that her absence of a system that ends up resembling a system but is really only a habit, hatched by necessity and helped along by being given reams of scrap paper by a friend who for a time worked at a disgusting job in her abusive father's small printing plant, of taking rapid on-site notes at the instant of experience on folded sheets of scrap paper, ended with a sheet numbered "4000" when she decided to switch to a more orderly and likely-to-survive system of taking notes in dated steno pads.

Writing (typing and editing) in June about editing (typing and writing) in March makes it hard to be sure in which month a certain instant is occurring (observed).

Let's see: "cloudy skies around five in the afternoon, yet light in the windows is brighter and harder-to-look-at than shaded and dull".

On the same plane as the surrounding rooftops, therefore: looking "south" from the blue room (kitchen) toward the red studio and its windows Monica can make out the persimmon clay of Greg-and-Lena's roof tiles through the slats of her own closed shutters thickly painted in a glistening, saturated red. Viewed from a seated position in the blue room Monica sees a pleasing and true red grid within the distinctive matte tomato soup red of the walls (an attempt to match Matisse's "Red Studio").

"Out of order" too: roses in an unidentified (un-described) vase are a far darker (blacker) red than all other reds visible from Monica's chair in the blue room.

"Typing in the blue room at 2 a.m.", but in "March" or in "June"? Rough handwritten notes seem to say that she's typing in the blue room in March (of what year?) and in June of '76 and that she has impossibly similar experiences on both occasions.

No matter how unlikely, she's compelled to follow what's in her handwritten notes. (Realism in relation to writing if not in relation to life.)

Notes say that looking out the window (blue room window if in June, uncertain window if in March) Monica sees "an orange moon".

In June, clouds so thin, so insubstantial, they're able to pass through the 3/4 orange moon without the slightest trace of a shadow and without altering either the moon's own brilliant orange light or its orange illumination of whatever's silvery blue in cloud screen and across skin of ocean. This too: whatever orange light falls on ocean remains orange, but also acquires an un-nameable compounded color as photons dancing at the orange end of the spectrum forge a channel through oily blue of deep ocean heaved up to surface.

Monica writes at 2 a.m. in June that at 2 a.m. in March (looking out what window?) orange moon is a little more of a pumpkin orange, is a little more like a child's crayon drawing of a moon and that the room she's either in or looking into has an odd "sandstone orange glow" (therefore Nadja-and-Andy's one room apartment in Greg-and-Lena's house, therefore looking down directly at only a slight angle and distance from the red studio). Notes also say room's odd glow reminds her of photographs of light in the desert she'd seen recently.

Notes in June also say that "of all her rooms the proximity of the sky is the greatest in the blue room" (that is, sky over peaked roofs of massive beachtown multiple dwellings to the East comes close to her windows).

On Saturday June 19 Monica is typing (editing or trying to edit) in her red studio for the very first time with the 25" Zenith color tv on. (Similarities and differences between trying to write with the tv on and trying to write on the front porch with all the interruptions and distractions of the street should be listed, but aren't.)

Monica had been watching a Dodger game for the first time since her childhood. The Dodgers have a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the fifth and, as much as by the game itself, Monica is surprised by the pleasure it gives her just to be looking at the green Cincinnati outfield, shallow and brilliant across the inner surface of the screen.

Hasn't watched baseball since childhood and hasn't typed her Chronicle since late March because she and David spent the winter housesitting on Salem Avenue and decided to get serious about gathering material and taking notes for a novel about Leila X and the whole X family, but got side-tracked when a story about Pam Leary's brother Rudi Jolley and his best friend Donald Green began to materialize instead and that story leaked out into other related stories for 130 pages that seem to be continuing.

Baseball game is a distraction from typing (though typing, of course, is rarely typing, sometimes it's editing, sometimes writing and mostly the kind of editing that is writing) and then Monica gets distracted from the baseball game when she changes channels between innings and stumbles on a documentary about the inland waterways of Australia.

Time of day not noted and not many clues in Monica's raw notes about nature of light inside the green room, blue room or red room or even in the windows (much more in fact about light in Cincinnati and in Australia), but ("now"?) Monica finds it unlikely that she'd be indoors working, particularly with the tv on, during the day when it would be possible for her to be outside where she loves to write — so thinks it's safe to assume that it's dark

or beyond dark —> into evening

evening —> into the deep evening that's

either night or not-quite-night (therefore dusk?).

And all pass trying to type, write and edit and at the same time follow the narrative of the baseball game only through glimpses and at intervals and therefore re-invented as an untrue narrative for baseball, where an odd, subtle coherence of atmosphere is built up of unpredictable events of uncontrolled duration that end up having an internal resonance. And this too: writing/typing while following the game in a broken-therefore-false way both become subordinate to "Inland Waterways of Australia": extreme clarity of blue water (too blue, too clear, too precise for the number of pixels possible on Monica's tv screen).

blue water rushing in a clear and sparkling way over rocks (tidal surge in or out?)

impossibly clear underwater view of reefs (still the "Inland Waterways"?) with (notes say, though it doesn't make sense to Monica while editing (typing) "later") "pearls" , extraordinary green (exact nature of green not noted, only that it's as electric and beautiful as the green plane of the Cincinnati outfield) of "clownfish" and the "wonderful colors" (none of them noted) of other reef-dwelling fish, all oddly illuminated, most likely by headlamps of divers and cameramen.

graceful gliding (whole body one gelatinous wing) of adult manta ray through depths and shallows of all planes and regions of impossibly clear blue water (voice-over narrative says that adult manta rays can weigh two thousand pounds, while David's later research in the library suggests three thousand pounds and also tells him, so he can tell Monica for the Chronicle, that manta rays are also known as "devil rays", can measure twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip and are capable of leaping sixty feet — out of the water into the air — to escape a predator).

diver with camera follows the rising and falling forward and sideways path of the enormous ray for a long time while pleasing, liquid voice of narrator glides along with it and Monica can't help losing the thread of her writing and of the baseball game as well. . . .

This too and "out of place" (two pages later) in Monica's notes: Australian documentary ends with what scene exactly not noted and when Monica switches back to the Dodger game the score is 7-5 because Driessen just hit a home run.

Let's see, this too: in the middle of or after trying to write and at the same time follow both a baseball game and a documentary about the "Inland Waterways of Australia" Monica's cousin Roberta from Boston calls, distraught: doesn't know if Monica knows or remembers that this is the weekend she's visiting and that she'd arranged with Kitty to stay in Kitty's apartment on Mercer Street while Kitty and Happy are away on their camping trip, but Kitty forgot to leave the keys! So, obviously, she's locked out with nowhere to stay! Doesn't remember (or never knew) where exactly Kitty went — what campground or even what state — but does know that Kitty feels she's at a stage in her life where it's important to get more athletic. So she and Happy (or is she just supposed to say "Hap"?) are starting to (or just planning to start to) do a lot of hiking and camping and so on. . . . Breaks off to go back to the doorman and try a different strategy.

"Whatever distracts us from something deserves as much attention as what we thought we should be paying attention to." (Sentence Monica finds on a separate sheet of folded white scrap paper and can't remember when she wrote it or if she wrote it at all.)

Where, where exactly, in relation to all that came before on the evening and night of what day (exactly) in June, at the same time as other events or following impossibly clear blue water of Australia/green of Cincinnati outfield/call from Boston cousin: long view down into the un-shaded and well-lit window of Melissa and Ralph Aiello's groundfloor, driveway-side apartment (how many rooms Monica has never known) in Greg-and-Lena's massive chipped and stained white stucco and orange brick multiple dwelling. Melissa, rounded but not at all spherical, more torpedo-shaped, like a forest animal that's low-to-the-ground and always forward moving on four short legs, sniffing and foraging, is playing on the bed with her happy baby (name not remembered or noted or simply never-known) and Melissa-playing-with-baby reminds Monica to chronicle the fact that she's forgotten that just that afternoon David ran into Melissa in the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street, on her way out, reaching into a waxed white paper bakery bag and taking a bite out of one of the brownies she'd just bought. (Not noted which of two possible brownie options David sees Melissa eagerly biting into: either dark chocolate iced with a moist cake-like texture and no nuts or un-iced but with a crisp top crust, fudgy interior laced with walnuts.)

Late the same night: deep, tortured sobbing, not a baby's practical crying to solve simple physical discomfort, but the cosmic sobbing of a young child brushed for no good reason by the solar wind of mortality. May have to wait a lifetime for the grief that settles in her now — in the narrow, elbow-shaped attic bedroom in this New York neighborhood that's less like a suburb than a small coastal town with a strangely miniaturized and accurate model of Manhattan always in its North-facing windows — to return with more intensity and no better explanation.

Lena's come in and is saying something calming in a sweet and soothing voice that nevertheless isn't soothing or calming little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond who continues to sob for most of the night.

All of it audible to Monica because Lena's left the windows of the narrow attic children's bedroom — more or less parallel to or slightly above Monica's red studio south-facing, driveway-side windows — open for the summer months.

Monica has a decision to make that she can't make and that seems to be deciding itself for her: tired of writing about roses, but here in her notes, already chronicled and demanding to be transcribed and edited, are more observations — observation after observation, popping up between other observations and mini-narratives like weeds — about roses.

For example, notes say "red roses last June and this June, around the time of Hugh Fox's visit and interview, a big vaseful of red roses on her enormous oak-desk-and-breakfast-table, flanking her electric typewriter along with a small potted pine brought back from Virginia by Lowell (visiting a very pretty, fresh-faced nurse named Margaret he may be falling in love with) along with a so-called 'asparagus' plant and a spiny one with crimson-rimmed leaves notes call a 'marginata', but which David needs to do research on so Monica can be certain. . . ."

Let's see: what else about roses that Monica has no choice but to transcribe: pink roses are surviving better than red: they're brighter, smaller (more tightly furled) and have a more lasting and penetrating aroma (seems able to find the nose wherever it is). "A few vibrant bunches of bright, fragrant pink roses."

Digression (and relief) from roses:

Pat Corcoran is angry: not expressed directly to Monica, but so audible — so loud — on the porch from the Corcorans' groundfloor front-porch-facing apartment that she might as well have sat down in the porch rocker next to Monica and talked right into Monica's folded sheet of scrap paper as if it were a tape recorder: "Days like this! Why'm'I saying 'days'? It's this shit'n house! Fuckn' shade comes off in my hands!" Louder still, but more muffled, head turned the other way, toward "Johnny" somewhere deep in the dark interior (all rooms peculiarly dark under low ceilings, all the many windows facing west (porch) and south (driveway) heavily shaded by the wide slats of ancient wooden venetians that are never open): "CAN'T EVEN BOTHER TO PUT FOUR SCREWS IN THE FUCKN SCREEN DOOR!" Monica can hear John Corcoran's tenor voice forcing its way into the open air of ABC Street from the deep interior darkness and also through how many dense atmospheres: "Whadya think, Pat? My life doesn't stink too? Huh?! Forget that I have a fuckn job I have to go to every stinkn' day? That I have to work, Pat?!"

While Pat and John are fighting, little blond-blond Timothy Corcoran's puppy (breed and name not remembered, never known and/or not recorded) sneaks out of the house and curls up on the porch at Monica's feet for the first time.

"Bright pink roses" in the Czechoslovakian crystal vase: "bright" because of light amplified in water by light amplified in glass? While pink of roses in dark green pottery vase is only called "sharp" and roses have "mysteriously dark (black?) centers" because of light not amplified, but cancelled?

Dominick Ianni is mowing Sylvia Greengrass' two meager lawn squares again.

Notes say that Yvonne Wilding and Al Szarka both complained (separately or together not noted) about Monica and David, but not noted who they complained to, who repeated the complaints to Monica or what the complaints are about.

While Monica is on the porch and taking quick notes about Timothy Corcoran's un-named puppy and about Sylvia Greengrass' lawn she's also trying to write a sketchy sentence or two about the extraordinarily fine rain that was falling "earlier", when she was still upstairs in her green front studio and could see — through the cheap bamboo roll-up blinds with their random pattern of dark lines and brilliant dots and dashes of light because of scattered broken-off bits of fragile matchstick rods — that the rain is little more than an odd sprinkle condensing out of the atmosphere. Only lasts a short time, just long enough to make her think — without being able to remember the exact language — of von Doderer's description of a particular kind of rain that sprinkles like water from a watering can. Even if she were able to find von Doderer's exact language (most likely in The Demons) it would be a translation, therefore an approximation or an analogy and therefore a misinterpretation: a fact that wouldn't trouble Monica, or David either for that matter, because they discovered together a long time ago that art (including the hopscotching mutation of narrative from language to language and novel to novel and even from novel to film and back again) proceeds largely through misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Writers being influenced by the work of other writers in translation is only one path for creative misunderstanding. Global mutation of narrative through misunderstanding — and what else?, Monica wonders — leads to narrative that's weedy and resistant to easy digestion.

Let's see: notes say that Greg Coffin's band is leaving early to play (where not noted) "around three" and seems unusually excited about it. Their excitement gets Lena's attention and she calls out to Greg in a voice that's even more nervous and quavery than usual to ask why they're leaving "so early". (May have noticed, along with Monica, that all the band members have thrown much more clothing in the car than usual.)

Sketchy notations also about someone "new and unfamiliar" (someone David's been pointing out to Monica as an odd new twinkle in the Coffin/Forest galaxy).

First appears as "the blond ping-pong freak".

Next as "blond ponytail who doesn't play in the band and who seems much more interested in Lena than in Greg, Andy or anyone else in the band".

Monica chronicles the fact that David speculates, not for the first time, about "something going on" between Lena and blond, non-musical ponytail/ping-pong freak who's suddenly begun appearing in whatever space Lena happens to be standing in.

Also notes that Lena used to be followed around (the way beautiful Grete Forest was and still is followed around by Leo Romero, even though he's now married to and in love with equally beautiful Lily) by "Johnny", the depressed drummer who wore nothing but black and slept in a blackened room with blackened windows and Monica and David assumed that "Johnny" was a necessary, dog-like companion for Lena, tolerated or welcomed by Greg because Lena might otherwise notice that she's ignored and left alone to keep house and raise the kids. . . .

Now the "blond ping-pong freak" appears as "the tall blond guy with a ponytail", as in "the tall blond guy with a ponytail seems bored" and that may explain why there's suddenly as much ping-pong being played in Greg-and-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room as when the tournament was on.

Beautiful and glamorous platinum-haired Lily Romero comes out on the tiny concrete-and-orange-brick front porch with shaky wrought-iron railing to keep Lena company (tall blond guy with a ponytail inside playing ping-pong with languorous strokes that have sudden whiplash finishes against what opponent not noted) while she's brooming.

Lily calls out to Minnie Liman (thin as a profile drawn on a sheet of paper, paper profile then held sideways so that you're not sure if you're seeing drawing or even paper anymore) walking by slowly in the gutter with the Liman family sheepdog, Sally. Not noted if Minnie pauses to chat, but Monica does note that soon after Lily waves to Minnie Lena's little porch becomes absurdly crowded: young and handsome Riley Liman (younger and slighter than older, blond brother Tommy, his fine milk-chocolate hair combed in a straight, flossy diagonal across his forehead and always-beautifully-tanned skin making him look un-related to any other Liman) who's brought his friend Sergei up with him, Greg-and-Lena's big black Newfoundland, Grendel, Lily Romero, Lena, an unknown friend of Lena's or Lily-and-Lena's named "Linda" and tall blond guy with a ponytail, who's torn himself away from ping-pong to crowd himself in near Lena's still-attractive plum-like face and plaintive eyes.

Sometimes the Chronicle corrects itself before Monica has a chance to notice that something's wrong.

For example: first it says "same June day or another".

Then it seems to catch itself and change direction slightly and say "no date noted, only 'a grey Saturday in June' ".

And then again: "though it may not be a 'grey Saturday in June' of '76, it may be 'a grey Saturday in June' of '77, when Monica is typing (editing) June of '76".

Let's see: the "World Series of Poker" is being broadcast from Las Vegas and that makes Monica wonder if her new 25" color tv will be another distraction and also if that's the same thing as saying that what she finds herself watching (even if only in random flashes) may turn out to be still one more thing (one more digression) to chronicle.

(Jack) Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson

Bones Berland

Saratoga Slim

Amarillo "Treetop" Straus are some of the players still in the tournament at the point the "World Series of Poker" catches Monica's attention and distracts her from what? — what exactly? — not noted.

Notes say that Monica "goes back to work" and that she also changes channels and is immediately distracted — from her work and from the "World Series of Poker" also — by the "Irish Sweepstakes", being broadcast live from County Kildare, Ireland and about to begin. Span of the race is, of course, much shorter than the span of the slow-moving poker tournament so Monica (work suspended?) is easily able to see that "Minstrel" is the winner of the Sweepstakes and still turn back in time to learn that

a player named "Milo" has been eliminated and that

Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson

Bones Berland

Buck Buchanan and

Junior Sailor are the only players remaining.

Monica notes that the white fog powdering the air ("white fog" of June '76 or of June '77 again not perfectly clear) dissipates almost immediately, as if swept away by the harsh strokes of Lena Coffin's brooming.

Not noted whether from inside (looking down and almost directly across the way, at the slightest diagonal to the right (Northwest), through the green studio's bamboo blinds, or blinds rolled up (one half multi-panel casement window cranked open)) or from her front porch rocker behind the tall and wide Rhinebeck pine: Monica sees an oversized station wagon (color, make and model not noted) with uncommon red license plates (therefore should be easy for someone to figure out from what state) pull into the driveway of the massive yellow-and-brown hacienda-style multiple dwelling where Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle lives with her ex-Marine Corrections Officer husband and two lightbulb-headed boys, Hank and Willy.

Chronicle says that it's Nancy Wattle's family, but doesn't say how she knows that: large woman (Nancy's size and shape or larger in every dimension) and a fat man whose massive head has settled so far down between his fat shoulders that it's turned the neck into a ring of something doughy and pliant that doesn't look like a neck, just an unbaked roll of stuff forced out by the weight of the massive skull-ball.

Next time Monica looks only Bones Berland and Doyle Brunson are at the table and a little later (elapsed time not noted) the voice-over narrator says that "Doyle 'Texas Dolly' Brunson has just won 'The Worlds Series of Poker' again — two years in a row! — using the same exact strategy and holding exactly the same winning hand!".

One of the children visiting Nancy Wattle has "BRIDGMAN" lettered in red across the back of her shiny blue jacket and Monica has no idea what it means and hopes that someone else will.

Monica's raw notes Sunday and Monday the 20 and 21 of June, and even some leftover bits of Saturday the 19, seem scrambled together on purpose with a fork and a small mixing bowl. It may be possible to figure out chronology and/or assign definite dates to all or some of the scrambled bits while going over her notes, but as Monica begins she isn't at all sure she can or even if she wants to.

Thankfully very little about roses.

Let's see: while editing typed sheets about snow in February she's looking at "bright pink roses" in a vase (ceramic or glass not noted). And "sunlight on pink roses and green leaves on Sunday".

Notes also say "the bright pink roses of June" and, in the same sentence, talk about "fog" lifting and about an "oppressive mist" that's been sitting only over ABC Street and the other streets leading directly to the beach or, possibly, over the whole small-town-like beach community or even over all the streets of New York City, but whether in "June" or in "February" notes don't make clear. "Now" or "then"?

"At 9:30 a.m. on Monday" the front doorbell rings: a registered letter and a small package for Monica, delivered not by Lou the rolypoly mailman but by a thin and unfamiliar substitute. Monica has to search through pages of folded and scribbled scrap paper notes to find out that three copies of Chicago Review (date and/or issue number not noted) with Monica and David's story In Doubt (novel excerpt altered to make it a free-standing story) were in the little package and that the registered letter is a check from Confrontation (for what exactly not noted).

"Pink roses last longer than red and are more fragrant."

A short burst of warm sunlight, blue sky and wild breezes blowing clouds where there's no fence to catch on. And for exactly the same brief span Fionnuala Regan, Joan Regan and Old Rae Ryan (wearing royal blue or not not noted) are on the Regans' porch together, talking about what, what exactly, no one will ever know.

Let's see: a few not-quite-events chronicled "on Sunday": Ernie Brennan, Margaret's ex-husband (Daisy's father), who rarely appears on ABC Street to see Daisy and who, Monica thinks she remembers from Margaret, gives next-to-nothing or nothing toward support for Daisy, is here today. Here on this Sunday because it's "Father's Day"? Passes with Daisy now (on foot or in Ernie's unchronicled old car, not noted). Father and daughter looking natural and relaxed and happy to be together or just a tall once-blond-but-not-so-blond-anymore, no-longer-quite-so-lean-and-muscular-as-once-upon-a-time-in-the-Navy, sober-therefore-not-so-irritable-and-impatient guy passing for no obvious reason with a little blonde girl of ethereal, almost transparent beauty.

Nothing further about Ernie and Daisy for pages of crowded, hard-to-read notes and then a solitary sentence — almost lost between paragraphs of other almost-events — about Margaret, Daisy and Ernie "returning" from unchronicled, off-screen space and no further notes about them for as many pages as Monica feels like searching ahead.

Other not-quite-events "on Sunday":

Someone who speaks a little English but not much is pounding with the side of one fist on the front porch door. Manages to tell Monica a fragment of at least one story: a fragment that sounds like fragments of several splintered stories: he's looking for "Stevie" (Themis/Spylianos' substitute) because he's supposed to leave "Stevie" his car (unchronicled/undescribed car at the curb, too long a story to explain why) and also of course, the car keys, but "Stevie" isn't answering, so what should he do?! Leave the keys in the mailbox? Does Monica know if that's safe? Car and keys so close to each other, so obvious. . . ? Maybe this could work: leave the keys in the mailbox with a note — in Greek of course, so no one can read it — explaining where the car is, then park the car on another street. . . .

"Stevie"'s friend leaves, heading North —>, then out of view.

Notes suggest that Monica leaves pretty much at the same time and that when she returns she finds "Stevie"'s friend taking the keys and the note out of the mailbox. She finds that she can follow his broken English well enough to understand that it made him too nervous to leave the keys, but can't follow him enough to understand his long explanation. Seems to say that he knows "Stevie" well enough to lend him his car, but doesn't know if "friend" is the right word for it. He used to work with Steve in the kitchen of the Cornucopia Diner and when he worked in the diner he lived in a house like this on ABG Street, but now he lives in Bay Ridge Brooklyn and has his own little business (nature of business not told or not noted) in Jersey (town not noted or not told).

More about the car, but Monica can't follow it.

Monica notes again, or same sentence is repeated, that now that the unpleasant mist has lifted the breezes are wild and exhilarating. Air has an unusual glow that makes the body tingle. Soul can barely hold on to a corner of the world and grips it tight with hands and teeth — as if holding a crisp white sheet from a neighbor's clothesline that unexpectedly sails into blue sky.

Also "on Sunday": from time to time Monica enjoys taking an outdoor shower on Salem Avenue in one of the two rough wooden stalls hammered together by Alyosha out of old planks painted forest green and attached to the back of the house: so many spaces and separations above and up-and-down the hammered-together doors that the green and blue world, local and cosmic, easily sails in and Monica can gaze out while she's showering: today (or may only be chronicling it "today 'on Sunday' ", but occurred "a day or two ago") she's able to see — while not-quite-cold water is washing soap from her skin — "green peaches, small as apricots", hard, not even quite round, with no more edible flesh on them than walnuts, yet a beautiful parrot green flushed with a whole other spectrum of unrealized yellows, oranges and reds in neighbor-to-the-West Blanche's uninteresting backyard.

Rosamond Coffin is angry again. What happened (what happened exactly) is uncertain, but seems to be this: Lena warned Rosamond not to bicycle too far from the house, to stay within view (exact point along ABC Street headed South —> toward boardwalk and beach where Rosamond would no longer be visible to Lena on her little orange brick porch would have to be paced off, but Monica's busy and David's not in the mood). Rosamond set off bicycling toward Babette's at the far south end of the street and as soon as she became hard to see Lena called her back. Rosamond ignored her mother's anxious voice, of course, and Lena had to call again, "ROSIE! TURN AROUND AND COME BACK: RIGHT NOW!" over and over in a high, trembling quiver piercing enough to carry to Babette's and maybe even to the beach and through a few waves, but Rosamond kept pedaling without turning her head until Lena had to come after her and carry her back screaming. Crying and screaming hasn't stopped to this minute. "NO! NO! NO! NO!" etc. and "EVERYONE ELSE CAN DO IT! NO ONE ELSE GETS CALLED BACK!" On and on endlessly, audible even now in the background when Artie Tilden (pinched white shrunken-head-face and long red ponytail) drags himself without energy up the front porch steps and settles down on the wide railing as if he's in the mood, listless as he is, to tell Monica stories:

a lot of opinions about "Stevie", about Themis/Spylianos and Greeks in general and even about the way life works. Longwinded opinions and tiny, almost granular fragments of stories, as usual. For example: Artie Tilden (never a loony conspiracy theorist like Lon Gurion) is convinced that there's a "Greek Mafia" that no one knows about. This guy supposedly called "Stevie" is a perfect example. He (Artie) was no fan of Spylianos', but this guy is different. He's slimy. Hasn't Monica felt the same thing? His habits and his activities are suspicious. A lot of things are done on the sly and you can't get a straight answer out of him. He comes and goes at weird hours that working in an all-night diner can't account for. Sometimes he (Artie) hears him sneak in or out at 4 a.m.! What diner shift begins or ends at 4 a.m.?! And the phony blonde "girlfriend"!? At first he never saw her. She was kept hidden. And now he keeps running into her on the porch half-dressed! — still pulling her little "waitress"'s skirt down over her ass! Does Monica buy that story? His theory is that she's a low level actress who's paid to be "the girlfriend". It makes him nervous to have people like that living in the house and he's sharing his thoughts — even though he knows it could make him sound a little cracked — because he can tell that Monica hasn't been paying serious attention to it.

Supposedly relaxed and lounging on the railing, not-quite-hidden by the heavy green bough-pads of the Rhinebeck pine, Artie's wound up and can't stop talking.

This whole business with the so-called friend pounding on the door — does Monica know what that was really all about?! Well, he does! This is the story (or at least whatever he knows for sure): apparently the pounding by the so-called friend woke "Stevie" up. Just as he himself came out into the hall "Stevie" opened his bedroom door a crack and took a little step into the hall, half-dressed and nervous. Made a "sh-shh-ing" gesture to him (Artie): didn't want the "friend" to know he was home. When the pounding stopped and it seemed as if the coast was clear "Stevie" told him a crazy tale about "switching" or "trading" cars. For some reason the guy felt entitled to take "Stevie"'s prized green Mustang and leave some piece of shit in its place! Monica must'v seen how angry the guy was that "Stevie" hadn't left the keys to the Mustang!

There's this too, as the background to everything: when Spylianos was living here, he (Artie) hardly ever had a real conversation with him, except one time, when they hardly knew each other and Spylianos must have been under a lot of stress and in need of someone to talk to, he spilled his guts about something Monica may already know, but he didn't: once-upon-a-time and apparently not-so-very-long-ago Spylianos was living the good life in South Florida and for some reason was known as "Themis" there. Came north to get away from a situation. Didn't go into detail unfortunately, but in his (Artie's) opinion (and it may even have been Themis/Spylianos' point) whatever made him run away from a very pleasant and luxurious life in South Florida is the experience that formed Themis/Spylianos' current philosophy of life: that it doesn't matter how you get your money. Being rich is in every case better than being poor. Everyone dies no matter what. So what does it matter in the end what you did to get your money?! Etc., etc. Everything that spilled out had that bitter flavor.

So, for him (Artie) (and it should be for Monica too), the crucial thing is to figure out what "mistake" Themis/Spylianos made in Florida that could have been serious enough to force him into exile here! Who was he? Who was he really? And why was he disguised as a cook in an all-night diner in this out-of-the-way corner of the city, living in a dark and crappy little rental apartment here in this house or in another just like it in the middle of Brooklyn somewhere. . . .

And now they have this replacement, without the "Florida" story but doing exactly the same thing! It's strange and it's scary and he seems to be the only one aware of it!

Not clear in Monica's rough notes — in the main body of writing whose solid blocks and slanted coils resemble sentences and paragraphs or in the knotted, overlapping and unspooled alphabets stacked in the margins — whether or not it's "a hot, sunny Sunday". Are the hammering and mowing, electric sawing and drilling and the hollowness and echoing that make the deep arc of the sound horizon of a hot, sunny Sunday (and what else?) the ingredient of experience we're painfully aware we're losing as soon as the porch door closes behind us? Can't be found by the one scribbling on the porch, like a painter whose work depends on obsessive out-of-doors looking and sketching who finds she's missing a pigment that's necessary but unavailable? Longing for the impossible physical brushstroke of color drives the writing of the one scribbling on the porch as much as the need to keep what ambles horizontally across her path from disappearing?

Sounds of electric sawing, pounding of nails into wood, etc. on the front porch while Monica's writing and then the same sounds through windows open in every room in every direction when Monica's briefly upstairs, making herself something to eat (or, more likely, eating something David made for both of them) .

Now she knows for sure that it is the "hot, sunny Sunday" in her notes because on the next folded and crowded sheet of scrap paper it says that Monica turns on her new tv while they eat and at first they watch a black bear eating apples and honey by moonlight and then (notes say) she and David are trying to decide whether a remake of Beau Geste (actors and director not noted) is interesting enough to keep them indoors watching tv "on Sunday, June 20 around 6 p.m.".

Anne Marie returns (on a bicycle, color not noted) from delivering a Father's Day package and then Anne Marie and Artie Tilden go off together (both on bicycles!), headed for Father's Day dinner with Artie's parents.

What is the ingredient of experience that's bound to feel as if it's missing (and therefore always-being-strived-for by the one scribbling-as-if-sketching on the porch) because it can't be ground like a just-discovered pigment for the obsessive painter who also can't stop looking at the clothesline reflected in the picture window or at the ruin on the hillside and trying to figure out what she/he's really seeing or how seeing is possible at all (the thing that's "over there" and continues to be "over there" is now also "here").

Whatever in the atmosphere needed to be cleared (invisible background dust of the erosion of everything visible only as a sudden lack of clarity) cleared by wind. And because of this clearing of the atmosphere Monica is able to see a grasshopper (notes in crowded scrap paper margin that she needs to chronicle the fact that she hasn't seen a grasshopper in years) jump from a blade of tall, unmowed grass into the Rhinebeck pine's deep and layered universe with its elephant-ear needle-pads and cave-like depths, honeycomb of hiding places, creaks, hums and micro-buzzes, aromas that have their own second and third aromas that only hidden creatures, and not Monica or anyone else, can ever know. Disappears and no way to know if it springs out immediately somewhere out of view (on the western side of the pine toward the sidewalk, for example) or if it spends the rest of its short life hiding there.

"Just a little later" Monica is sitting on the windy beach, leaning against a log. The same wind that's sorting sand-that's-eager-to-travel-westward from sand-that's-happy-where-it-is and sending curled sheets of the more restless sand grains across what's chosen to form a stationary underbed imagining itself as a dark shelf of solid rock, shifting the contours of the beach surface utterly but invisibly, is having trouble shifting the surface of the ocean. Wind cuts directly to the bottom and stirs up a dark, sleepy layer that colors the surface mass of piled-up inclines. Silty darkness mixed with ocean's off-blue intensifies contrast of ocean's mineral mass with creamy blue of sky thumb spreads with pleasure straight out of the tube.

No human figures on the beach, only a few not-so-common terns. Boardwalk is also deserted until Grete Forest appears with Allison Savas, zipping up the hoods of their sweatshirts (colors not noted) as if they have something to talk about and are about to descend and take a long walk together along the shoreline. And, a few seconds after that, when they're already on the beach and starting to walk west with the wind at their backs, Babette Coffin runs after them barefoot, calling out something urgently that Monica wishes she could make out and chronicle, but can't.

"Thick white curtains" noted earlier "today" or "yesterday" in the Rosenwassers' north-facing picture window, making it a mirror with ambiguous depth under the glaring surface that's endlessly taking unstable snapshots of a wide arc of ABC and ABD Streets all the way to the intersection with Coast Boulevard, is pulled back so that Monica can see Annie Rosenwasser blowing bubbles for a child hidden from view.

Chronicle notes (because they've just become visible again?) that Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle's oversized family has been visiting: woman as big as or bigger than Nancy Wattle is wedging herself behind the steering wheel of the station wagon with uncommon red license plates and Nancy is sliding in next to her.

Smell of barbecuing (which neither a human nose nor a dog's nose can ever ignore): hot wind makes it impossible for nose — no matter what its powers of deduction — to trace aroma to its source. Steak that seems to be charring, fat that seems to be dripping down to sizzling-and-smoking fire-and-embers on ABC Street could be travelling on unpredictable updrafts from ABD and/or ABB Streets and from any location between bay and ocean. Updrafts can too easily swirl around the bulk of massive old mansions long ago converted into multiple dwellings and rooming houses and through yards and driveways and up to Monica's nose sniffing the universe through a cranked-open casement window.

Against Monica's will and, even more important, against the Chronicle's will, more roses:

Dark, strawberry centers of creamy pink roses against dark green leaves. And dark green and strawberry and pink (how much cream stirred into the strawberries exactly?) plus ever-present, looping avocado vines against bamboo blinds' screen of broken horizontals.

Monica and David are sitting at Monica's big, green-studio oak desk/breakfast table sharing a simple breakfast of brie cheese with two kinds of famous Peninsula Bake Shop bread (what kind not noted, though superior sourdough salt sticks and dark "Russian Health" bread most likely) and iced coffee (mild and creamy with thickest heavy cream and lots of ice in tall iced-tea-type glass for Monica, black or near-black in bottomheavy bar glass for David) with big wedges of Peninsula Bake Shop's not-too-sweet lattice-pie-crust-covered strawberry pie for desert.

Same day or another very much like it: air smells of pine and roses.

Peculiar intensity of sunlight: in excessive brightness of atmosphere, as if every photon is plugged in and turned on. Blue screen of sky is also peculiarly illuminated, switched on and waiting for a picture to form.

Unusually quiet: every object solidly built up of units of light, but not of sound. Only sound recorded the inwardly rumbling engine, like a full metal barrel rolling back and forth across its thin belly, of a small plane very high up and painted a weak and tender blue.

Nicole Renard drives by heading north —> toward Coast Boulevard and beyond, Babette Coffin in the passenger seat and an unfamiliar man in the back. Monica wonders if Nicole is about to make a right turn on Coast Boulevard (or drive straight (north) to Bay Drive and make her right there) and then head east in the direction of Long Island, where (Monica thinks she remembers, but can't be certain) Nicole's never-seen-on-ABC-Street father used to and may still live. Wonders also if she's wrong in thinking she remembers an estranged brother, rarely seen by Nicole and never seen on ABC Street, who could be the unknown man in the back seat, having flown in from another city or country and for some reason driving now with Nicole and Babette to visit the rarely-seen father on Father's Day.

"Bright orange flowers" (tiger lilies?) are suddenly blooming at the front of the house and also on the north side where there's a narrow alley with a fence and a few thin hedges between the massive multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house and the landlord's ugly two story no-longer-modern.

What else on this day in June?

Monica only chronicles the return of Nancy Wattle's overweight family, but nothing about them.

Beautiful, wavy-haired Martina (Tina) Lima and bright and beautiful, tadpole-faced Jojo Coffin stop in front of the porch where they know that Monica's working (walking north —> or south <— not noted) to ask Monica if she got a haircut. Clear to Monica that they're disturbed to not see Monica's long, dark waves of hair (deeply troubled that is by the idea that Monica would cut her hair or, even worse, have it cropped in a "beauty parlor") and also visible to Monica that they're relieved to learn that all Monica's done is tuck her long, wavy hair inside the collar of her denim shirt because it was blowing into her eyes and interfering with her work.

Monica notes this slight mirror inversion of language: just wrote "long, long days of middle-to-late June" and, a few minutes later, while typing/editing winter '76/'77 Chronicle, reads "long, long nights and short days of January".

"At 7:30 p.m." sun has faded, eternal chill has risen from every boring little lawn-plot of earth and Monica is inside closing her windows against it.

"At 9 p.m." wind picks up, sweeping down ABC Street from the beach and bringing an utterly different kind of chill with it, one that unpleasantly evokes the light of late autumn with its wan sunlight and saturated orange and the early part of winter she was just re-experiencing while editing her Chronicle.

Return to winter rattles ancient windows now that they're fastened.

Let's see: a little conversation about writing indoors vs. writing out of doors. Monica says to David that she's noted that he's been writing out of doors lately, though, as they both know, unlike her he finds writing out of doors distracting because whoever passes or stops to tell him a tale doesn't then get included in what he's doing. It's an intrusion and a break in his concentration and the inner-ness that he needs and she doesn't. He needs the quiet and isolation of a room with a desk and books — so why has he been out of doors so much? He's not sure, he says, but knows this much: while he's been working on The Menaced Assassin or occasionally building a chamber fiction he's found that he's happier and in a lighter mood when he's outside and probably for some of the same reasons that Monica loves and needs to be outside. But when he's working on something like "Talking About Jerry, Cherry & Rudi" he finds working out of doors impossible. Then every little thing is an annoyance and a distraction and if someone stops to talk to him it gives him a headache: he feels the need to be at his desk with his papers spread out around him and no fear of something urgent blowing away. . . .

On June 21 David cuts more roses ("another vaseful"), giving Monica no choice but to write the word "roses".

Male and female cardinals together for only a few seconds on ABA Street: red-red-red of male — that is, red in every part and feather and hard to say if each red flame is the same as every other red flame or if each red is deeper and more saturated in its brightness than the red settled just under or alongside it: female just as beautiful but subtler, with indescribable not-quite-pomegranate-or-persimmon red flushes and brushstrokes through shaded nutmeg browns, only crest and tail dipped like brushes into cans of undiluted red paint.

Lena Coffin (purely as an image in Monica's local image world) is not having a good day: bad enough, that is, that it's one of Lena's many brooming days, but today she's made it worse by wrapping her hair in a dull, floral-printed kerchief: a skinny old lady twinned by her beloved broom-companion.

Let's see: indoors, in Monica's green studio, pink rose petals on dark, scuffed wood of desk and on golden and slightly more varnished wood of floorboards.

Just-cut roses (red or pink?) replace dying roses in an un-chronicled vase and still some life left in pink or red roses in clear glass pitcher.

"A little after 6 p.m." Monica moves from her behind-the-pine porch rocker to the pleasant quadrangle of sunlight on the porch steps and continues looking out at the street and writing there, a familiar way of extending the writing life of the day.

Notes say either a "grey June day" or a "green June day", fragrant and moist.

Directly across the way — a straight line with no angle at all, so that Monica can't help watching in an undisguised way — always-housecoated-and-frazzle-haired brown/blonde Mrs. Sloth steps reluctantly out of her interior, goes to the mailbox and seems surprised to find a letter there. Tears the envelope open at once and, with a dramatic gesture of annoyance as if the little porch were a stage with no one but Monica to make an audience, clearly doesn't like what she's reading. (Not noted whether she goes back in.)

Fionnuala Regan always has little yellow-haired Matthew dressed well, as if solely for Monica to pay attention to and enjoy chronicling his clothing: a navy-blue-and-bright-vegetable-green-striped polo today with brand new cobalt denim coveralls. He's bicycling toward home on his little bicycle and his father (the only Regan Monica doesn't know (has never even spoken to)) is walking slightly behind little Mathew, keeping an eye on him without interfering.

A little later (how much later exactly not noted) Mathew's father/Fionnuala's husband is wheeling baby Becky in a handsome new carriage, surprisingly not south from the Regans' toward the boardwalk, but north toward Coast Boulevard, Mathew following, again on his little bicycle and now with a lightweight, pale blue jacket covering his green-and-navy-striped polo. Cold metal of carriage push-bar held with one hand, short dog-leash wrapped around other, transmitting tugging of little poodle's circumscribed wandering up through arm and brain toward what?

Father/husband stops suddenly: tells little Mathew not to move! and not to take his eyes off his baby sister's carriage! He forgot his cigarettes and just has to run back to Gramma Regan's house to get them. . . .

Bright vegetable green of towel in whose "left hand window" of whose house almost matches green stripes in little Mathew Regan's polo. (Little debate with herself, and then with David, about whether it's crazy to bother recording the color or even the existence of this green towel that may be part of a pattern so large it takes forever to see it or just one item in a not-exactly-random catalogue of sheets, towels, etc. whose visibility (only as window-reflections?) is regular but always surprising.)

Another license plate — or just a clearer view of one Monica's already chronicled? — on one of the vehicles belonging to Nancy Wattle's (visiting) oversized relatives: not solid red as recorded in an earlier scrap-paper note, but red white and blue arranged like this: flag-like white stripes on red color field/white stars on blue color field and "76" and "MICHIGAN" in white on red or blue field not noted.

Allison Meehan's style and arrival time home have both changed (and apparently with some relation one to the other): arrives home regularly every day (that is, of course, when Monica is there to record her) between 6 and 7 p.m. and her look is now the look of the tailored and style-conscious Manhattan office worker: understated skirt or slacks, simple blouse and jacket and so on, limited variables too subtle and boring for Monica to document.

Another bicycle: Nadja's Andy rolls up quickly on his (what color?) racing bike, and skids to a stop in front of Greg-&-Lena's little orange brick porch. "Finally gave us a few more lifeguards!" he calls out to Monica for no reason in particular, carries his expensive bike up the front porch stairs and into the enclosed front porch ping-pong room.

From her angle on the porch steps Monica can't help having a clear view of roses and then she feels compelled to record them: as if the roses are pressing themselves between sheets of folded scrap paper that later can add up to a heavy volume of Chronicle no matter what she wants:

"bright pink roses"

dark green pad-like pine boughs

bright green of leaves (too many shapes and degrees of green to catalogue)

other clusters in other locations of "bright pink roses"

level but layered vista of pinks and greens dark <—> light and leaves <—> needles: broad fans and fluttering hearts.

Recorded against or without her will.

Sylvia Greengrass is watering her two little brick-and-iron-enclosed lawn squares and Monica can't help thinking of Sylvia's not-long-dead husband, Enos, whose main, perhaps entire, presence in the Chronicle is as an obsessive waterer-and-hoser, but not so much of lawn as of driveway and sidewalk, every crack and pore of old, discolored cement power-sprayed clean as if it were his own body. Deep need and pleasure could be felt from across the street. And always or almost-always shirtless, in baggy and faded Dutch blue shorts; bald, sun-baked, a lean rotisserie chicken too long on the spit.

Sylvia, possibly concerned about getting wet while watering the lawn, is wearing a long beige raincoat and matching rainhat.

Another steamy day in June or the same day.

Waggling lightbulb-headed Hank & Willy Wattle's father (ex-Marine with a slight-but-noticeable limp, haircut in short, stiff bristles like a wood-handled hairbrush) comes quickly down massive yellow hacienda-style multiple dwelling's brown front steps with one of Nancy's oversized relatives visiting from Michigan.

Surf-casting rods at 9 a.m.

A little later (exact time not noted), after Nancy's relative and Mr. Wattle (Nancy's husband's first name forgotten or never-known) have gone off quietly south <— toward the beach, another of Nancy's visiting relatives appears in front of the house between barren lawn squares: massive head, almost perfectly round and extraordinarily heavy, dropped down between pillowy shoulder pads, doesn't require a neck. Neck would be useless punctuation between masses. Sunken weight of head doesn't need the neck, padded bolsters of shoulders don't need the neck and great mass of body doesn't need (or even want) it either. Just another bull pawing the pavement, while it lights up an early morning cigar. Seems to be waiting for someone or something, but really content to do nothing but send off waves of being oddly translated into foul smoke-aroma blown by breezes between bay and ocean and carried by thermals to highest multiple dwelling or apartment house windows. Just one more empty space in the day he seems to have learned very well how to turn to his advantage.

Where is Monica (where is it logical for her to be?) when she writes "cool breezes blow red shutters" and also notes that David has his ear to one of the south-facing red room windows and is trying to memorize (and at the same time begin to quickly outline) a conversation he's deliberately overhearing between bearded-lifeguard-Andy (Nadja's Andy) and Andy's visiting teenage sister. No written version of the conversation given to Monica by David for the Chronicle, but David must tell her something because her notes say that Andy seems surprised and disappointed that his sister has so many questions to ask about the way he's chosen to live. At her age she should be more open and adventurous!, etc. Defends his choices, but sounds uncomfortable and depressed. May say that her questions are hard to answer in a way that's truthful and that she can understand with what she knows about life so far — so she'll have to wait a little while and then answer them for herself.

"Pink roses and green reflections of trees in muddy water" in Johnny Guitar.

Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar on Monica's new 25" color tv and no attempt by Monica or by David (as either or both of them often do) to get down any sort of scene-by-scene visual model of the narrative coupled with flights of memorized-but-not-necessarily-accurate dialogue, something like trying to quickly sketch in, in the middle of the night, a dream narrative's spatial dynamic while it's still fresh and hasn't broken down into a story that's vacant and conventional.

Any reading about Johnny Guitar comes "much later" (exactly how much later not noted). Film seems to just be there in Monica's notes not as a coherent narrative watched in sequence the way she would in a theater, but as a series of events among other events in the day — in the same way as, working on the porch, she sometimes looks down at the paper in her lap, sometimes looks out at whatever's crossing the open space between pillars, sometimes toward a movement or a sudden change of light to the left of the massive Rhinebeck pine. Or it's a little like opening a book at random and being struck by an unexpectedly concentrated model of reality, a fresh idea, a startling word-cluster on one page and then later opening the book somewhere else, further along or earlier, and reading in a way that has nothing to do with story-telling, just like the eye finding pleasure in different regions of the surface of a painting.

Mercedes McCambridge, dressed in black (black skirt or black pants not noted) and in a permanent fury cut down to a sharp, uneven edge from head to toe, leading a posse of men also dressed in black, gallops through landscapes and moves through interiors that are oddly pastel (pastel pink, pastel blue, pastel yellow and green) and whose oddity Monica puts off thinking about.

What does the "waterfall" noted by Monica have to do with Joan Crawford's white dress? or with the white dress's beautiful blue shadows?

Greg Coffin and Andy Forest, one slender, artistic and graceful, the other muscled and athletic, both tall but with one a bit taller than the other, are having a conversation in the cracked and weedy driveway, not far from where Monica is writing in the southwest corner of the porch, but what they're talking about is not chronicled therefore it's probable that Monica couldn't hear it.

Let's see: slightly later on the same June day?

Monica's changed her position: she isn't writing in her usual corner of the porch. She's on the porch steps (also a familiar location, leaning against one of the two rectangular walls that frame the steps and give her the illusion of being enclosed and hidden in an "observation post" position). Looking to her left (south) she notices that she's just a little below Lena Coffin on her small orange brick porch square, sewing while planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond is happily leafing through the illustrated pages of a book in her stroller.

Once happy, fresh and plum-like oval, now still oval, but without its gentle, plummy flush of life, plaintive-and-anxious-about-nothing-in-particular, yet oddly attractive if only as a residue of memory. Small, thin and girlish, yet her girlish, too-short sunback summer dress with what Monica thinks is called a "dirndl" waist, tight and positioned above the open bell of the flaring skirt-bottom, looks odd on her. An old-looking ten-year-old nervously trying to figure out what to do with herself while babysitting.

What else on "the same June day"? Trees are stirring leaf by leaf, not in masses: individual leaf sounds that make Monica want to count them on a blackboard in pyramids of 1's.

A pair of men's khaki shorts is drying in the right-hand window of which set of windows in whose house or apartment?

Allison Meehan, leaving for work in what color polo and jeans, stops to tell Monica another fragment of her story when she spots Monica not-so-concealed on the steps. Explains that she's carrying a light blue uniform on a hanger because she needed another job for the summer (no longer working at Boggiano's Clam Bar for reasons not chronicled) and there were no other jobs, so she's working at the McDonald's in Kings Plaza. Never finished high school, so she has no one else to blame. . . .

Must be "the same June day" because Johnny Guitar is still playing.

Out of order or just what's noted next: screen is red, not pastel, because Mercedes McCambridge is burning down Vienna's tavern.

Beautiful, Technicolor blue shadows on Joan Crawford's white dress again, but now she's sitting on a horse with a noose around her neck. Crowd of men (still in black) around her, being urged with fury and flames shooting out of "Emma"'s head-to-toe jagged edge: "get on with it!!", "hang her!!!" and so on. Not much dialogue recorded, but the visual meaning is clear: the men just can't bring themselves to do it. "If you want Vienna hung, you'll just have to do it yourself, Emma . . . !"

As Emma raises her whip to strike Joan Crawford's horse and put an end at last to white dress and blue shadows, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) appears (from where —within or outside the frame — exactly?) and — not clear in Monica's notes — if, after taking the noose off Vienna's neck, he carries her away, both of them on one horse, or if she's able to stay seated on her own horse and they ride away together, but separately.

Posse, unable not to be in black, rides after them.

Somehow (not accounted for here) Sterling Hayden and Vienna have gotten far enough ahead of the posse that they're able to "hide in the underbrush" without being spotted.

Ray manages a beautiful shot of flames in every window of Vienna's burning tavern as the posse in black gallops by.

Fat Agnes is (as usual) searching for Lou, the rolypoly mailman. Grateful to Monica for having spotted the mail truck zipping by north —>, where it must (Fat Agnes concludes) have made an immediate left turn onto Coast Boulevard west and another sharp and immediate left turn south on ABD Street toward the beach because, Monica says, she caught a glimpse of the red, white and blue of the truck again — through one of the narrow, telescopic driveways looking all the way through from ABC Street to ABD Street.

Fat Agnes says that today she doesn't have the energy to chase after him. Minutes later Monica sees Fat Agnes sit down at the corner of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard, resting uncomfortably near the bus stop on the low, uneven brick wall framing the sloping elbow of well-kept green lawn around the handsome ranch house of the prized "corner property".

Rests there for twenty minutes or so, but the mail truck never re-appears and she heads back toward the subterranean apartment near the boiler room she shares with her forever-ailing husband in the vast and sagging mustard shingle roominghouse (bitter or absurd signboard "SHANGRI-LA" hanging over the front steps on two short chains since when Monica has no way of knowing) Fat Agnes calls home.

Gives Monica a weak wave as she passes on the west side of the street, in front of roses on barren lawn after barren lawn and just before she's blotted out by the wide heavy pads of the Rhinebeck pine's needle-boughs and cave-like interior.

Old Rae Ryan (not noted here and not noted earlier whether or not either Rae Ryan or Fat Agnes is wearing her customary royal blue — royal blue dress in spring and summer, royal blue dress-coat-and-hat in fall and winter in the case of old Rae Ryan, royal blue baggy slacks, blouse, pullover and/or sweater in any season in the case of Fat Agnes) calls out from her usual rocking chair on the Regans' front porch where she has a small, pleasant groundfloor apartment running front-to-back just above the wide driveway between the Regans' three-story whitest white shingle and the Rosenwassers/Arlington sisters' no-longer-modern two-family to a woman (unfamiliar to Monica) with two children passing on Rae Ryan's side of the street in the direction of Coast Boulevard.

Wants to know where the unknown woman is headed, if she doesn't mind her asking.

"Not at all, Mrs. Ryan", unknown woman answers pleasantly and even seems to laugh at the insignificance of what she's doing. "Just a couple of things I forgot to get in the market. . . so I'm going to AAF Street to the little superette I don't like very much. . . . "

"Would it be too much trouble, would it be a nuisance, to ask you to pick up a quart of milk. . . ?" All of a sudden she just had to make herself some rice pudding! Can't remember the last time she made it and she just has to have it. . . !

"But with raisins or without, Mrs. Ryan, that's always the big question for me. . . ."

"Yes, that's true, and then: regular raisins or golden Sultanas. . . ?"

"Cinnamon?"

"And thick sweet cream!"

"Yes!"

Seems to Monica that both women are laughing a little together anticipating the taste of old Rae Ryan's rice pudding.

Pat Corcoran is taking blond-blond little Timothy to the beach and she's given in to Rebecca Geiger, who wants desperately to go too. Pat wants to get into the ocean and she's impatient, having trouble getting the children ready. Rebecca Geiger can't stop chattering away, telling non-stop-hard-to-believe tales, as usual. Even when they're finally down on the sidewalk, heading south with all their food and gear, Rebecca Geiger is exclaiming loud enough for all of ABC Street to hear: "I GOT UP AND MADE MY BED! AND HAD A CUP AND SAUCER!!"

All Pat Corcoran can do is shake her head and walk faster.

Old Rae Ryan seems (to Monica from across the street) a little surprised to hear the sound of Sylvia Greengrass's van. Or it's the fact that Sylvia Greengrass is calling out across the short distance between her (Sylvia's) narrow brick-and-iron front porch to the Regans' wide-open, white shingle porch next door to find out if "Mrs. Ryan" has seen Lou, the rolypoly mailman today.

"Are you expecting something, Sylvia?" Rae Ryan wants to know. "Waiting for something special?"

"To tell the truth, Mrs. Ryan, I don't know what's got into me. When Enos was alive I never used to care one way or the other about the mail — and the other day I caught myself crossing the street and running after him! What for, Mrs. Ryan? What exactly do I think is going to arrive in an envelope?" Long, uninteresting story about some mixup at the post office: wanted her mail held on certain days because she'll be away, but they made a mistake and they're holding it now so the postman can't deliver her mail, etc. etc. "Not that there's anything that matters, Mrs. Ryan, but it's driving me crazy anyway!" In fact, if Mrs. Ryan could explain it she'd be very grateful.

"Well, you know, Sylvia, maybe this isn't true for you, but it's a fact that it's often the case when the husband dies the world opens up a little for the woman who's left behind — as if, when you were seventeen or twenty, you were assigned a bad seat in a theater and you couldn't see anything and now you can move around and sit wherever you want. . . ."

All Sylvia Greengrass answers is that she knows that she never used to talk to any of her neighbors and never used to know anyone on ABC Street and now suddenly there are people who stop to say hello as if they know her.

"I used to read a lot and now I wonder if that's going to change."

Well, Rae Ryan says, she's always said hello to people and probably knows just about everyone on ABC Street and that hasn't stopped her from crocheting. She was good at it and friends and relatives used to ask her to embroider their pillow cases and tablecloths and napkins. . . but nobody uses those things anymore. . . . "So, even if I could still do it, it would be a waste of time!"

"Sunlight on roses" — but what color roses and on what lawn?

Notes say "the son is on the small space of his family's porch", but later (while typing/editing) Monica has no idea whose son she meant and whose porch he has his "feet up on the railing" of. She notes that she's not at all certain, but the only "son" she can think of who might be sitting with feet up on a little tinted stone rectangle with painted iron railing that doesn't deserve to be called a porch is squat landlord's lazy and irritable son next door (first house to the right (north)). Thinks to herself — without noting it down? — that image of landlord jr. lounging on porch next door might be one of those images that are impossible to see in a fresh way/as a unique event because they've been repeated so often with very little variation through the years, one image visible through the other by multiples brain and eye are too bored to register.

Monica wonders later what her rough notes mean when they say that "David is hard at work on a narrative written many years ago". What, for example, does the word "written" mean — what does it mean exactly — if David needs to be "hard at work" on it? "Written" only in the sense of a sketch that puts a reality on paper where there was nothing solely in order to have something to work on (endlessly molded, adjusted and shifted later like Feininger's sketches of the ruins of the church at Hoff near Dieppe, which obsessed him for most of his life and produced only a few complete masterworks).

Rarely-seen Al Regan is on his front porch with his son-in-law (name not noted or never known) and eldest grandson, Mathew, and both grandson and nameless son-in-law seem to have had their hair mowed short at the same time. All Al has to say to his son-in-law is that it's clouding up and son-in-law answers in kind that he heard that there might be a storm around three. . . . No record of how much of the afternoon passes in the same way extended horizontally along a hidden equator toward infinity.

Let's see: Andy Forest, Riley Liman, a slender, dark-haired boy who resembles Joshua Coffin but is chronicled as an unfamiliar boy named "Jonathan", Cathy Castle, Scarlet Castle and Martina (Tina) Lima go by not exactly simultaneously (width of sidewalk couldn't accommodate them), but singly or in pairs, one closely after the other as if they're all together, coming from the same place and headed toward the same place?

Just as the sun is setting through the clouds (exact nature of clouds not noted) the familiar sound of an electric saw making the minor alterations to the neighborhood that help keep it the same seems to usher in the muted light of not-quite-twilight and with it the damp coolness of earth with nothing earthen about it. (Region of mind's tongue devoted to tasting nothing but air currents alerts the brain and therefore all the other senses to the subtle flavors of the atmosphere.)

Monica decides on the spur of the moment to head to the boardwalk, where the atmosphere is entirely different: out through the gap between six-story apartment buildings (one on Southeast corner ancient yellow brick, one on Southwest corner newer-but-not-new conventional "red" brick) fronting boardwalk and ocean: weak sun still creating a solid diagonal plane across blue sky and ocean that's also blue, but blue ground up with shadow (infinite grains and flakes of minerals unfriendly to light).

"Walking in wan sunlight on new wood."

Fresh boards are still being fixed in place with battery-powered nailguns as Monica walks (makes her wonder if sound of battery-powered nailguns is what she took for electric sawing earlier) and as Monica's gazing at sunlight on boards and trying to make sure she remembers how color of fresh new boards and color of weak sunlight seem attracted to one another like walnuts and maple syrup Nancy St. Cloud appears: walking west, toward home, with little Tristan. Stops to explain (without Monica caring about an explanation) why she's on the boardwalk at this hour of the day, headed from the direction of AAF Street and its shops west —> toward ABF Street where the boardwalk ends and then toward home: she was looking for a pair of sneakers for "Ugo", Andre's good-looking slob of a nephew. Yes, she knows that Monica knows very well that she never liked Ugo (can't stand adolescent male pigginess is more like the truth) so the story of why she's shopping for sneakers for Ugo is too long and complicated to tell. Long and complicated and she really can't talk because she's in a hurry to get home and get ready for her session with Dr. Beechnut. Thinks Monica knows that she's been working with Dr. Beechnut (or working for Dr. Beechnut, she's not sure which is more accurate), but Monica may not know (because they haven't seen each other for so long!) that Dr. Beechnut's training her to treat the children who're in residence at Dr. Beechnut's Prometheus House in Manhattan.

In a hurry, but doesn't seem to want to stop talking, so Monica decides to walk Nancy home.

Let's see: Andre says he's fed up! Needs to get off the ship! That is, off ships in general. It's a French steamship line, isn't it? But does that mean that the French crew members are in any way favored or rewarded? No, it doesn't, of course not, quite the contrary! — as is usually the case in life, doesn't Monica agree? They're hiring a lot of cheap Columbian labor! and so on in the usual style: grievances about salary, unfair work demands, the laziness and incompetence of other nationalities etc. etc. What he'd like to do (as if talking to Monica, but actually picking up a conversation with Nancy where it left off x number of days ago, trying to persuade her that leaving his secure job on the ship is a good idea) is to go into the air conditioning repair-and-maintenance business with Ugo. Tristan's godfather Dewey (someone he's pretty sure Monica never met) does very well in it and makes enough just by working a few months in the summer. So (something you'd think Nancy would like!) — plenty of time off to have fun, travel, pay better attention to the family, pursue other interests, maybe even devote a little time to developing himself, like Nancy's doing. . . .

Nancy interrupts to remind Andre that he has to get ready: driving her to Manhattan. While she's working with Dr. Beechnut he'll find a movie (must be a war movie playing somewhere!).

What else? Nancy asks Monica if she wants something to eat: fried some artichokes last night and there're some left and some buffalo mozzarella marinated in olive oil, black pepper and [rest of recipe smudged]. Also plenty of leftover salad of provolone, Italian salami, medium-hot peppers and a few other things in a simple vinaigrette.

"Being typed in the red studio November 28 '77 around three in the afternoon."

Chronicling in a hurry when Monica doesn't feel like chronicling because Mikki called with 1001 tales to tell as if determined to re-insert herself into the Chronicle. Only the fact of the phone call and of the un-chronicled chronicling recorded here, but none of the tales.

When is it (same day or another?) that Nancy St. Cloud lets Monica know that she ran into Wanda Baer? Says she surprised herself: not only happy to see her, but was able to express her happiness! (Something she's been working on with Dr. Beechnut.) But, to tell the truth (and she (Nancy) knows how much affection Monica has for Wanda) Wanda's reaction to her warmth made her regret the fact that she allowed herself to show it. Wanda laughed a big, dumb laugh that may have come from being uncomfortable, but it made her (Nancy) uncomfortable and the expression on Wanda's face was the unattractive expression of the first face when it's trying not to let the world get a look at its second or third face. Then, as if she was trying to return her (Nancy's) warmth and friendliness, Wanda started complimenting Nancy's looks. How great she looks! So much better — and different — than last time! For one thing, her face is so much more open! Lost that terrible dark and inward look! etc. etc. Seemed a little familar and aggressive, but also pretty observant, so she might have been ok with it, but then Wanda started talking about her shape. Now, thank God, she could see what a nice shape I have. "'Last time you were wearing a sack: now I can start to picture what a beautiful body you must have!'" Should always wear form-fitting dresses like the one she's wearing today and on and on like that and looking her over the whole time. She's had to fight hard to learn not to tolerate that kind of stuff coming from a man, so why should she like it coming from a woman? Wants to know if Monica knows if Wanda Baer is usually that crude. Is that in general how Wanda responds to a little warmth and friendliness? Or should she (Nancy) be concerned that she still gives off a wavelength of passivity? that men and even women aren't afraid to cross all sorts of boundary lines with her. . . ?

Hastily scribbled notes that seems to refer back to another note now entirely forgotten by Monica: "a second robin spotted on ABF Street, near Coast Boulevard. The spotter tells Monica (trying to contribute to the Chronicle) that the robin "fell out of a tree" and has unusual "white markings on the tail and on the breast". Before looking at pictures in a bird guide David at once wonders if the spotter is ignorant and the fallen bird isn't a second robin, but a towhee. A tiny amount of easy research is all that's needed, but Monica is in a hurry to convert raw notes into typed sheets, even if un-edited, so she doesn't do the research and doesn't even ask David to do it, assuming someone else will or will at least be more certain than David is.

Nails being hammered with electric nailgun into new wood of boardwalk and into Chronicle as well.

Marginal complaint to herself (crowded in on a folded sheet of lavender scrap paper in a tumbling column of badly stacked words that are hard to make out minutes after writing): "'Typing/editing has never caught up to writing and probably never will.' Every writer's problem or only my problem because of my daily, obsessive chronicling. . . ?"

Band members seem to be having a meeting, out of view but clearly audible — so Monica can only guess who's saying what and doesn't even try, though some of the voices and some of the attitudes are easier for her to identify than others.

Let's see:

"It's new and it's tough. . . ."

"Tough because it's new?"

"No [third, different voice or same voice as first voice?], it's tougher to resign yourself to being corny than to risk something new."

"You have to decide: safe or risky. 'Decide or it decides for you'."

"So you really think my playing is 'corny'?"

"This is what I think: the willingness to change is never a 'decision'."

"You mean: your decision is whether to be willing and that came a long time ago, before you even thought of it as a decision? Is that what you're saying?"

"And I think the only thing that matters as a musician is finding a way to be yourself."

"Isn't being yourself the thing that comes naturally?"

"No, finding an interesting way to be 'yourself' is a struggle."

"Well, sometimes 'being yourself' isn't very interesting. Or entertaining either."

"The real struggle is the struggle not to be yourself. To make art out of your self. Every slob is 'being himself' without half trying and everyone has that slob-self waiting on his/her couch for the other, struggling self to just relax. . . . "

"So we're all just a bunch of slobs who have to learn to struggle against our natural selves and become exactly what? Or do I have it backward: we have to learn to resign ourselves to being exactly what?"

"Either way at least we're communicating, right. . . ?"

[General laughter and snickering.]

"Let's get to the point: everything has to happen in rehearsal. I have a new tone in mind for us and we have to work hard in rehearsal to get to that tone. I really believe that that tone can change everything."

"Oh, believe me, I can bullshit any tone. Musically I can go in just about any direction. And I can fool them and I can fool you and I can fool myself, cause it's all bullshit all the time."

"The way it sounds to me is that we're sick of being a rock'n'roll band and with this 'new tone' we won't be a rock'n'roll band. But what will we be?"

"You want me to shut up, but I'm just trying to clarify."

"Anyone here still dreaming of being a 'superstar'? Anyone here with the same old delusions?"

"No one here is delusional! What I'm hearing is that we'd all like to grow."

"I wouldn't mind a shot. Enough garages and basements, enough nowhere clubs, enough shitty payment for ten lifetimes! I'd like a little taste of whatever the other thing is, even if that's poison. Does that make me delusional?"

"Am I the only one who has a family to think about?"

"The nub of it is this: the band has to sound simple. I've been in a million busy bands and we've become just another busy band and I can't stand listening to us. I'm in the middle of it and I'm part of the busy-ness and I hate it."

"So now we finally got to the point of what's tough about the new idea. It is much harder to sound simple — to be simple and still be interesting — than it is cover up how boring and corny you are by sounding busy. . . ."

Same day and "out of order" or another day completely and out of order in a different way. Walking with Nancy St. Cloud (north —>) on ABF Street and just about to cross Coast Boulevard Nancy spots Marian Woolsey turning from the Boulevard onto ABE Street and hides herself behind Monica.

Gauzy, lightweight curtains are blowing in and out of "the righthand window" of Greg-&-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room. And, really paying attention and narrowing her focus, Monica sees someone (a woman, but not 100% certain that it's Lena) deeper in the interior, in a black dress with white polka dots, folding a large, vivid square of red and blue/green. If there's a pattern it's lost in the folding.

"Breeda Clifford" is in the margin of Monica's handwritten scrap paper notes, but the name is an almost illegible scrawl and Monica is certain that it's wrong (not quite certain, but thinks she remembers that the name scrawled in the margin is a blurred version of the actual name of handsome Ryan Lenehan's girlfriend and will have to be corrected "later").

Notes say that Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding pull up in an old blue-and-white Jeep that Monica doesn't recall having ever seen before. Notes don't say whether they linger to chat or go right in.

Someone talks about the "golden day": one of those rare and special days that "seem washed and scrubbed".

"As if it rained."

"Or rained nearby."

Humidity blown away and rain clouds with it.

A little sun?

"Yes, and now there are blue skies — as if sun and blue skies have something to do with one another."

"But don't we already know that?"

"Did it rain in Brooklyn?"

"Who said I was in Brooklyn?"

"Came from where then?"

"How should I know?! I've been a lot of places in the last few days! So all I can honestly say is that I just got home and it could just as easily be from anywhere!"

"Oh! but last night. . . !"

"Last night on Coast Boulevard!"

"Around 7:41?"

"7:41, yes. Sky was amazingly blue. Blue through bright green leaves!"

Sunlight, yet it was chilly.

Several women agree that "it felt just like autumn" and the conversation puts Monica in mind of the same exact moment in her green front studio: "at 7:41 last night" blinding sunlight through broken bamboo rods/sunlight on "beautiful avocado green of the walls"/"a film of green light" in the bamboo blinds giving them a sense of smooth coherence that they don't actually have/dark green leaves of the plants almost turned into the livelier green of the walls by the intensity of the sunlight.

At 10:30 a.m. (on a new day or same day already being chronicled?) Monica is in her favorite porch rocker behind the Rhinebeck pine drinking an iced Bustelo cappuccino and nibbling from a whole Peninsula Bake Shop strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Not known before, so how Monica knows "now" who Nancy Wattle's visiting relatives are isn't explained, but notes say "Nancy Wattle and her sister and her sister's husband" are "dressed up" (that is, dressed better than they usually are) and "going out to dinner". Husbands often go fishing together in the morning and family often barbecues together in the evening. Not known or not chronicled: a) whether family barbecues in a hidden corner of the broad brown and ochre stone porch or on one wing of the barren and lumpy lawn or b) always barbecuing fish caught by Wattle husband and brother-in-law or more traditional barbecuing of steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs, etc.. In any case, seems to Monica safe to conclude that Wattles and relatives have been eating at home every night before tonight.

Whole family leaves "around 4 p.m." in the afternoon of the day after Monica works late, typing on the cool porch.

Profoundly but also inexplicably melancholy sound of mourning dove, sighted first (by David) on Greg-and-Lena's crummy orange plastic awning and then in the narrow space, divided by a wooden fence and small plants, between the massive old multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house and the landlord's boring two-story pseudo-modern.

Nothing but thick folds of white curtains — that is, no complex reflections, layers, ambiguities and angles of distance and interior — in Rosenwassers' picture window in its fixed relation to Monica's vantage point.

Ryan Lenehan's girlfriend Breeda Clifford goes to Stella Maris. Source of information not noted and not noted either how Monica gets to read the Father's Day note Hap "Happy" Huntington Blank (Monica's sister Kitty's new husband) wrote to Alyosha, unless it's Alyosha himself, puzzled and amused or something else not so easy to name, who visits Monica to show her the note and get her angle on how to take it: be honest about his own uncomfortable feeling that the note is a little overboard and loony or get over it and try to enjoy Happy's way of expressing himself as something nice that he's just not used to.

"On Father's Day I need to tell you how much I love you for giving me Kitty!

"I didn't exist until I met her!

"Thank you for creating me!

"And since I exist now for the first time because of you, you're my father too!"

And maybe a little more like that.

(Monica fails to chronicle whether she helped Alyosha come down on the side of being-honest-about-looniness or acceptance.)

Notes say, but aren't perfectly clear about it, that "yesterday" Monica "finally found out" what it means when little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond ("Rosie") calls out "Ah-wah!"

Monica would have to check back in her notes to be sure, but thinks she always assumed "Ah-wah" meant "Bah-wah" for Rosamond's way of talking about the Coffins' big black Newfoundland, Grendel.

"Yesterday" Joshua brought Rosamond up to the corner of the porch where Rosamond had spotted Monica working and then Joshua couldn't get her to leave. Sat down in a rocker next to Monica and seemed to like sitting there and playing at being Monica. Even the promise of "a present" and then "two presents" from Joshua didn't tempt her to go home.

After a while (exact length of time not noted), sitting and looking out peacefully at ABC Street where nothing much is happening, Rosamond ("Rosie") says in a surprisingly forceful voice, "AH-BAH!" Monica confesses that she's puzzled: she'd always thought it was (and has always been chronicling) "Ah-wah" and that "Ah-wah" was Rosie's name for Grendel, but Grendel is nowhere in sight. And, even worse, even more confusing, she said "AH-BAH"! What could "AH-BAH" possibly mean and why would she be calling Grendel now?

It's never "Ah-wah", Joshua says. Monica's just been hearing it wrong. It's always "AH-BAH!" and it has nothing to do with the dog. "AH-BAH" just means "food" or "I'm hungry!" or "feed me!".

After Joshua's taken Rosamond home, Monica finds that Rosamond's left a book behind: very few words, mostly beautiful watercolors of food on every large and colorful page.

"A solitary cigarette and a sweet breeze in the summer of '76."

Chronicle notes, without being sure that it's accurate, that this summer has "a different flavor" than other summers — not just for herself and for David, but for ABC Street and even for the universe. Chronicle also notes that if it's true that this summer has a different flavor than other summers it may or may not be because the texture of experience is altered by the decision to try to pay attention to the external side of writing: spend all their time writing and next-to-no-time getting finished work into print. Time spent on one robs time from the other. Time spent on the "career" of writing means not writing and a life spent writing etc. Chronicle also talks to itself a little about its sense of having less recorded (remembered/therefore translated) film dialogue, catalogues of meals eaten and so on and wonders what exactly Monica and/or David have been doing to get their work into print and if that extra effort is the reason for less recorded/translated film dialogue, etc. or if one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Chronicle talks to itself marginally one last time on this day in June about things it feels Monica doesn't want to pay attention to: reminds itself that twins twinning is a linked series of events, therefore could be organized into a volume and also that The Menaced Assassin needs to be worked on at the same time.

Roses again!

Have to be recorded against Monica's will, as if red and yellow are spattered like paint on white or lavender scrap paper and nothing can be done about it. Untouched by red-or-yellow-rose paint spatter: white bedspread visible to Monica through the glare in the Rosenwassers' second story picture window at a steep angle left (southwest).

Analyzing what she's seeing more closely, Monica can see that the white bedspread is not visible through the reflection — is not inside the window, behind the glass and in the apartment — but is hanging over a fence in someone's back yard between ABC Street and ABD Street and has been teleported by the window and reconstituted as the white, glaring reflection that hides the apartment's interior.

"Large blood red roses on the Regans' rosebush" and "large yellow roses" where? where exactly?

"Righthand window" of which set of windows is an odd green that Monica recognizes and even finds familiar but can't name: similar to green in her four-color, four-chambered ballpoint: green of pen not exactly the same as solid little pastille of green in the compartment of a watercolor set that needs to be moistened to become a bright, translucent green to be applied with a child's brush: bright and watery algae green that — because it is a ballpoint — has traces of clotted, darker greens at the edges.

"Lefthand window" of the same set of windows also filled with color: pink and blue (from the same tin of child's watercolor pastilles in little compartments?) of a wide swath of cloth that might be a shirt or a dress (Monica can't tell if it has sleeves or not), possibly washed and hung to dry there, hanger not in view.

Let's see: if rough notes go on to talk about Annie Rosenwasser and her Danish husband Nils does that necessarily prove that the "lefthand" and "righthand" windows are windows in the Rosenwassers' second floor apartment above the Arlington sisters' groundfloor "master" apartment in the two family pseudo-modern box at a short diagonal across the street and southwest of the Rhinebeck pine and the corner of the porch where Monica works?

Annie Rosenwasser and thin blond husband Nils are walking with youngest child (a baby daughter in a carriage, name not recorded or not known) toward beach and boardwalk.

On Thursday, June 24, heat surrounds the porch, which, as usual, is as cool as a well. Lou, the rolypoly mailman, has delivered a letter to Monica and David from Maureen Owen of Telephone magazine and the cool well of the porch, in the shade behind the tall and wide Rhinebeck pine, is a good place to read it.

"Hi.

"Thanks for sending the beautiful work!

"Telephone is just too cramped for space right now for me to take anything. I have a very good feeling about Time Table though. I'd like to do something with it. I am in the process of trying to get a letter press, if I can I'd like to print it — Time Table. So please check with me again in Oct ok.

"Very best,

Maureen Owen" [signature in pen, color of ink and type of pen not noted]

Not perfectly clear in Monica's hastily sketched rough notes whether Monica, while reading Maureen Owen's letter, is also chronicling something she observed "yesterday" or if she overhears old Rae Ryan now (while she's reading) talking from her porch as if to someone in the street (though no one's chronicled):

"WHEN YOU GET TO BE MY AGE!

"A BAKED POTATO IN THE OVEN

"RICE PUDDING THIS AFTERNOON!

"HEAT WAS BAD ON AAF STREET!

"AND TERRIBLY CROWDED TOO!"

The rest of what Rae Ryan says is not so clearly audible, but Monica's sure that she says that she simply can't go back there (to AAF Street) again and asks someone (as she often does) to pick this and that ingredient up while he or she is out doing their own grocery shopping.

"Around 7:30 p.m." breezes get stronger: surrounding heat must have dispersed because breeze that blows through the already-cool porch is just as cool or cooler still. "A little later" breezes die down and cool porch feels surrounded by the warm stillness of a summer night. Monica is still outside, typing (editing) her February Chronicle by the weak light of a single overhead porch-light bulb (wattage not recorded or never known).

Friday, June 25 is a short, humid day made up of events so brief they fit neatly into the dimensions of the day, but may not have a full paragraph among them.

1) Monica doesn't know why she knows that it's "the last day of school". (Most likely explanation is that she was told by one of the children on the block who like to stop and give her what they think might be an interesting fragment of a story for her Chronicle, but Monica has no record of who told her or when.)

2) Another day when Monica isn't tempted to go swimming because of reports on television and/or radio that the waters of

Atlantic Beach

Long Beach

Fire Island

Jones Beach, from the coastal waters of New Jersey all the way up to Connecticut, are polluted.

3) John Corcoran (not as red faced as usual) returns from jogging and stops to explain to Monica that, despite the fact that — as she must figure — he does a lot of heavy physical labor, he jogs every day at 5:30 a.m. (duration of each session of jogging not told or not noted) and he's been doing that since they moved here. So — even though he eats exactly like all the guys he works with and hasn't changed his eating habits since forever (as much as four sandwiches and a couple of beers for lunch, for example) — he's actually lost about twenty pounds (over what period of time not told or not noted) and can't imagine what the reason could be if not his ritual of morning jogging!

Let's see: what else on Friday, June 25?

4) An 8 ½" by 11" manila envelope of the kind Monica and David use for mailing and return of manuscripts arrives from "M. MacArthur, Gallimaufry" with an address (details not recorded) in Virginia (though the manuscript was mailed to California). Nothing in the envelope but a letter:

"Dear Monica and David

"Thanks for the ms. We'd like to use Figures of Speech and How Many Twilights in our next issue.

"The move to Virginia has set me back somewhat more than I'd expected. On the other hand, good fiction is coming in much more quickly than I'd anticipated. All to the end that I'm not quite sure when #8 will appear — but probably sometime before August. I'd like to have a short bioblurb or work statement from you in case we have a notes section. In the past we've paid in copies, this time I think I have enough money to pay a nominal sum to each contributor. But there will be some compensation — in copies (5-10) or cash ($2.50-$5 per page).

"Best

"Mary MacArthur

"PS, drop a note if you have questions."

5. Monica hasn't seen Cathy Castle (already a little thicker, more curdled version of the fresh-faced and girlish, somewhat-Theresa-Wright-like-but-already-overburdened-young-girl Monica first met how many years ago) in ages, but here she is now, returning from shopping on AAF Street and probably from the supermarket beyond, with her three children — Debby, Patrick and Scarlet — and struggling under too many packages, as always. Two of the children (Patrick and Debby, who act like twins but aren't) are crowded into the carriage with overflowing supermarket bags and one (Scarlet, the oldest) is walking and pretty much able to keep pace with Cathy.

Cathy (not quite as good-natured as she used to be, not yet sour, still smiling and friendly, but smile and warmth that went along with it thinner and shallower than Monica remembers them) stops briefly to say hello and to say that she has to go home (to an apartment what size and on what floor of the ancient yellow brick apartment building fronting boardwalk-and-beach at the southern end of ABC Street Monica doesn't think she's ever known) to put stuff away, but then has to go back to the market because she didn't buy everything she needed! Couldn't get all of it, because, if she did, there'd be no room in the carriage for the kids!

Not noted where Monica sees three couples who belong to the tribe of the Coffin/Forest band-&-family: Leo & beautiful, platinum-haired Lily Romero (Leo in new band t-shirt, black with band's meaningless new name "SILVER DOLLAR" in white), beautiful Latin American singer Luisa and her boyfriend (name unknown and nothing chronicled about him at all) and Greg Coffin & Andy Forest.

At 9:30 a.m. the smell of honeysuckle through the front (west-facing) green studio windows is so overpowering that, even though it's real and exists now as Monica's inhaling it on Friday, June 25, it stimulates a longing to experience it in some other way, as if the aroma could exist for some other dimension of the self (one that has to do with aroma-memory and something else harder to name).

Also at 9:30 a.m.: Monica is at her typewriter typing the words "first snowflakes of winter" and "flakes are substantial and the ground is already wet, so snow should stick and remain visible throughout the day and possibly even tomorrow" (therefore, obviously, winter '76/'77 notes being typed/edited "now", in June '77).

Anything else?

Just this: Nancy Wattle's brontosaurus-like family, visiting from Michigan, is gone and its absence contributes to the stillness of ABC Street's morning, as if what's visible adds or subtracts from the density of the street's landscape of sound.

Monica can't help overhearing, and doesn't try very hard not to overhear, squat landlord W's squat daughter Ellie talking excitedly to her undescribed boyfriend in the sloping driveway (neighboring house immediately to Monica's right (north)) about the new car they've just bought, apparently together, and their plans for washing it together every weekend right here!

On Saturday June 26 roses force their way into the Chronicle again, as if growing randomly in so many places just so it would take too much effort to uproot every bush and every scrap paper notation. Chronicle says that "roses are crumbling like old velvet".

At 8:30 a.m. Monica is outside, where she prefers to be, writing on her front porch and observing that the streets are already wet (therefore must have rained offscreen and out of sight, while she was sleeping). Same wet streets as in the December Chronicle she's editing: for example, in the sentence she hasn't yet edited: "streets are wet because snow's turning to a very cold rain".

Bushel of red flowers (not roses) set down on one wing of the Regans' green-green lawn Monica had noted how many days-and-lavender-sheets-of-scrap-paper-ago is still there. Therefore must be meant to be there: enormous bushel of red flowers still in its round, slat-sided fruit crate planted there as if it were a bush.

Still more on June 26? Squat and friendly landlord "W" is on his porch and seems to Monica to be troubled (pacing a little) and wanting to talk. Fragments of several tales that have to be told: thinks Monica knows that his wife, Minna, had a hysterectomy last week (Monica notes that she thinks she murmurs that she didn't know and also that he probably doesn't hear her) and it's not going so good. She's been running a fever since the operation and so far they can't explain it. They're taking tests, one test after another, but can't answer his questions.

A long, complicated story that no one wants to hear.

Does Monica want to hear it? Goes on without waiting for an answer, because he has to.

Seventeen years ago, when Minna gave birth to Edgar, she developed a dangerous clot in her leg and he realizes now that he didn't take it seriously and for that reason (because he really wasn't paying attention) he has no memory of what they did to make it go away, how long it lasted, etc. etc. Then (does Monica know about this?) Minna had a tumor in her breast and had to be operated on and again she developed a dangerous clot in her leg and again he forgot about it completely and can't remember details.

Fortunately, Adele was old enough and much smarter than he is and remembers that Minna ran a fever then too and that, because of the clot, they treated her with blood thinner, the same as they're doing now! Adele's also reminded him that, because of the clot or because of the blood thinner, Minna had trouble walking and that they said the same things then that they're saying now: she'll have to stay in the hospital at least another two weeks and when she gets home she has to do nothing but rest. They have to be very careful. No cooking, no household stuff, because even the smallest cut slicing a vegetable or an injury to a toe. . . .

What else does "W" have to say?

Younger daughter, Ellie, graduated from college and already has a good job at Korvette's as a manager (he was against it when she switched from accounting to management, but it turns out she was right!).

Adele — who he's never worried about because she's so smart and so focused — has big plans for her future and doesn't want to start down a road she thinks leads nowhere, so she's only been working part time at meaningless jobs since she graduated.

And all you can say about Edgar so far is that he'll be in the new Bay View High School's first graduating class.

What else from "W"? Monica's bored and doesn't record anything else. Does he (landlord "W") tell Monica his fragments of tales not only because he's compelled to but because — having no clear idea what she's doing with paper and pen on the porch just about every day — he expects her to chronicle them because that must be her job. And, if that's true, does that expectation obligate Monica in any way? Chronicle finds the question offensive and shuts itself down.

It's not clear who stops to talk to Monica about Margaret Brennan's friend Wendy's two daughters, Natasha and Karla. Can't be Natasha or Karla themselves, because Monica can't bring to mind the sound of the voice of either girl, though she can vividly bring to mind the intelligent and skeptical sidelong glance — fleeting and hidden in a somewhat Florentine profile, golden-brown wave of hair and what-color, pulled-down seaman's cap while bicycling slowly by in the near distance of the gutter — and the pretty, soulful face, wavy dark hair and unexpectedly heavy-legged gait of the younger.

Could be Laurel Lenehan, who rarely passes but would certainly stop to tell Monica whatever fragment-of-a-fragment-of-a-story there is to tell.

Not much, but let's see: Natasha and Karla both skipped a year of junior high school, therefore it's not only the older one with the tell-tale intelligence of her quick but inquiring gaze at Monica, but the younger and deceptively duller/more anxious younger one who may have an interesting, unknowable inner life.

Laurel Lenehan will be seventeen in August and Karla is either exactly three days older or three days younger than Laurel. Karla just graduated from high school, while Laurel is first starting her junior year and Natasha is going into the tenth grade.

It's not always what's interesting that interests Monica.

Can a flower — even a rose — ever be boring the way a person is boring?

Still the same day in June or June rolls horizontally through another June day with no trace of a border having been crossed.

Monica is sitting on the porch making a list that's really two lists: those who've noticeably deteriorated over the harsh winter of '75/'76 and those who didn't survive.

Most obvious: Enos Greengrass, who died this winter, on what day exactly discoverable or not by leafing back through pages of the Chronicle. (Exists here — continues to exist here — if nowhere else.)

As Monica begins her morbid list and is writing the name "Enos Greengrass", his widow, Sylvia Greengrass, pulls up directly across the way in front of the Greengrass' little brick-and-iron fortress, driven by seldom-seen daughter, Leslie, Leslie's young son, Tommy, in the back seat alone or in the front passenger seat, next to his mother, the color, make or model of Leslie Greengrass' car not noted. And a little later Sylvia (surprisingly active, not quite "youthful", but less dark and pouchy than Monica remembers her) and grandson Tommy are setting up a sprinkler on one barren wing of the front lawn (also fenced in by brick and iron), though it's already clear to Monica that Tommy prefers his little pale green watering can with its tomato red sprinkler-head spout to the mechanical sprinkler.

Let's see: who on ABC Street, aside from Enos Greengrass, didn't survive the unusually severe winter of '75/76? Probably many more than Monica knows, but what happens outside the edges of the Chronicle can't be chronicled, therefore — however interesting or important — is of no interest to Monica compared to anything even marginally within the borders of Monica's local image world. Therefore: two husbands (names unknown), halves of two couples Monica has chronicled or not summering on ABC Street (for how many years not noted) as if the neighborhood were still the summer destination it once was, reappear without their wives. Possibly because he is alone one of the returning husbands stops to talk to Monica for the first time to tell her that his wife died. No cause given or no cause recorded and all Monica learns is that she was named "Mrs. S.". (Monica notes her astonishment that the two husbands — who seem to know each other — would choose to return for the summer (for summer vacation) to the same rental apartments on the same street without their wives.)

Beginning of a list of those who survived the brutal winter of '75/'76, but who've deteriorated:

1. The mother of the thirty-something son taken dramatically away by ambulance more than once for trying to kill his parents is sitting on the tiny porch on the ABC Street side of her handsome elbow-shaped brick house on its spacious corner lot, reading The New York Times under a yellow and white sun umbrella fixed to the iron railing. She looks to Monica — from her long diagonal view toward the intersection of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard — older, that is, weightless, blanched and de-boned.

2. Al Szarka's father (name never known), making one of his rare visits to Al, is having a hard time getting up the porch steps. Monica doesn't remember him walking with difficulty, but that's his way of limping onto and up the few steps of Monica's so-far-very-short list of winter's casualties. Looks the worse for wear, as if he's been in a fight: disheveled and with a bandage on his face (exactly what part of his face not noted) and out of sync with the unusually summery atmosphere and with the spring breezes that occasionally blow through it.

Let's see: Artie Tilden comes next on her long sheets of crowded, handwritten scrap paper, but Monica can't find a logical way to add him to her hasty list of those killed or seriously damaged by the brutal winter. Still, something's wrong with Artie Tilden. Pacing back and forth across the width of the porch's wide, grey-painted boards between Greg-and-Lena's cracked and weedy driveway and the hedge-filled space between the massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house and the landlord's boring pseudo-modern two family, distractedly reading a handwritten letter he's just taken out of the communal mailbox. Monica doesn't know how she knows that it's from someone named "Faggiano" and that it's from an address in Queens and she also doesn't know what's in the handwritten letter that's causing Artie Tilden's agitated pacing.

Let's see (2): Artie Tilden asks Monica (Monica notes how unusual it is for Artie Tilden to reveal his anxiety) if she's seen Anne Marie: she works till 12:30 and yes, of course, it's only 1 and he knows he's being crazy, but on the other side of the ledger, Monica knows what it's like where Anne Marie works! That whole neighborhood, though it's only ten minutes away, is hell. So he can never completely relax until she's home!

Artie Tilden disappears from the page, so must go inside as soon as he finishes his sentence.

"Seconds later" Anne Marie's car (no color, shape, make or model noted) pulls up: lithe and slender, a pretty little girl with bouncy brunette ponytail, Anne Marie springs up the front porch steps in a couple of bounds in a tight white uniform (whether she's a nurse not noted) and (instantly at the front door) wants to know if Artie was looking for her, but Artie's already opening the door to kiss her hello. Takes Artie a minute to notice that Ann Marie brought a friend home with her, an extraordinarily tall blonde (no other details of appearance noted) and he says to her in a familiar, joking way that every time he sees her he's reminded what a scary monster she is! and they all laugh and head inside.

On the same late June day and pretty much at the same time that Anne Marie is arriving at Artie Tilden's with her "monstrously tall" blonde girlfriend, an attractive woman (age not speculated on), blonde hair streaked with brown or brown hair streaked blonde in harmony with tan and with chocolate top (long-or-short-sleeved blouse, polo, halter, tank top, etc. not noticed or not recorded) and dungaree shorts parks in the cracked and weedy driveway right below the southwest corner of the porch where Monica is working.

Woman's boyfriend (undescribed) gets out of the car (also undescribed) carrying a long, shallow, foil-covered metal tray and both head toward the very back of the driveway where a seldom-used garage-converted-to-guesthouse is partly hidden by overgrown vegetation and by a fractured angle of the cracked white stucco corner of Lena-and-Greg's massive multiple dwelling.

"A little later" David reports to Monica that he heard Allison Savas (oversize dark-framed glasses, sharply-cut black hair covering face almost to hunched shoulders) say to Lena that she'll see her "later": "we're all eating together tonight!"

Muffled sound of Leo Romero's furious drum practice coming through partly open windows of Greg-and-Lena's ground floor ping-pong room.

Breezes, mysteriously fragrant and unconvincingly explained away as "ocean breezes" — from right here on Earth or from a floating garden not at all like the beautifully tended ones across the street — had sprung up suddenly "in the early afternoon", continued pulsing across the porch and then died, either "a long time ago" ("around 5:30" scribbled in margin) or suddenly, "just now".

Let's see: what else on the same June day?

When the mysterious breeze passing across a sensitive, unidentified region of the soul dies down, there's nothing to weigh against the day's heat settling in the angular quadrant of sun pushing across the resistant grain of the porch toward the Southwest corner.

Monica stays as long as she can and then (not done working) heads (exact route and distance recorded before?) for the Salem Avenue back yard, where there's bound to be some shade because of the height and density of the surrounding trees and overgrown hedges.

Salem Avenue back yard is green from edge to edge. Eye bumps up against green as if it's flown into a soft green wall and it takes time for the eye to settle down and take in other colors and forms: over and through the knotted green lattices of hedges Monica thinks she sees hydrangeas — blue and rose not fully developed and still leaching out from green like watercolor paint stains — beginning to blossom here and there in the large, messy yard immediately adjacent to (south of) this one and on near-distant lawns.

Monica wonders if what she sees is in any way conditioned by the sound — uneven but always there, repetitively recycling through several degrees of intensity — of the enormous main unit of neighbor-to-the-west's powerful central air conditioning system parked outdoors.

A wasp and a white butterfly, one hidden in the woven lattice of the warm hedge-leaves, the other in one cluster of tall blades of seldom-mown grass among other tufts and clusters growing to uneven heights.

Set of lookalike towels without variety and without even an interesting kind of repetition on a neighbor's clothesline (which neighbor not noted, but no clotheslines ever in neighbor-to-the-west's back yard, therefore could be in large but messy yard of neighbor-immediately-to-the-south or in one of the two small, partly paved and boring yards directly to the East). Monica speculates: may be exactly the same set of uninteresting towels in the same not-noted yard the last time she walked 1/2-2/3 of her ABC Street block north, made a right turn onto Coast Boulevard let's see 1, 2, 3, 4 blocks east, left on AAI Street one long block to Salem Avenue, right on Salem approximately 1/2-2/3 block to the handsome old Victorian where Monica sometimes house-sits.

Clouds, strings and dots of insects, exact number and varieties not noted, only the collective humming and ZZZ-ing and movements in the air that are an important part of the blissfulness of this hot and sunny day in June.

A green ball tossed high in blue air.

"June 27" is called in Monica's raw notes "the hottest day so far" and notes also speculate that the extraordinary heat of the day explains the sudden change in the Regans' magnificent elm: what had been from Monica's point of view across the street (east) and at a slight diagonal (north) toward Coast Boulevard broad, empty sprays of tiny leaves from the tree's enormous core now, today, for the first time, is a dense green wingspan in every direction: fully developed leaves so wide that the pure white-with-green-trim façade of the Regans' handsome three story house is hard to see. Sudden fullness of elm can't have anything to do with unexpectedly flowering perfume (honeysuckle and other unidentified flowering plants) of summer, but seems to.

On June 27 Monica is writing on the porch, taking notes and trying to sort out the voices of two or three women next door and at the same time trying to figure out where (where exactly) in Greg-and-Lena's house they're coming from.

Voice that seems to be Lena's quavers: "she has the stuff to make it, so. . . ."

"So when she makes it you'll. . . ?" Voice that sounds to Monica — though she doesn't know the voice anywhere as well as she knows Lena's — like Allison Savas'.

"Yes, I will. I promised to do that and I will."

"That's alright then."

And Nadja's very pleasant, Eastern-European-accented voice objects mildly: "but you'll end up giving him money and that's no good. I never like that."

Three voices continue debating the same subject, even though Monica isn't sure what the subject is, but are drowned out by the band's loud playback of a popular Disco song they're rehearsing for their next gig somewhere in Queens.

"Disco/Disco that's where the happy people go!

"Got Disco

"And they're just dancin' along

"to a powerful song

"dada-dada

"Disco/Disco. . . . "

Music dies down and now Monica can hear the voices of the band mates, but not the voices of the women (from a different still-undetermined location that seems to her at a higher altitude in the house, possibly Greg-&-Lena's raft-like second story front porch or Nadja-&-Andy's small, rundown back porch in the tree tops):

"Going to Ralph's tomorrow?" (Obvious to Monica as Andy Forest's voice.)

Voice Monica doesn't recognize at all, therefore most likely "Mike", the reclusive bass guitarist, always in black, who (Monica knows, but isn't sure how she knows) sleeps in a blackened room with blackened windows.

"What?" (Or "whut?", either way uncomprehending.)

"I said: are you going to Ralph's tomorrow?"

"Only if we all go. I mean if we all go, then I guess. . . . "

"Not likely that Diana Scott's gonna go, cause I don't think Diana Scott's back from. . . . " (Voice unrecognized.)

"Well, if Diana's not going. . . . "

"Jesus, Mike," Andy says laughing, "I don't even know if I'm going!"

"So maybe no one's going. . . !"

Still "on June 27" Monica notes (warning herself that she needs to pay closer attention to when events — always "now" in the Chronicle — are taking place) that June '76 notes are intercut with March '76 notes (specifies pp. 4-5-6-7-8 and 10 of the March Chronicle) and also that all of it — June and March — are "being typed in November", so that snow is possible, but needs to be identified always as occurring while Monica is typing in a different season.

For example: sentence immediately following a sentence about the band uncharacteristically practicing disco music is a sentence that talks about "the beginning of the week" being "icy" and that "ice softened to rain and then rain quickly turned cold again, almost to freezing".

Let's see: June notes in November comment on the fact that Greg Coffin retreats into the psychologically remote piano corner near kitchen sink and west-facing front windows of the loft-like second floor breakfast-dining-parlor-living-practice-room-children's-homework-and-playroom etc. etc. to spend the afternoon playing Bach (which piece not known or not noted), trying to make "Disco/Disco" recede.

Lena's noisy old vacuum cleaner starts up in the enclosed front porch/ping-pong room and easily drowns out the contemplative tinkling of the Bach fugue.

By chance, Monica spots her (and David's) old friend Leila X exiting the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the ocean end of ABC Street (forms a wall between boardwalk-and-ocean and the Coffin/Forest mother-&-daughter shared by Babette Coffin and daughter Grete, Grete's husband Andy Forest and Grete's daughter from her marriage to Tony Lima, Martina (Tina) Lima) and, with an odd pause in her gait (somewhat baggy bluejeans and a pale, short-sleeved blouse that does not set off the beauty of her extremely long blonde hair) that seems to Monica a sign that the mind is telling the body to make a sudden turn, she turns right on the boardwalk in the direction of ABD Street or beyond.

No way to know, of course, if Leila X is avoiding her (and just far away enough to stimulate interpretations that may or may not be true), but seems logical to Monica that Leila may want to avoid the questions Monica is bound to ask because they haven't seen each other for so long (how long — how long exactly — not noted).

Let's see: what else "on June 27"?

The Regans' beautiful old elm is not only as full as it should be in late June, but has extended its reach out over ABC Street so that even bicyclers rolling by too fast to have anything resembling a story to tell about whatever they see and hear at any given spot she-or-he is passing feel its coolness as a second self of wavering shadows.

Monica writes that Wanda Baer's confessed to her recently that the only feeling she's certain of feeling is the inability to feel anything and, for her, that inability does feel like a feeling. Monica certainly knows that she (Wanda) is good at pretending to feel something, at looking like she's feeling something, and can even sometimes convince herself — almost to the point where she feels as if she's feeling happy or having pleasure or is even genuinely moved by something someone tells her — but sooner or later she knows that she actually felt the next-to-nothing that's exactly the same as nothing. It's all just stories to her, if Monica can understand that. It's not something that's happening to someone. Another person's suffering or happiness is just like reading a newspaper. You get the meaning and know what emotion you're supposed to feel, but you actually feel nothing. Can she go through her whole life that way? And is it possible that life as a good pretender can be a satisfying life?

Is the movement of a tree — light of a tree and also its shadow — a chance to feel the life of a tree as it's living its life in front of you — and is that experience enough to neutralize the misery of a human life that sometimes insists on walking across Monica's pages?

Is the green dress hanging in the lefthand panel of the Rosenwassers' long North-facing picture window, as if to dry in the late rays of a waning sun, Monica's evidence that Annie Rosenwasser and her Danish husband Nils are still visiting?

Monica notes their ambiguous presence as an item in a short catalogue of departing visitors:

Notes say that "Nancy Wattle's relatives from Michigan left on Saturday", except for Nancy's Brontosaurus-like sister and her youngest (slender) daughter, who've lingered behind.

Monica's sure that there's more to this catalogue of departures, but can't find it. Chronicle seems more concerned with other issues: wonders, for example, if the long days of June, looking for a way to express their fullness, have forced themselves into the radical expansion (or it may say "extension") of the leafing branches of the Regans' enormous elm all the way across ABC Street. Continuous field of green that pulls all ABC Street's grass, hedges, evergreens into the expanding tree's orbit.

Monica also notes that "in June" she's editing November Chronicle exactly at a moment when (in November) she's lamenting how painful it is to remember the warmth of June nights: no sun, therefore days so short that night is only a slight deepening of the darkness of the day. And there are even times when four nights go by without any day in between.

Happy to return to June and June chronicling.

Let's see: seldom-seen-on-ABC-Street, Ernie, tobacco-blond father (moustache, for example, like loose cigarette tobacco sprinkled between lip and nose) and beautiful daughter, Daisy, delicate-to-the-point-of-transparency, pass (headed north or south <—> toward or away from beach and boardwalk not noted) and then "a little later" Daisy passes with mother Margaret and this time Daisy's hair is tied back, away from her little mermaid's face, and Daisy's changed into a freshly laundered-and-ironed blue-and-white check dress.

What else "on June 27"? Does the Chronicle say clearly that it is June 27?

Notes say — but don't seem to be "in order" — that Jojo Coffin also passes, not exactly at the same time as Daisy and her father or Daisy and her mother, and only add that Jojo's wearing a startlingly cherry red dress and matching cherry red knee socks: startlingly red-clothed little girl hopping and skipping quickly as a brush stroke.

This too: little melon-domed Rosamond Coffin is hopping around on the sidewalk from the Coffins' house to the house next door where she likes to say hello to Monica on her porch and then back to the Coffins' house and back to Monica's again over and over on a springy green plastic caterpillar.

This too "on June 27", but not much about it: not Artie Tilden, but someone who resembles Artie Tilden (and therefore must be related to Artie Tilden?): thicker body but with exactly the same odd pelvic thrust forward as if perpetually and unsuccessfully trying to screw whatever's in front of it. Interior cable seems to connect perpetually unsatisfying pelvic thrust to permanently sour facial expression.

Monica only notes that the visit is short and that she's certain that she's seen this other unhappy Tilden before, without being certain then or now if he's old enough to be Artie's father or how old he is at all.

Greg Coffin steps out his front door, crosses the enclosed ping-pong room to the small orange-stone-and-wrought-iron-railing front porch where, earlier, Lena was sewing while little Rosamond had the ecstatic feeling that she was reading her big story book with full page pictures.

Greg is holding a whole pineapple in the palm of one hand and the raw, chlorophyll green around the rough edges of its quilted diamonds seems to harmonize in an electric way with the green of a sleeveless dress hanging in what window across the way at what angle exactly?

Orange of tiger lilies, as wildly vivid as a cantaloupe suddenly sliced open on the lawn in front of you, is oddly sucked up and enclosed in little tubes at night, signaling all the color in the world to roll itself up.

Also noted: "one-wine-colored hydrangea", but not noted on whose lawn.

Leila X pays a rare visit to Monica "around 7", but only stays on the porch long enough to say that she has a plan and that she already sees that there's a built-in problem with her plan: each thing in the plan depends on each other thing, so if she doesn't get the main thing (or maybe only the first thing) done, the rest of the plan is bound to fall apart, as usual. Plan basically is this and she'd like Monica's opinion: move to a suburb of Boston, but keep her job in Manchester and commute from Manchester to Boston. Not that long a drive and she really doesn't think she'd mind that kind of driving, but first and most important (the "main" or "first" thing in her plan) is to finally take driving lessons! Not being able to drive is one of the things that ruined her life! Doesn't Monica agree?

OK: driving lessons

moving to a suburb of Boston

and then — also very important —she has to buy a car!

Can't remember why, but she has it in her mind to get a Plymouth "Volare"! Does Monica know anything about a Plymouth? Specifically about a Plymouth "Volare"?

Monica says that she has an answer that makes sense to her, but may not be satisfying to Leila. The Chronicle has taught her, and she has no doubt about the truth of it, that there's a "magnetic" or clustering principle in life. She herself doesn't care about cars — the makes, models, years or designs of cars — but the Chronicle does: it matters to the Chronicle what the people who populate it, its "characters", own and drive. Not only are there obvious resonances between characters and their cars (color, age, how worn out and broken down, style, etc. etc.), and the multiple appearances of a make and model of car — the unexpected resonance of a car between "characters" who have nothing to do with one another — is one of the patterns and repetitions the Chronicle seems to enjoy. So, yes, she (or the Chronicle) has heard of the Plymouth "Volare" only because the landlord-next-door's younger daughter Ellie (who's old enough to be living on her own, but still lives next door with the rest of her squat little family) and her boyfriend (or fiancé) just went out the other day to buy themselves a new car for their shared future and she (Monica) is sure that she heard them say that it's a Plymouth "Volare"! This too: Ellie seems to be a very practical and careful girl, a lot like her mother, and is sure to have done meticulous research, so Leila can probably be comfortable that the "Volare" is a dependable car.

Let's see, what else?

Last night "around 11" there was a sudden, violent wind from the North: rising up terrifyingly out of the Bay like a Japanese movie monster or sweeping across it all the way from Canada. Needed to get to the ocean and went through every tree on ABC Street as if it was in the way, but couldn't quite tear it loose.

"Later at night" there was an equally violent thunderstorm, but neither the storm nor the wind cooled things down one drop.

On Monday, June 28 Monica writes that she "has a headache", but a closer re-reading of her hard-to-read scribble seems to say that the headache was yesterday, "all day yesterday", and has to do with the weight of the atmosphere, thunderstorms "around midnight" and heavy rain that should have relieved the atmospheric pressure, but didn't.

"On Monday morning" she wakes up to Greg Coffin's recently-intensified piano practice. Monday mornings (it seems to her) have become a ritual, but it also seems to her that she's been hearing Greg's piano every day for unusually long stretches of time and wonders what the significance is.

"At 9:30 a.m." she notes that a vaseful of orange flowers (not noted if tiger lilies) that had "closed up last night" are as open and inviting this morning as a mimosa handed to you before breakfast.

What else on Monday morning? David says (reporting to Monica for the Chronicle) that he just saw Leo Romero return with locally glamorous whipped-butter-blonde wife Lily (no idea from where, but Monica and David have been commenting to each other for weeks that the band seems to be practicing without a drummer).

This too: an unusual amount of activity next door at Lena-&-Greg's:

Lena Coffin

Greg Coffin

Rosie Coffin

Jojo Coffin

Joshua Coffin

Nadja & Andy (last names never known)

Allison Savas (cropped black hair, big glasses, always inward and tearful)

Jacky Savas (strung like a bow, ready to fire)

Ralph Aiello

Melissa Aiello (pregnant): all seem to be in motion to an unusual degree, but why?

Monica notes that she doesn't know (has no way of knowing) if all this unusual shuffling of familiar pieces is just ordinary movement she's paying attention to to an unusual degree or if there's something odd and hidden behind it.

Let's see: Nadja-&-Andy's lives, for example, are based on (or seem to be based on) following the sun: depart in winter for the south of France, for Hawaii or other tropical or sub-tropical places where surfing and earning a little money while living life on or near the beach are possible and return to ABC Street every spring. This too: while they're gone Jacky and Allison Savas take over their small-but-desirable studio on the second floor rear with its little, rundown porch in the trees and then, when Nadja and Andy return (sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly), they (Jacky and Allison) have to quickly vacate and move back downstairs.

Not certain to Monica if Ralph and Melissa Aiello also play a role in this spring/winter apartment rotation.

Notes say that someone's offered the information (on June 28?) that beautiful blonde Lily Romero's pregnant and that the sudden, impending responsibility is giving Leo a lot to think about (can he continue to play the drums, for example), but Monica doesn't know (didn't record) who said it or if any of it is true.

This too? Chronicle notes "a cool mist" that's both pleasant because of its coolness and unpleasant because it's thin enough so that Monica can feel that it's only a wrapping around an undeveloped cloud of heat.

Monica notes: "written with some reluctance and uncertainty": that is, "just because we come across something that irritates or concerns us enough to think about it more than we want to, does that mean it belongs in the Chronicle? a sign that it needs to be left out of the Chronicle?"

Not only in literature (that is, both in writing's public architecture and in the hidden universe of the act of writing) this is how it always works: come across a name you've never heard of ("John Yau, winner of a 1976 NEA grant in poetry" for example) and aren't interested in (because he's an NEA grant winner, always a sign of unimportance?) and then — how many days or weeks later — there's an article in the Sunday NY Times by Edgar Zacharias (someone Monica knows), "How to Be a Difficult Poet", apparently about John Ashbery, but really just as much an account of "John Yau"'s relationship with Ashbery, including a fragment of an interview with Yau casually documenting Yau's pursuit of a relationship with Ashbery.

According to Zacharias, Yau graduated from Bard College in 1972 and "came to Brooklyn College last fall" precisely in order to study with Ashbery (history of how Ashbery came to be teaching in Brooklyn College not in Zacharias' article or not noted by Monica) and, before arriving at Brooklyn College, Yau spent time boning up on Ashbery's work. "Carefully read" (according to Zacharias or to Yau, quoted in Zacharias' interview) all Ashbery's books and "even researched libraries and second hand bookstores for the uncollected poems and prose". Again according to Zacharias "Yau recognizes that if you wanted to know somebody you didn't know before, you had to study with him. Not that he would teach me a secret, but that he was someone I could learn something from".

More of Zacharias about Yau and of Yau about Ashbery: "How has it gone?" Z. asks Y. And "John Yau" says: "He's not interested in protégés [not clear in Monica's rough and crowded notes if she underlines this sentence] and thus [Monica asks marginally if Z. can be quoting Y. accurately and that Y. actually spoke the word "thus"] not concerned about losing students".

A little more: some empty praise of Ashbery's teaching methods and then, "I feel that, when I leave, I'll know something I hadn't known before. . . " etc.

Nothing in Monica's notes by Z. about A., therefore safe to conclude (Monica thinks) that it's Yau's pursuit of A. in and of itself, but also as a model of something in the public architecture of "literature", that bothers and concerns Monica and, it seems to her, Zacharias too.

What else? Nothing more in her hastily written and peculiarly ordered notes about A., Z. or Y.

On June 29 Monica tries to write about "heavy fog" that's descended all the way to the sidewalks of ABC Street and (definitely observed or only because it's logical) all the other sidewalks of the neighborhood as well, but, looking out over Jamaica Bay and straight across the short inches that easily span Brooklyn with the idea of looking at Manhattan's skyscrapers in the fog, she encounters nothing but white space similar to the space of a sheet of paper that hasn't been typed on yet.

What next?

Not noted where, where exactly, Monica encounters Pam Leary and has a brief conversation with her (and, for that matter, not noted either when the Learys became tenants of house-and-Chronicle or exactly which tenants they replaced, where those tenants of house-and-Chronicle have disappeared to). Chronicle only knows this: Pam Leary has a cold and says that her brother, Rudi, does too. Both hate having colds, so today they're trapped at home together with colds they hate and not that much to do but reminisce. Monica waits for Pam to share some reminiscences of her childhood with her brother Rudi, but it doesn't happen. Only shares this: she's had a plan forever and still has it. Her plan started in college (it's important that Monica understand that it's her plan, always was her plan, not Ted's, though he pretty much goes along with whatever she decides), while she was studying German literature and getting her B.A. (which period or aspect of German literature, which authors or movement, etc. not stated, therefore not much to learn from Pam's interest in "German literature"). Says that German literature is what she loves most in life, but she's very disciplined and that her love for German literature has to be on hold. She's at the very beginning of her twenty year "retirement plan"! In a nutshell: she's going to spend twenty years away from the German literature that she loves so she can raise a family. She'll give herself completely to the project of raising a family, but, at the end of twenty years, nothing and no one can stop her from returning to her studies. By then Ted will be established in his field and able to support her and the children when she goes back to school for her Masters.

Monica waits for more, but there's nothing.

Let's see, same day or another: windows open, therefore the inevitable spring/summer noises of electric saws, power mowers, hammering and remote echoing of hammering of dull nail into wood that would rather split than yield — local universe being altered and rebuilt in ways that will be impossible to notice for years, roof by roof, garage by garage, back porch add-on by back porch add-on, etc.: the aural background for skinny mother (skinny mother other than Lena!) vividly dressed in flame-orange slacks and crisp, orange-and-white man-tailored shirt to pull up or gingerly lower baby carriage down flight of five or six front porch steps and then again three or four more times throughout the beautiful day, each time with a change of clothing. Trying to keep neighbors passing time on their porches from being bored? Or consciously crossing the space of the Chronicle's local image world as vividly as possible.

Is anyone else crossing the space of ABC Street on this June day?

Let's see: Babette Coffin, looking youthful and a little too-appropriately-beachy in navy blue short sleeve top and white slacks (with a chrome yellow hair band saturated enough to paint itself into Monica's notes with a single oily brushstroke) is bicycling side-by-side with beautiful granddaughter Martina "Tina" Lima, also in navy and white, but arranged differently. Babette's hair is cut short and attractively angular (exact shade of tawny blonde not noted or not remembered with enough definition to chronicle) around the upper 2/3 only of her strong, still-beautiful face; Tina's hair, as always, an extraordinary fountain of golden-brown waves).

Grandmother and granddaughter bicycling side-by-side past the porch where Monica's working, both beautiful and with similar sun-caramelized skin tones, passing easily, but not quite with the same motionless acceleration as a few clouds sailing deep on thermals in a second or third sky and nearly invisible from the sidewalk.

Day continues and seems to be built up out of a limited number of repeated and varied units.

For example: another pair of bicyclers goes by, but at a faster pace and not at all gliding or remotely cloud-like: Margaret Brennan's best friend Wendy's younger daughter, Natasha (tanned, brunette and pretty, but could be prettier if she were happy, not so much bottom-heavy as restricted, legs and face bound by something that's likely the same thing and not two separate bindings) and Natasha's best friend, blonde and graceful Eva Lindbloom. Natasha and Eva are practicing riding with no hands, trying to get to Coast Boulevard as fast as possible without wobbling.

Blue sky made bluer (blue as a blue smock in what Vermeer painting Monica can't recall or as the extraordinary little corner of sky in an early Matisse painting of an angular view out his Paris attic window) by the waffled orange edge, crisp and fragile as a potato chip, of Greg-&-Lena's crappy plastic awning.

Blue ocean also made bluer — thick and tactile as oil paint just squeezed out like the body of a weird blue insect rolled over by the bicycle tire of a beautiful girl bicycling toward Coast Boulevard — by blindingly white hull of white sailboat and again by sailboat's small, white triangle of a sail with broken red angle within white triangle.

What else?

Wendy, in tight white nurse's or waitress's uniform, returns home from work in her big, baby blue convertible, top down (make and model not noted or never known).

Rudi Jolley's buddy Donald, back from the beach in a too-small bathing suit (color not noted) with MONROE COMMUNITY COLLEGE stitched on it in white, is complaining to Monica or to no one in particular that he left the goddamn beach too soon! Lousy watch's never accurate! Watch says it's three, but it's only one! Now what's he suppose't'do with the rest of the fuckn afternoon? Stupid t'go back to the beach'n'get all covered with crap again! Doesn't feel like hanging around Pam's dumb little apartment again neither! And there doesn't seem to be anything else to do in this nothing neighborhood, so what's left? Sulks uncomfortably on the thick porch railing for an unspecified length of time with a can of not-so-cold beer (brand not noted).

Skinny mother-and-housewife (not Lena Coffin, therefore not next door on little orange porch, but where? where exactly?):

in red and yellow sleeveless dress (precise pattern not noted and only noted that red and yellow sleeveless dress is "the second or third" outfit Monica has seen the skinny mother-and.-housewife in today). Doesn't remember, and would have to search notes taken earlier today for any record of first or second outfit, and she wishes someone else would do it.

Monica makes an effort to remember, but, as always, memory is unreliable and wants to stay hibernating where it is:

"early in the morning" (hour not recorded) skinny mother-and-housewife in sleeveless white blouse (morning sunlight makes barely-tanned skin of long arms up to sharp edge of shoulder unusually vivid, and, in the same way, skin of legs precisely cut off by crisp bottom edge of sand-tone shorts).

Monica notes to herself: skinny mother-and-housewife seems to like her blouses sleeveless, so must like the way her long, thin, bare arms look.

What else? "A little later" (late morning?) a red and black check "maxi" dress, also sleeveless.

"A little later still" another "maxi" dress, sleeveless, but a brilliant pineapple yellow.

Afternoon yet? A dull, straw color three-piece shorts-and-sleeveless-blouse set with a matching long sleeve jacket draped over the back of a nearby chair.

Last or next-to-last: with two friends, sitting on folding chairs on lawn in front of which house?, talking while they keep an eye on seven children, five out of seven approximately the same age and size (between two and three years old), one six-month-old-or-so in a carriage and one taller one, no more than four-years-old.

Last?: pulling an olive green carriage up the porch steps, then carefully and with difficulty easing carriage down steps, pulling up steps again and so on and so on how many times not noted.

Pulling up and lowering down of carriage coincides exactly with arrival of skinny mother-and-housewife's husband returning home from work in a dark suit, struggling with black attaché case and overloaded carton of what looks to Monica from her distance and angle to be stacks of spiral-bound notebooks.

Burdened as he is, worn-out husband pays no attention to wife and carriage.

White motorboat on blue ocean leaves a trail like skywriting: pencil-thin line at first, straight as a line can be drawn without a ruler, then feathering out into plumes of foam that explode any memory of a line and what it was trying to say.

Donald Green is lounging on the porch again, waiting for Rudi and (it seems to Monica) eager to have a chance to tell her fragments of a few tales: tears off sentences with or without their stems from how many dense and tangled stories to see if Monica can make sense of them: "these are the kinds of filthy postcards Pammy's innocent little pink-cheeked Teddy's Dad always sends Ted when he's in some stupid place on holiday, the old goat!" Donald says with mirthless glee and has a postcard to show. "'These are the kind'v tomatoes your old dad's pickn'!'" Images of naked and almost-naked women on the beach and another part of a sentence about "'tomatoes in Florida!'", on an oversized glossy advertising postcard for "PUMPERNIK's" in Miami Beach. Donald says that nothing Ted's Dad says or does makes much sense except for the energy and endless filthiness of the bastard, which you have to grudgingly admire, doesn't Monica think so? Card also has a really funny anti-Semitic joke that Ted's Dad heard on vacation that he actually thinks his humorless son might enjoy, but Monica decides not to give it another life, even for the truth of chronicling.

"This too", Donald Green says, already inwardly laughing about something Monica has no way of having a clue about: Monica knows that he and Rudi really don't have two dimes to rub together at this moment, right? So somehow Pammy talked her cheap little bastard landlord into letting them stay in the shitty "apartment" in the basement, but they flooded it! (Dying to tell Monica the rest of the tale, but can't tell it because he's laughing so hard his brain is bouncing around in his skull.) "Not just once!" Sometimes it's Rudi, sometimes it's him! One or the other of them forgets to put the stupid stopper back in the fuckn' floor drain after they shower — so, when it rains…! Can she picture it? Landlord got what he deserves is how he looks at it. All men are dummies and they're always dummies for the same reason when it comes to saying "yes" to women, especially if the man's a short, ugly old dummy saying "yes'" to a young woman with a nice body, so he deserves a flooded basement for whatever he was imagining about Pammy!

Suddenly realizes he has to go! Completely forgot that he and Rudi promised a buddy that they'd help move some heavy furniture (one of these weird deals where a whole brand new dinette set fell off some asshole's truck) and thinks he hears the clumsy hippo tromping down the stairs from Pammy's now — so he'll have to finish the story another time!

Out of order. Or in the right order, but out of place in a different way.

One more view of skinny mother-and-housewife: leaving her house alone (at what hour exactly not noted) in pink-and-green-striped pinafore and white slippers.

White of slippers almost as white as boat on blue ocean, heading back in the direction it came from and cutting a different sort of path than before.

White, lacey curtains breathing in and out of open, side windows of Greg-&-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room.

White roses more vivid than red roses on wiry Ellen Garvey's front lawn and nowhere else.

Roses seem to have sprung up overnight and — without assuming a correlation —atmosphere is suddenly moist and green. Moisture may have nothing to do with the roses (clots of red and white that have violently popped up everywhere) and roses may have nothing to do with the green washes, thin as watercolor, oddly pooling in only a few spots into green cakes, thick and oily, that have suddenly painted themselves into empty spaces everywhere. All three elements of the day may have arrived independently, but there's no denying that the atmosphere is moist and green and there's no escaping the sudden, overwhelming tea-scent of roses.

"Out of order" again.

Skinny mother-and-housewife seems to have put on her pink-and-green pinafore and white slippers to go shopping (what kind of shopping not noted), because she's returning home laden with packages (dimensions, number, colors, all other possible characteristics of packages also not noted).

Monica isn't sure if she's already chronicled "a heavy bee" hovering with difficulty (difficulty of holding a hovering position makes it zzz-zzz in violent diagonals this way and that way), its struggle observed by an indifferently circling butterfly and clusters of tiny insects.

JULY 1976

July 1 rolls in quietly with Lou, the roly-poly mailman's brand new mail cart, an odd light blue — not the dark, near-cobalt of the Post Office's traditional red-white-and-blue and not leather either, like Lou's worn old saddlebags.

Lou and his light blue mail cart pass the porch where Monica's working and July 1 passes invisibly (unchronicled) with him.

Monica notes that July 2 is a day off from working with David on The Menaced Assassin [no reason given] and that that may be the reason July 2 seems to be far more crowded with visible incident than July 1.

For example: Minna W., squat landlord's squat wife, is resting on the small, brick front porch of the W.'s boring two family pseudo-modern immediately north of the vast multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house: bouquets and flowers-in-pots surrounding Minna W. on her cushioned patio chair. Also on July 2 (but when, when exactly, not noted) Monica sees Minna W. hobbling (as if recovering from a leg injury), with older, blondish daughter Adele (ordinary height) on one side (carrying still one more bouquet), younger, squatter daughter Ellie on the other.

What else on July 2?

Monica's notes make a brief reference to "days of hard work" on The Menaced Assassin and the need for "a day off". Day off from work seems to leave room for the phone to ring once and notes say casually, as if it's understood and not unusual, that a single ring is Mikki's signal that she's able to make a plan with Wanda Baer to exchange apartments, so she (Mikki) will be next door to Monica for a couple of days.

Also on July 2, but a little later, when Monica's outside: an unfamiliar car (color, make and model not noted, therefore not known) with a white, Canadian license plate parks in front of the porch where Monica is sitting in a porch rocker in her usual position for working, but taking the day off so not working on The Menaced Assassin (still can't help chronicling?). Warren Rosenwasser gets out of unchronicled car with a little boy, waves hello to Monica and approaches to tell the tiny fragment of his story he thinks he needs to tell: drove down from Guelph to visit his parents: son Lance travelled with him, but not Amanda. He'll be teaching in Tuscaloosa, so they bought a house and Amanda's already there, having fun fixing the place up.

Monica stops to look at the calendar tacked to the wall above David's desk (not noted, and not even a thought about noting, where "David's desk" is in Monica's three room attic apartment, her house-atop-the-house, green front studio where she has breakfast while looking West and even a little South (toward ocean) and North (toward the Boulevard and Manhattan) through two sets of nine panel casement windows that crank open and closed with ancient cranks and later writes and types at the same enormous oak desk or table; blue kitchen with a beautiful old metal-top kitchen table (sharp green and black angular blocks against dark caramel background) that David turns into a desk whenever he has to; and red bedroom that has a small writing desk in the corner near the deep dovecote window facing East with a narrow, tunnel view of nothing but the peaked tile and shingle roofs of massive multiple dwellings.

Calendar is an Arizona nature calendar sent to Monica by her childhood friend Ellen Grace and is open to a large, glossy photograph of a snowy landscape in DECEMBER. Monica finds that puzzling and says that she can't imagine why David would want to sit at his desk and project himself into December! But he only just turned the page today, he says, because now it is December! Today is December 1!

For a long minute Monica has trouble adjusting to this obvious reality.

It's December '76 in the windows and on the calendar, but spring-into-summer for Monica because she's been editing (typing) June and now July of '76 for so long that spring-into-summer reality has entirely replaced the cold and snowy one in the streets: already near-black in the green room windows, evening rising up early from the roofs.

Snow into rain in the streets of December — not only in Monica's green room windows, but as something felt on the skin in the streets, walking from ABC Street east to AAF Street and then north along AAF Street one long block to the intersection of AAF Street with Salem Avenue and Bay Drive and then east on Bay Drive an un-measured distance around the curved perimeter or cutting a straight diagonal through gas station plazas to a short row of shabby storefronts (laundromat, Chinese takeout, photo developer, what else?) ending in the Post Office and through two sets of hard-to-open double doors to another view of a dismal day through windows.

Waiting for a clerk to weigh, stamp and mail "Part Two" of a long novel to their agent, Monica discovers that Fionnuala Regan and her pretty, blonde daughter Becky are right behind her and is surprised to discover further that, up close, Fionnuala looks frail and miserable. "Miserable" is the right word, Monica thinks, but miserable in what way — in what way exactly? Let's see: Cathy Castle, for example, is miserable also, but their two miseries are different. Seems to her that Cathy's is the daily, shallow misery of someone too small for the number and weight of chores-responsibilities-and-packages loaded onto her less-and-less-girlish shoulders and arms. Cathy's doesn't seem like a psychological misery and Fionnuala's does. Fionnuala's psychological misery has begun to groove her ordinarily expressionless face in surprising and unpleasant ways that could easily become a fierce mask of angry unhappiness. Extraordinary pallor, as always.

Despite her unhappiness, Fionnuala offers Monica (to Monica's surprise) a lift back to ABC Street, but not noted whether Monica accepts or not. Logical to accept, for all sorts of reasons it would be just as easy for someone else to list as for Monica, but Monica may very well have made a decision that isn't logical and therefore obviously there's no record of a conversation in Fionnuala's car.

Let's see: what else in December?

A short digression about "7" and "12".

Monica's already noted to herself a problem (that is, a potential confusion in time) as soon as she crossed the border into the enormous new territory of her rough July '76 notes and that potential confusion absurdly reinforces David's observation/theory/and/or prejudice that the numbers "7" and "12" have an unexplainable affinity for one another. David was born on 7/12, has always been aware of his birthday's reverse affinity to Pearl Harbor day (12/7) and he's acutely over-aware of the appearance of 7:12 on the clock, on passing license plates, in the ratio of runs to hits in baseball box scores, as the time on an alarm clock when someone wakes up and/or the random number on a hotel room door in a tv crime series, etc. etc. Where there's a "7", a "12" is sure to follow.

Monica notes almost at once — as soon as her foot crosses the border from the vast expanse of June — that some of her rough "July" notes were typed (edited) in December and that there are instances when "12/76" observations slip into her "7/76" experiences and that therefore, of course, there are observations unrelated to temperature or weather that could be "7/76" observations or just as easily and logically "12/76" observations. And David is sure that the problem is made worse and more persistent by the peculiar affinity between "7" and "12".

Let's see: more could be said and seems to want to be said about the natural affinity between the numbers "7" and "12", but the Chronicle resists and let's Monica know that it prefers to get on with the horizontal narrative of events as they occur and keep occurring.

The Chronicle is willing to say only this (because it can't be avoided?): 7/1 and 12/1 occur with the exact same stroke of pen or typewriter key, in this way:

Monica is looking at the scenic calendar tacked to the wall above David's desk (though it's never been made clear in Monica's notes where in Monica's apartment David's desk is). The description of the calendar scene is surprisingly vague (no way to be certain if Monica is looking at a "snowy landscape" or at "snow-covered streets"), but Monica does record clearly that she finds the calendar page's title "DECEMBER" puzzling and that David has to remind her that it is December — even though what's visible in the window of whatever room David's desk is in is still just another bleak November day, cold and rainy and without the transforming element of sun or snow.

December 1 in reality as well as in the beautiful Arizona nature calendar given to her by her oldest (her "childhood") friend, Ellen Grace.

Let's see: Monica debates with herself how important it is to untangle what could be confusing about July Chronicle being typed and edited in December and mingling or simply resting comfortably there side by side on the same level plane of paper as if there's no important difference between what occurs in one month or the other. Or: all differences subordinate to a certain odd linking of events (same as the Chronicle's "clustering principle"?), in this case the unplanned arrival in the neighborhood and within say ten or twenty pages of quickly sketched notes of a few of Monica's "old friends".

For example: on "July 2" Monica is pretty sure she sees "an old high school friend", Alana Eagleton, visiting the big yellow stone house hidden in beautiful trees on the north side of Salem Avenue where Alana Eagleton's parents still live. Alana Eagleton is with two children and that reminds Monica that one of the few things she knows about Alana is that at the age of twenty she'd already married a lawyer and had two children at once. Monica sees Alana from across the street and only long enough to wave hello without being certain that it is Alana.

Monica notes the fact that she can't remember the last time she caught sight of or even thought about Alana Eagleton and here she is on Salem Avenue while Monica's old friend (predates high school and Alana) Mikki is still visiting and her even older friend, Ellen Grace, has been calling because she's about to arrive or is already in New York for a two month visit.

Let's see (tangled or untangled): notes say that Mikki has traded apartments with Wanda Baer so she can spend a few days with Monica on ABC Street and also so that Wanda Baer in turn can live a little of the downtown Manhattan life she craves and needs and by "now" (July 2) Mikki has been on ABC Street for two days ("Thursday and Friday") and Monica notes that for her, after days of hard work, it's been a welcome relief: no swimming (ocean's still polluted), only talking and eating. For example: "on Thursday night" lobster dinner in Sheepshead Bay: crabmeat cocktail (type of crab not known or not noted), white clam chowder, a bowl of steamers with drawn butter, whole lobster (steamed or broiled not noted), onion rings, French fries, cherry pie and coffee.

What else about Mikki? While stuffing themselves with a huge "Lobster Dinner" in Sheepshead Bay Mikki is reminded of all the lobsters she's been eating lately, as if, she says, eating lobster has given her a desire for more lobster and tells Monica this little fragment of a story. Went for a mini-vacation (for a week or weekend not known or not noted) in Provincetown with her "little cowgirl" Cindy and (can't at all remember or explain why) invited Margo and Muffy to come along as another couple. She can follow her own logic to this extent: once she allowed Margo to come she really had to invite Muffy –— just to keep Margo from being too much of a nuisance. And of course there's the fact that Margo likes to be taken care of and has zero capacity to take care of anyone else, so if she (Mikki) and Cindy wanted any help and didn't want Margo in their laps they needed Muffy. For example: they had a cookout on the beach one night and it broke down like this: she and Cindy (or maybe Cindy a little less than her) know how to cook, but haven't done much camping (maybe Cindy a little more than her), Muffy loves the outdoors, has done a lot of camping, has made campfires and bonfires on the beach, etc. and had definite ideas about what goes into what she thinks is called a "lobster boil" (actual boiling of a live lobster and — the tricky part — timing the boiling of the lobster with the corn and potatoes and all the other ingredients, but Margo — who has no trouble eating a lobster that was just boiled alive — ran away from cooking the live lobster as if it was Godzilla. Useless, but still trying to tell everyone what to do.

Let's see: what else about Mikki?

Already doing enough counseling to pay her rent and her grocery bill and she's even managed to pay Dr. DaVinci a few hundred of the two thousand she owes him!

This too: she's decided, and she won't change her mind, that she's going to make counseling her life's work. Of course she needs to have more training — clearly needs to know more, but also needs more of something she can't name yet that will make her feel professional — so her plan is to go to Stony Brook for her MSW: already filling out an application for an expedited program that will only take two years if they give her credit for the training and counseling she's already done at Identity House. In other words, she's decided that, if she's going to do anything with her life, photography will have to take a back seat. If not, she'll always be just another "photographer" with a lot of experience and a knowledge of human nature who does a little counseling on the side or a "counselor" who etc. and she doesn't want that.

What else might interest Monica for her Chronicle or otherwise? Frederique is spending the summer in Annandale doing research and working on her "definitive biography" of Djuna Barnes, which never seems to make any progress. Mikki tries to think if there's anything else — with all the time that's passed — that she needs to tell Monica. Does Monica know that Cindy's moving into Margo's old apartment next door, "tomorrow", Saturday, July 3? She's (Mikki's) hired a mover, so she'll leave tonight and go straight to Cindy's old apartment to help oversee the final packing.

Monica notes that at "about 7 p.m." on July 3 Bicentennial floats are rolling slowly down Salem Avenue, past the house where Monica periodically does some house-sitting and where she waved to a woman who seemed familiar and might even be her old highschool friend, Alana Eagleton.

Same July day or another: dried peaches (or bruised and pitted, not-quite-round fruit that resembles peaches) spatter irregular drips of color — bleeding orange and brown — on one or more of the small, flowering trees in neighbor-to-the-west's back yard.

Another, slightly contradictory and hastily-sketched note calls the peach-like fruit in neighbor-to-the-west's yard "ripening" instead of "bruised and pitted", describes the color of the fruit as a soft, absorbent yellow-orange (not noted how many fallen and rotting in the frequently-mowed grass) and says that the unexpected color in the air, looking toward AAI Street closer to Salem Avenue than to Coast Boulevard, is what gets her attention at the same time and in the same way as the too-sweet scent of flowering white clusters in the tall hedgerows.

Another note (also "contradictory"?), out of order in the way that all the quickly-sketched notes for the Chronicle find their order, says that Monica is in the Salem Avenue back yard "for the second day in a row" and dates those two days as "July 4 and July 5". One of the Salem Avenue house's neighbors-to-the-east (four relatively narrow houses in a row of two attached sets and every small backyard plot (facades of houses face AAH Street to the corner of Coast Boulevard) paved and neatly fenced in) is a woman who, Monica estimates, weighs a little less than three hundred pounds, stands about five foot five, probably in her mid-thirties, with two small children (age and gender not known) always with their mother in the backyard plot, playing on the tinted paving blocks while the mother barbecues and has long, dramatic conversations on the phone (no conversation ever chronicled).

Another "out-of-order" note talks about "rotting peaches" in the grass, "green peaches on the tree".

Let's see: Monica makes a marginal note to herself — in the crowded margin of the long (approximately 8 ½" x 14") sheet of glossy white scrap paper with a vertical green stripe she's using to chronicle the visits of two old friends as quickly as possible — that, with all the other fragments of stories that are floating unfiltered in the air of whatever space she's in, she doesn't want to lose sight of the fact that the "ARIZONA HIGHWAYS" calendar with its beautiful, full-page photos of landscapes, animals, flowers, etc. was sent to her by her old friend Ellen Grace just about "one year ago", whether in July or November not noted.

Ellen Grace and Mikki are Monica's two oldest friends and Monica tries to be accurate but finds that there's no way to be sure with certainty that she became close friends with Ellen Grace just a little bit earlier. The Chronicle puts it this way: from the first Ellen Grace seemed to have (even though Ellen Grace doesn't see herself that way) an odd indifference, a kind of moral laziness about most of the things that preoccupied everyone else, and Monica found that quality attractive, while Mikki seemed to have an intense need for something that Monica had no way of naming or understanding.

Notes say that as soon as Mikki's weekend in Wanda Baer's narrow elbow of an apartment in the attic of Greg-and-Lena's house on ABC Street ends, Ellen Grace calls. Or absurdly close attention might discover that Ellen Grace calls just before Mikki actually clears out, so there may be a meaningless overlap.

Ellen Grace doesn't hide the fact that she was uncertain of the welcome she'd get from Monica or that she's relieved that Monica seems happy to hear from her and wants to see her. Admits that she's equally surprised to find out that Monica is a writer: says that it's a little hard to explain that she doesn't mean that it's surprising that Monica writes or that she's found a way to enjoy her life while still using her brain (can't imagine Monica not using her brain), but she never would have predicted that Monica would be dedicated enough to stay in one place rather than spend her life traveling and having a good time in all the ways that come with a life like that. Would Monica have predicted that she'd be happy committing herself to chronicling beachtown life on a street like ABC Street? Or wouldn't she have thought it more likely that she'd find a way to use her brain somehow while floating through life?

This too: Ellen Grace says that discovering that Monica is a writer makes her want to tell her a million stories that she might not have told her! For example: does Monica remember how wild Monica's younger brother, Lowell, was, at least around her (Ellen Grace)? Used to chase her with a pointed stick and it was never certain if it was a game or not! The other side of it (what's always made her think that Lowell had it in him to do something unusual and important with his life) is how serious and thoughtful Lowell could be even at that age. There were times, and she loved them, when he wasn't trying to be a nuisance or make an impression, when she was able to have a long, interesting conversation with him. Does Monica know about those moments? Has she ever had a chance to tell Monica any of that? She's hoping to stay here for two months or so (unless Monica throws her out!), so maybe there'll be a chance, if she can still remember what they talked about, to tell Monica a few things about Lowell from a different perspective than the one Monica is used to.

Let's see: what else about Ellen Grace? Told to Monica when? when exactly? If not "now", in the first conversation just after/just as Mikki is leaving ABC Street, how could any of these story fragments have arrived here, on this sheet of scrap paper, scribbled "on this day"? Another way: how does Monica know any of this?

Ellen Grace's biography in a few sentences: married a fellow student in her senior year of college.

Marriage lasted fifteen years: a long nap with few interruptions.

Fifteen months after the end of her fifteen year marriage she met and quickly married an older man, an airline executive with money.

Took her no time to get used to a more wide-awake and adventurous lifestyle.

Too many stories to tell about that and maybe they'll get told or maybe they won't — depending on what? what exactly?

A little Chronicle entry about weight and old friendships: Ellen Grace says that Monica might find this interesting (or, if not, Monica should let her know immediately and that might help her decide what stories to tell): she herself weighs almost exactly what she weighed in college, maybe even in high school, a little above or below one-hundred-and-twenty pounds and that makes her wonder: does Monica remember Linda? (suggests that she think of someone really skinny, like Twiggy). Unlike Monica (who stopped answering her letters a long time ago, after Monica's first trip to France and Italy, when — in her opinion — Monica started turning into someone she didn't know), Linda kept in touch and they still talk. So she (Ellen Grace) plans to see her in Manhattan. For example: she knows for a fact that as thin as Linda was then, in college, she's thinner now! No more than eighty pounds! Her profession (something to do with fashion) may have something to do with it, but that doesn't get to the bottom of it. Does Monica agree?

What else about Linda? Only this: Linda advised her not to call Monica: "you'll only be rejected, Monica must have four Ph.D.'s by now, she's a professor, she's published a dozen scholarly books and anything you have to say to her will seem like nonsense!" But, of course, that didn't stop her. Seemed like a stupid idea of who Monica was or what it means to be intelligent.

Anyone else? Does Monica remember Jill? She's sure that Jill was someone Monica didn't like, even in high school. Jill had problems even then and her problems have, of course, gotten worse and more complicated. Jill followed her to Santa Fe and tried to get her tangled in her (Jill's) problems, which by now were horribly dark and messy. So she stopped talking to Jill for a while. Saved by what? by her own laziness?

A long story — or a lot of long, complicated stories — Monica can ask her about, but only when they meet.

On ABC Street: thunderstorms through green leaves not only of the Regans' enormous elm, but through the green leaves of everything:

and thunderstorms and green leaves through the dots and dashes of the broken rods of Monica's bamboo rollup blinds:

beautifully, wildly curving stems and leaves of Lowell's avocado plants against matted nut-color of bamboo:

"green on either side of green studio's bamboo blinds" whose dots and dashes a child on the west side of ABC Street is still trying to decipher.

Is it on the same July day or another that Lou the rolypoly mailman delivers a small package and, inside it, a blue box of short and pungent French "Gitanes" cigarettes. Makes no sense to Monica and the mailing address — to "Delil Straw" at her address — is even more pleasantly senseless.

A short tale of life and death begun earlier in the little catalogue of those who didn't/almost-didn't survive the brutal winter of '75/76 or begun somewhere else that needs to be located, then broken and scattered on a number of pages of notes as always and, also as always, interrupted by other notes, other places, times and conversations, and needing to be pieced together according to a principle that resembles order.

Let's see: there are two sets of couples who winter together in Florida (what region of Florida, what town in Florida exactly, not known or not recorded) and spend their summers together on ABC Street, always in the same two well-kept mansions-converted-in-later-life-to-multiple-dwellings toward the middle of the block (that is, about halfway between boardwalk-and-ocean and Coast Boulevard). All four are in their seventies and, notes say, Monica has been saying hello to, possibly chatting a little with, all of them for years, but — without having any reason why — knows one couple better than the other. For example: she knows that one wife and husband are named "Flo" and "Joe", but has no memory of (that is, no record of) the names of the other couple at all, except that the name "Connie" seems to cling to someone in this little constellation.

Scattered notes are confusing on the issue of who runs into who and where that someone tells Monica the often-interrupted, fragmentary tale.

Monica tries to make sense of her notes and the best she can do is: the couple Monica doesn't know as well, walking down half the length of ABC Street toward the boardwalk on the way to AAF Street for unknown reasons, stop to talk to Monica (who must be on the boardwalk for that to happen).

Un-named couple let Monica know with some emotion that they're going to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary in November and that they know Flo and Joe "even longer!"

"A fifty-five-year friendship!"

"Longer than we've been married!"

All with the same strong emotion that Monica thinks she understands, but probably doesn't.

This last winter they stayed in two small hotels near each other in Miami Beach and, in March, all Joe told them was that Flo had been ill, had had an operation in New York but insisted on going to Florida as usual and then, when they were in Florida, he had no choice but to agree again when she insisted that, when summer came, they'd return to their usual apartment in their usual house on ABC Street.

So here he is alone.

They must have figured out, Joe said when they first got together here, that Flo had cancer and that she'd died in Florida.

"At least I had fifty-four years."

And un-named couple add: "And now we're coming up to fifty years together."

What else on the same July day or on all July days that seem to be the same day — after Monica's pieced-together conversation with the un-named friends of "Flo & Joe"?

Very little on ABC Street: another tiny, broken fragment of note contradicts a sentence Monica just wrote about the two seventy-something couples who summer on ABC Street. Broken fragment says that, illogically, the couple that Monica knows less well used to spend their summers in the spacious and handsome second floor apartment now occupied by Yvonne Wilding and Al Szarka. (Marginally, Monica notes to herself that not knowing this couple despite the fact that they once apparently spent time in the ABC Street house where she has her little house-atop-the-house may not be as illogical as it seems, if their time in the house was a long time ago (that is, before Monica's time).)

On Salem Avenue: Rough, elliptical note says only "Hot days"

"sunlight in late afternoon"

and, a little hard to make sense of, "a bit cooler"?

"Cooler", but when? Only after "sunlight in late afternoon"?

This too, which may or may not confirm that there is coolness in the afternoon despite "sunlight" and despite "Hot days": rough, elliptical note also says a few words, not a complete sentence, about a "pancake in the back yard" and about Monica's speculation about the time elapsed since the last time David made his oven-baked pancake and she ate it (sharing it with who aside from Bah-Wah, who loves its sweetness and its egginess and what other qualities — what other qualities exactly — she's always wished she could ask Bah-Wah directly about) on an improvised table in the back yard, picnic style. In any case, rough, elliptical note doesn't have time to go into detail about the recipe for David's Oven-baked Pancake for Monica. Notes only say that the pancake is his adaptation of the recipe for a traditional "German" pancake and/or "Dutch baby", etc. His adjustments over years of trial and error and experimentation with quantities and proportions of ingredients, near-obsessive attention to nuances of execution in order to arrive at certain desired results are hard to make others understand exactly.

If David's adjusted recipe for his baked pancake (the end result of years of crossed-out additions-and-subtractions, reminders, etc. as the recipe got refined and made precise and repeatable) isn't in "rough, elliptical note" quickly sketched in in July '76 or December '77, then how can it be here "now"? Added when? when exactly? And if "now", when exactly is now?

The Chronicle is content to leave the question of determining when the "now" of writing (editing) the final version happens to someone else "later", but feels bound to admit that it had a struggle deciding whether to allow Monica to manipulate time. That is: no recipe in original notes, so absolute faithfulness to act of chronicling means no recipe here. Also, truth of recipe, if written then, wouldn't have later refinements and definite conclusions. Other side of Chronicle's argument with itself is: to allow Monica to include any recipe for David's Oven-baked Pancake for Monica at all, it should be the later, refined one that can be used.

Let's see: INGREDIENTS have always remained fundamentally the same, all experiments with quantities and relative proportions, subtractions and additions from and to whatever the original newspaper or cookbook recipe inspired David (not in any cookbook he owns "now" and/or food-stained newspaper clipping long-since lost), resolved like this:

FOR EACH PANCAKE

1. ½ cup all purpose, unbleached white flour (organic, if possible, preferably Hecker's, King Arthur, etc.)

2. ½ cup whole milk

3. 2 ½ jumbo eggs (also organic (if possible)), beaten lightly with an electric mixer

4. pinch of nutmeg

5. 1 stick (¼ lb.) sweet (unsalted) butter

Chronicle rejects Monica's plan to include a history of the cooking equipment David's used since he first started to teach himself to cook (while he was in graduate school or soon after he'd left), but is willing to let this much of a too-long, too-complicated story in: when David first started to figure out how to cook he had no money (held odd jobs while starting to write fiction, not poetry, for the first time in his life), no kitchen equipment and a small, ancient stove in a tiny rental apartment, but, through trial and error and the need for the satisfaction of getting something done, managed to cook all sorts of meals (learning from cookbooks borrowed from the local library and kept so long the pages were as stained and matted and scribbled-on as if he owned them) using cheap hand-me-down (from who-or-where not noted or remembered ) or garage sale pots and pans. Certainly didn't own the cast iron pans he started to use later (also found at garage or estate sales)) for his baked pancake:

EQUIPMENT

1. 2 10" cast iron frying pans (preferably old, well-used and dedicated to baked pancake only)

2. 2 medium size mixing bowls

3. small bowl for mixing one egg

4. one electric hand mixer

[N.B.: batter will be prepared for two 10" pancakes, no matter what, but capacity of oven will dictate what pans are used. For example: David's oven, even "now", when it's no longer the tiny, ancient stove supplied by a bad landlord in '76/'77 — or, possibly, not even supplied by the landlord, but simply the stove that had always been there, pre-dating landlord and maybe the landlord before that and just left there for David and whoever came after David — but Monica's stove, where David's been baking the pancake "now", is a standard, acceptable one, but can't handle two 10" pans at the same time. So he's forced to adapt and uses one 10" pan, one approximately 7 ½" pan and one pan marked 5", but which a ruler measures to be more like 6 ½" across the bottom.]

INGREDIENTS FOR EACH PANCAKE

½ cup all purpose unbleached white flour (Hecker's or King Arthur brands)

½ cup whole milk (discovered "later" that the recipe works just as well with goat's milk, but David says that he wouldn't try to use any non-dairy milk substitute).

2 ½ organic jumbo eggs, well mixed with electric mixer, but not beaten

1 stick (¼ pound) sweet (unsalted) butter

pinch ground nutmeg

confectioner's sugar

2-3 fresh lemons, halved

best quality fruit preserves (a matter of taste, of course, but must be high quality, whole fruit not jelly or "spread" and with no filler or chemicals: David thinks Tiptree "Little Scarlet" strawberry best, but Monica prefers Tiptree "wild blueberry" or seedless blackberry)

1. Preheat oven to 425°-450°. (David notes that, in general, recipes seem to assume new, optimum equipment and rarely take into account the wild variability of what people actually have to use: one oven's 425°, for example, is another oven's 500° or 375°, depending on age and all sorts of other variables. Temperature control knob on Monica's gas oven has become loose and inaccurate with time so David has to keep adjusting the temperature to make sure he ends up with the desired result. Now, for example, he has to set the control knob almost to maximum or "Broil", probably at the rubbed-out 500° mark.

The basic idea: oven needs to be hot and too hot is better than not hot enough: if pancake is browning too fast or even charring around the edges, the temperature can be adjusted down and/or pancake can be taken out while the oven temperature adjusts down, but a flabby, undercooked (too-eggy or too-floury), crustless pancake is a failure.

2. Set cast iron pans on their burners. David has always had, and prefers, a gas oven and stovetop because he needs the flame as a visual guide.

If using two 10" pans melt one stick (¼ lb.) sweet butter over very low ring of flame in each pan. If forced by oven capacity to use pans of varied dimensions, as David is, divide stick of butter in proportion to sizes of pans. No need to add more butter.

3. While butter is slowly melting:

a) crack two jumbo organic eggs in each of two mixing bowls

b) crack fifth egg in small bowl, mix thoroughly with fork and divide evenly between eggs in mixing bowls (each mixing bowl now has approximately 2 ½ jumbo eggs in it)

c) with electric hand mixer thoroughly but gently mix (do not beat) eggs in each bowl till yolks and whites are well combined

d) add level ½ cup flour to each bowl (do not mix at this stage)

e) add pinch nutmeg to flour in each bowl

f) add level ½ cup milk to ingredients in each bowl

[N.B.: Check butter in pan to make sure it's not browning (if so, heat is too high and should be adjusted down), only mildly bubbling]

g) using the electric mixer (coarse beater blades are sufficient, whisk attachment not necessary) thoroughly mix batter (egg/milk/flour/nutmeg) until result is smooth, dense batter without lumps. Break up and mix in any lump of flour. In other words, this is not like a griddle cake batter where it's desirable and even necessary to leave some lumps that will bake out on the griddle.

h) with a rubber spatula scrape down sides and bottom of batter bowl to make sure everything's been blended.

4. Check state of melted butter. If not bubbling at all, cautiously turn up flame a little to achieve desired level before pouring batter in.

[*N.B.: it's important to have in mind that one of the desired results, learned from experience and likely a wrinkle David's added from whatever recipe he'd originally stumbled across in book, magazine or newspaper, and also likely an alteration of all other similar recipes for an egg/milk/flour batter pancake that puffs up and browns in the oven, is the formation of a crisp and buttery bottom crust that's created partly in the oven and partly on top of the stove. Creation of this crust without scorching the bottom adds a layer of care and attention that comes into play no matter how many times David's made the pancake.]

5. When butter is clearly hot and bubbly enough (but not too hot or anywhere near browning) pour batter into pans (if not 10" pans distribute according to size) and leave briefly on heat to get formation of bottom crust started, but not long enough to start baking pancake on the stove top. Make sure you've scraped all batter from bowl into pan.

6. Immediately slide pans into hot oven and make sure to shut off stovetop flames.

PREPARE WHILE PANCAKE IS BAKING

a) Set out confectioner's sugar with large spoon for sprinkling on baked surfaces (not necessary to measure, because sugar will be sprinkled as desired)

b) halve and de-pit 2-3 lemons

c) preserves can be brought to table

d) large, attractive serving platters should be warm and ready

Oven David's using (Monica's) doesn't have an accurate temperature dial and he needs to turn it to high heat, therefore needs to check it after 10-15 minutes and sometimes needs to make a small adjustment down or else remind himself to pull pancakes from the oven early to get a good look at them.

Pancakes should come out when they're puffed into browned mountains and golden valleys (no two landscapes ever the same).

Oven can be left on or shut off entirely and then re-started and brought back to high, baking heat before pancakes are returned for a brief re-heating of confectioner's-sugar-sprinkled surface.

7. Using large spoon or with fingers sprinkle confectioner's sugar on surface of pancake, enough to add sweetness and a festive look to brown-and-gold hill-and-valley landscape of the surface, but not so much as to overly sweeten or hide surface. Another matter of trial and error to find the right level.

8. Return sprinkled pancake to re-heated oven briefly: only to heat pancake through and to set the confectioner's sugar so it's no longer soft and raw-tasting, not even 2-3 minutes. Be careful not to char the "hills" at this stage.

Remove pancakes from oven, shut entirely and return pancakes to stovetop burners.

Slide a metal pancake turner under pancake and lift one end carefully to determine how much crust has formed and how darkly caramelized it is. If crust is already well-formed, no need to rekindle flame on burner. If crust is light on underside, on the other hand, turn on very small ring of flame while pan is on burner.

9. With pancake on burner, squeeze approximately ½ lemon over surface to be absorbed by and combined with confectioner's sugar for a wonderful lemon/sugar flavor in each bite. David also likes to squeeze a little lemon juice around the edges, into the hot pan — particularly if on tiny flame — to hear the sizzle of juice hitting hot, buttery pan.

10. Remove pan from burner after no more than a minute or so and again, with care, slide pancake turner under pancake, trying as much as possible to leave crust intact. Slide onto warmed platter.

11. Scrape out any remaining crust and surround pancake with it (don't waste it, it's delicious!).

12. Serve with preserves of choice.

Monica loves lemon and likes David to give her an extra ½ lemon on the side.

Coffee or tea as desired.

Let's see, what else on Salem Avenue?

"Peaches on the ground/even more peaches on the tree."

Note clearly says that the peaches still on the trees are "green", but does not say whether peaches on the ground are "brown" or "rotten".

Same day or another just like it: Bah-Wah is rolling in the grass "in ecstasy": ball bobbling juicily in mouth, being squeezed and squooshed as if delicious and about to be savored by big, rosy tongue and mashed by bone-crushing teeth.

Sun has left the grass and Bah-Wah's body revels in rolling and forcing its way into earth's coolness.

One slash of sunlight — an angle of it sharp as a corner of broken window-glass still stuck in its busted frame — in one corner of the yard (which corner not noted) alters nothing.

At around 8 p.m. on "December 7" (12/7!) Monica isn't editing her July notes, therefore is forced to be entirely in December. Doesn't like the bitter winter night turning ABC Street vacant and uninviting in the west-facing windows of her green studio and decides to go into the red room (south-and-east-facing over tile and shingle rooftops) where she can turn on the tv and search for a different season (not just warmer, but fuller and more active).

Sliding through one channel after another leads her to a documentary-in-progress about herons.

Let's see: where are we? where are we exactly?

Voice-over narration says something about the lushness of spring "in the English countryside", but also something about unseasonably strong breezes "blowing young herons about a bit" in their nests.

Serenely quiet aerial view from a shallow altitude (no sound of airplane engine) shows cows in their usual poses, folded or standing as if planted in pale green meadows, shallow rivers with herons feeding at the edges of what's blue and sparkling through the settled washes of green.

Monica allows herself to feel (for how long exactly not noted) that she's made it through the impossibly harsh winter and is in some amplified version of the Salem Avenue back yard, writing under hedges that are more like poplars than hedges, slender rows of surging inclines of leaves that flip over easily in mild breezes, showing their silvery undersides in fresh sunlight and flipping back and forth between green and silver while Monica writes about Bah-Wah rolling pleasurably in the grass.

What else?

Low, aerial view of English countryside looks down panoramically on "pale green fields" surrounding "circular blue pools" and within the blue pools "islands of a slightly paler or slightly darker green" and somewhere, on the bank of one of these green islands within blue-in-green, a heron is "gulping down a large fish".

Voice-over narration tells us that a growing heron consumes approximately two-hundred-and-thirty-pounds of fish in two months and that "after eating, the nearly grown birds stretch out in the sun".

Fields of white flowers surround blue pools of water in the sun.

Sun over all.

White petals rain down illogically on Monica still writing under flower-less poplars.

Slightly too-poetic shot of setting orange sun in water and, even worse, of the black silhouette of a heron in fading sunlight, red sky in the deep background.

Documentary continues and it's clearly a different day.

"Let's see": close-up shot of the long, skinny legs of a solitary heron walking, first through dense grass like a cartoon heron walking with exaggerated yet careful steps through watercolor washes of the green that always symbolizes grass and then through sparkling blue water.

Chronicle says that long, pointed beak makes quick stabs in water "for trout", but can only know that if voice-over told her that.

More informative voice-over narration, but now Monica has to memorize it because her typewriter ribbon jams — refuses to go forward or back — and she can't type:

a) "a heron will eat almost anything"

b) "herons kill their food before eating"

c) "some creatures a heron is likely to eat: frogs

birds

rats

crabs

eel (because its fattiness or 'sliminess' is particularly well-suited to a heron's digestive system)"

d) there are even documented incidents of a heron managing to kill and eat a cat

e) a single visual documentation of a heron killing and eating all the "goldfish" (Monica questions whether the word "goldfish" is accurate or if the fish were actually "carp" or another golden fish larger than a "goldfish" and resembling carp) in a small pond on someone's property

f) herons sometimes, not often, eat "water moles" (Monica wonders: British for "muskrats"?) and even "moor hens" (also known as "gallinules")

g) some of the herons of the world migrate (from which countries not stated or not "memorized" and, similarly, where these herons migrate to not remembered or not chronicled), "but not English herons"

h) English herons stay in England and therefore any severe winter kills off young herons in great numbers

i) it can be said definitely that herons detest winter

j) heron winter mortality depends entirely on the severity of the weather

k) in the severe winter and thick snow of '62-'63 "10,000 herons died" (not clear to Monica, trying to remember "later", if the voice-over narration said clearly that 10,000 herons died in England alone!)

l) why do herons die in large numbers in severe winter? because, when snow covers the once-green washes of grass and blue water is frozen, there's nothing to eat.

And yet, voice-over concludes (or it's the last thing that Monica "memorizes"), herons have managed to survive as a species for "millions of years".

Monica can't help wondering how English herons, like the population of ABC Street, fared in the severe winter of '76-'77.

Let's see: July '76 being typed (edited) in December '77 (7/12) continues.

At 9 a.m. on July 5 Monica is sipping creamy iced coffee through two thin plastic straws jammed down between as many ice cubes as David could force into a tall and narrow "iced tea" glass (decoration on it not noted).

Smoking an aesthetic cigarette while sipping mild iced coffee and chronicling what exactly at 9 a.m. on ABC Street?

Old Rae Ryan is doing nothing in particular on the Regans' porch (whether or not in royal blue not noted).

Sound of Rosamond Coffin's profoundly melancholy sobbing (sound of a very young child in the grip of what's cosmic and insoluble) from one of the attic bedrooms next door. Little hard to hear through the coughing and grinding of a power mower plowing the shallow green icing of near-distant lawn mounds down to a seamless green/brown fuzz.

Let's see, what else on July 5?

Unusual constellation of four girls passes together (all in a line or broken up in two's or in some other way not noted and not noted either whether walking or bicycling): Holly, April, Sabrina and Natasha.

Natasha: Margaret Brennan's friend Wendy's younger daughter, pretty and awkward: heavy legs and wavy brunette hair.

April: the oldest, "most sexual" (not noted how Monica knows that and nothing about what she looks like chronicled either): poised and aggressive, as if the fact that April is unselfconscious about enjoying sex is exactly the difference between her poise and Natasha's awkwardness.

Holly: long and fluid, graceful and beautiful in every way, neither awkward nor overtly sexual, with an athlete's long stride that's necessary to keep pace with her ever-present Great Dane companion, a soft camel's hair color, name not remembered or never-known.

And Sabrina, who Monica's never talked to and probably never met and who doesn't carve out a visual definition as she goes by (lack of knowledge on Monica's part? and therefore unfair to Sabrina; or it could be that Sabrina's just someone destined to be a background figure in the narrative adventures of her friends).

At around 11 p.m. on July 5, from the darkness of Monica's front porch, David sees (and later reports to Monica for her Chronicle) that he saw only one light in the Greengrass' two story dark brick-and-iron fortress, but in which room — in which room exactly — not reported to Monica by David or not recorded by Monica.

The already-dark house made even darker by the solitary light's fluctuating blues and reds washing across the walls (whose color Monica has no idea of) where Sylvia Greengrass is watching tv, suddenly alone and without companionship (even if only the companionship of wiry and taciturn, compulsive driveway-and-sidewalk waterer-and-broomer husband Enos) in room after room now animated only by her own recessive energy.

No way for Monica to confirm on July 5 if Enos Greengrass is in fact dead or still in some state that's called "alive".

Let's see: the reality of December 11 '77, when Monica is editing (typing) July '76 and which obviously can't be known to Monica then, still-and-all can't be kept from interjecting itself "now".

At "around 6 p.m." on the second of two days so cold (tv says "10° ") that wind on any exposed skin bites all the way to the bone like the icicle-teeth of winter's starved and muscular animal (no blood, only pain) Monica is typing at her big oak desk/breakfast table, either in a miraculous quadrant of sunlight or looking down into the long, horizontal twilight of ABC Street at a miraculous quadrant of sunlight and brain immediately translates seeing into feeling.

What else? a) Chronicle says (but doesn't say how it knows) that Mr. Sloth's disappearance doesn't mean that he's dead. He's in long-term rehab in Connecticut for what appears to have been (though not truly known or chronicled) a stroke.

b) "Now", in December '77, Enos Greengrass is certainly dead, but "now", in July '76, Monica can only speculate that Enos Greengrass is missing and might be dead. So, whether Enos Greengrass is alive or dead depends entirely on whether Monica is recording or editing and on what part of the horizontal Chronicle a reader happens to scroll to.

Monica makes a mental note to herself to find out how often in chronicling reports of the "serious illness" of a figure in ABC Street's image world, and then that figure's disappearance from ABC Street, translates into death.

What else on December 11? Mrs. Sloth has disappeared as someone regularly visible on ABC Street (how long — how long exactly — she's been missing not noted). Therefore: definitely dead?

"Flo" (of "Flo and Joe") is, no-doubt-about-it, not only disappeared, but confirmed dead.

Monica's had enough of looking out her green studio windows at the terribly cold streets of December '77 and turns back to the summer of '76 still in her typewriter and eternally blossoming there.

On an undated day in July a woman in a white blouse (whether Naomi Rosenwasser or visiting daughter Annie not known or not noted) passes in front of the opaque white curtains, thick as bath towels, drawn across the Rosenwassers' second floor, north-facing picture window, and probably — since she's come between curtain and window — with the intention of looking out the window in a vague, general way at the short length of ABC Street between the Rosenwassers' house and Coast Boulevard or at something specific and unknowable on ABC Street.

Nadja's bizarrely Christ-like Andy, thin, bearded and shirtless, is backing his ancient Volvo out of Greg-&-Lena's weedy driveway roughly and quickly, as if he's afraid that if he's careful and slows down he might not make it to the street. License plate is an odd green-and-white one and someone (who, when or why not recorded) explains that it may very well be a NY plate, but "only a temporary" (therefore its unfamiliarity), because Nadja-and-Andy forgot to register and let the regular plates expire "on July 4". Even if all that's true, Monica thinks, the temporary green and white plate looks more like a Vermont plate or even a New Hampshire plate to her than a New York plate or — going to an extreme —possibly even the plate from a state or territory that never crosses her mind.

Let's see: what other incidents or not-quite incidents occur on the same undated July day?

"Happy" passes with a woman Monica has seen him walking with many times before (over how many years — Chronicle years and even pre-Chronicle years — not noted and no name for or description of her noted either) and Monica reminds herself (Chronicle reminds her) that she'd stopped chronicling "Happy"'s appearances a long time ago, but can't remember why.

Happy's face is smiling and smooth, smooth but weathered (weathered by weather or by alcohol and rehab-from-alcohol or by something else altogether?) and, with his thin, sandy hair, is weirdly reminiscent of an adult face from an ancient children's show on during the same era as "Howdy Doody".

What else?

Hydrangeas are blooming, but only along Coast Boulevard (not yet in the front yards and gardens of ABC Street or in the back yard of the W.'s massive old cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house and where there's bound to be seasonal blooming of hydrangeas (Monica's chronicle of yearly blooming would require tedious searching back through other years): a dense wall of lively-but-pale blue with hints of yellow in it and lively-but-pale rose-pink also with hints of yellow in it against the back fence).

Hydrangeas on Coast Boulevard (exact color and location not noted) not far from the spot where, "the other day", Monica was drawn to look up by the unearthly cooing of a mourning dove on a telephone line and too far down the Boulevard for Jojo, Rosamond and possibly even Joshua to be permitted to walk on their own. Wave hello as they pass walking their big black Newfoundland Grendel north on ABC Street in the direction of Coast Boulevard just up to the point where they're allowed to go. Not allowed to turn the corner, as if, beyond that. . . .

Around 3 p.m. "in hot sunlight" on the same undated July day: on one side (north) of the porch where Monica is working Minna W. (squat wife of squat landlord) is still recovering from a severe leg injury or operation: watching a small tv from a cushioned patio chair. Watching (Monica would love to but can't see what program) when Monica starts working and still there when Monica needs a break and goes upstairs.

Let's see: what, what exactly, is happening to Monica's south (direction of boardwalk, beach and ocean)?

Sound of a vacuum cleaner, rough and whining with an odd clink in it as if it's swallowed something it shouldn't have, from Greg-&-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room.

Vacuum cleaner noise followed at once by horrible scraping and screeching of dug-in furniture feet being forced out of their comfortable niches and dragged across rough board floors to unwanted new locations.

Ping-pong room being cleaned? re-arranged?

In sequence but illogical or recorded out of order for no good reason: Monica sees Lena carrying her old vacuum cleaner up the short flight of orange-painted front porch steps from street to porch room.

Has to be added to all chronicled events: always-always the movements that aren't observed and that might add apparent sense to the occasional senselessness of the everyday narrative with too many holes and jumps in it.

For example: SEARS delivery truck pulls up in front of Greg-&-Lena's exactly "now", driver/delivery man unloads a dishwasher (how Monica knows it's a dishwasher or whether boxed or un-boxed right there on the sidewalk not noted), straps the dishwasher on his back with a very few economical and athletic maneuvers and — just a little bowed — carries it up Lena-&-Greg's short flight of orange front porch steps.

Quickly from hot street and hot steps and little orange porch to cool, vacuumed and rearranged interior of ping-pong room.

Drawn side curtains (facing the corner of the porch where Monica's working) cast the room in even cooler shadow.

Seems to Monica that the delivery man/truck driver pauses at the top of the stairs, dishwasher on his slightly bowed back, to feel how hot the sun is and to sniff with profound pleasure the strong ocean breeze that's just begun to pulse across all the front porches of ABC Street before he plunges into the shadow and coolness of the interior.

On July 6 blinds are drawn "in both the left and the right hand windows", but of which house (Lena-&-Greg's downstairs ping-pong room, windows looking out over cracked and weedy driveway and corner of porch where Monica works or of some other house?) not noted.

Fionnuala Regan is at her parents' immaculately clean white shingle at a slight SW diagonal across the way, as usual. Not recorded what Fionnuala Regan is doing — what she's doing exactly — on the Regans' front porch, but Monica is more interested, as she always is, in the Rosenwassers' second story picture window above and a little to the left (south) of Fionnuala on the Regans' porch.

"At about 5 p.m." reflections of coral face-and-bath towels are floating in a bubble-like film above the surface of the long picture window, then moving in a liquid way (image transmitted from what clothesline in what back yard exactly Monica would have to calculate angles and think about geography and optics to have a clue) against thick and creamy fabric of Rosenwassers' pleated white drapes, drawn enough to let a-little-but-not-too-much light into the interior (which Monica has no idea of). Liquid movement of coral within white, each unstable substance adrift in the other, makes Monica think (thinking that = memory/memory that's really imagination (memory/imagination that have nothing to do with thinking at all)) of what washes through human senses at a waterside, marina table on a breezy day in summer.

Let's see: what else on July 6?

1. Sylvia Greengrass, pouchy, withdrawn and melancholy, is watering the two little halves of her lawn, hosing over the iron fence and brick turrets of the low exterior wall of the Greengrass' miniature fortress, picking up where recently-dead husband Enos left off, but with this (at least this) important difference: Sylvia's small frame and dark and pouchy little face are hidden in oversized dark rubber raincoat, wide rainhat and high rubber boots while Enos would look for any chance to water and broom in baggy old blue shorts and nothing else, bare-chested, sunburnt and wiry.

2. Wind is moving a different set of backyard towels than the set living remotely in the Rosenwassers' picture window. Wind separates two yellow bath towels from one white face towel and also swings the clothesline and all its long-dried towels from peaceful invisibility into flapping visibility.

What else on July 6?

Lou, the rolypoly mailman, delivers the mail directly to Monica's hand and in it a card from THE STARDUST HOTEL/LAS VEGAS, with no return address and with Yvonne Wilding's name crossed out twice with two incorrect addresses, one with ABD Street, one with the wrong house number and then, weirdly, re-addressed to "Pam & Ted Leary" instead of Yvonne. Monica makes no attempt to stop herself from reading the short, vacant text.

"Dear Yvonne — when are you getting married? What size bed will you have? Will you be at this address? Hope you're feeling ok. Take it easy. Love, Mom"

Tornado warning at noon, heavy rain at 5 p.m. on ABC Street on July 7 and reports (whether on tv or radio not noted) of a tornado touching down "in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty". Report also says that the tornado spotted in New York Harbor is "traveling in a North West direction" (that is, in the direction of New Jersey). No further reports about the tornado: where it ends up, what New Jersey towns are smashed and so on.

The Rosenwassers' white pleated drapes have stopped moving and the liquid, summery feeling of coral-in-white is now entirely submerged in the rich corn yellow of a thick bath towel and the paler yellow of a few smaller towels beside it. Chronicle isn't sure if one or more of the paler yellow towels has "polka dots" (and, if so, color of dots not noted).

Heavy rain clears completely at 6:20 p.m. exactly, leaving behind wonderful silvery fragments in the gutters and in the trees. Leaves of the Regans' elm are now silver-green and both silver and green are dripping down into the gutter, reviving ABC Street from silence and depression, giving it something to say that's local and cosmic.

Wind/dripping, silvery leaves/blue sky all seem to have something to do with one another, but no way for Monica to tell which is the cause of which.

What else on the same or another day in early July?

Old Rae Ryan is sitting in the southernmost corner of the Regans' front porch "early in the morning" and (looking ahead through hastily scribbled notes) then again in the evening.

New reflections or change in the same reflection in the Rosenwassers' second floor picture window against the same white, pleated drapes drawn against the summer sun: "black and yellow" bathing suits (exact arrangement of blacks and yellows not noted) and — not clear whether at the same time or a little later — other clothing and other colors at the same angle and height, therefore on the same un-located backyard clothesline.

Let's see: what in one place is called a "mist", in another a "fog" drifts north on ABC Street from ocean, beach and boardwalk in the direction of Coast Boulevard, Salem Avenue and then Bay Drive and the Bay and beyond, whether able to hold together all the way to Brooklyn impossible to say, bringing an unpleasant chill with it, a coherent entity that seems to have a personality.

Same July day or the next or even the one after that:

Monica hasn't seen Bill Kropotkin (Nelly X's cab-driving/ex-professor husband) for a long time. And even now he passes by chance and chats briefly on his way to or from his home on ACA Street from or to shopping on AAF Street or beyond AAF Street in the vast supermarket on the south side of Bay Drive past how many broad and oily gas station plazas, dreary shops and the orange brick Post Office building, drearier than all the rest.

Monica wonders, of course, if Bill Kropotkin went out of his way to walk north from the boardwalk and along ABC Street toward Coast Boulevard or if he'd had to make a stop at Ma X's sixth floor corner apartment in the ancient yellow brick apartment building at the ocean end of the block, with its broad view of beach and ocean through large sets of small panes in rusted frames.

Went out of his way to pass by just so he could crab to Monica for a few minutes? Always half-shaven and grouchy, serious face dark and bristling with grievances, Bill's latest complaint is this: has to drive morons all over Brooklyn! Never uses his brain anymore! Where's the proof, he'd like to know, that he still has a brain! Unless being an expert in every little street and cul-de-sac in Flatbush and Mill Basin and East New York qualifies as using your brain. "I'm not a producer anymore, just a consumer!"

Not noted which direction Bill Kropotkin heads off in, but north toward Coast Boulevard is logical.

A long story about someone named "Sonia" who the Chronicle remembers, but Monica doesn't: Chronicle reminds Monica that "Sonia"'s parents bought the apartment house that someone named "Stephanie Norr" (Chronicle seems to know her too, but, again, Monica doesn't) was living in "one year ago". More about "Sonia" and "Stephanie Norr", but even the Chronicle isn't interested enough to give the details that might add flavor.

Tommy Liman is back from a trip to Newfoundland (if chronicled "earlier", Monica doesn't remember it "now"). Tommy stops by to see Monica, but not to tell her about Newfoundland, only to find out if she's seen or heard any cicadas this year. He hasn't and wants to record that fact in the ledger he's been keeping, but needs to make sure that his journal entry has to do with the cicadas only and not at all with the fact that he was away. He's certain of this: last year he first spotted them on June 26 exactly.

A boy named "Jonathan", who's followed Tommy Liman onto the porch but who neither Monica nor the Chronicle has any knowledge or memory of, says with certainty that he has heard them, only not on ABC Street and maybe not even in this neighborhood. Tommy Liman is clearly bothered by "Jonathan"'s uncertainty and tries to press him for more detail, but Jonathan isn't even sure if he heard them this month or in July or maybe it's possible that he heard them "a little while ago", in June for example, because in June his family visited some friends in Pennsylvania and they live out in the country, so that seems much more likely.

Now Tommy is too disgusted to control himself. Doesn't Jonathan know anything about anything? Why talk about cicadas as if you're interested if you're really not interested? Hasn't Jonathan learned that if you're really interested you know exactly where and when you observed something?! If you don't do that then you're just fooling around and that's boring and stupid. You end up living in a boring, fuzzy world with no detail, like every other dummy! It'll just be one dumb thing after another without ever really caring about anything!

Turns his back on Jonathan as if Jonathan isn't there anymore and says he only has one or two other little things to tell Monica before he has to go: does Monica remember that he was taking Judo lessons? Started that after swimming instruction ended and he'd already worked his way up to yellow belt — does she remember that? — but then Newfoundland interrupted him, so now he has to decide whether it's worthwhile going back and trying to pick up where he left off or whether it makes more sense to just forget about it. So, if Monica wouldn't mind thinking about it, they can figure out what he should do next time he sees her.

If Tommy Liman said anything else it's not recorded.

Let's see: what else on the same July day or the day just after it or even just before it, but recorded "out of order".

Someone's birthday is being celebrated in Greg-&-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room next door. Monica can tell from the loud noise that the band is home: not the whole band playing together as a band, just random blasts and runs of music from solitary instruments in and out of harmony with one or more other instruments, never a run on the piano because Greg's piano is upstairs on the second floor in the Coffins' big breakfast/dining room/parlor/kitchen/practice space etc. Excited but scattered presence of band confirms to Monica that it's Grete Forest (Greg Coffin's graceful sister/Andy Forest's beautiful, athletic wife, Babette's ambivalent daughter-and-housemate) who's being celebrated. Monica knows that Grete's birthday is in July (close to David's, but not quite 7/12) and, not noted but Monica thinks she hears and/or sees Leo Romero's doggish, panting over-excitement, which can only be about Grete Forest (not his starlet-like blonder-than-blonde wife Lily).

Long birthday celebration (multiple days?) with runs, fragments and short blasts of band music means no gig "this weekend".

Sound of a noisy old stand mixer (dings and clatters in a wobbly, irregular way off sides of big mixing bowl) from Lena's second floor front kitchen/etc. "Saturday night around 8 p.m." Might be like Lena to retreat from the party to make drinks but, Monica wonders, what drinks are possible to make with an electric mixer, not a blender?

Monica also wonders marginally if she's ever chronicled Grete Forest's age because she'd-like-to-include-it-now-but-has-no-idea-about-it and also understands that it will be very hard to guess the age of someone girlish and womanly in equal measure.

This too: thick, white, pleated drapes are drawn across the Rosenwassers' second floor, north-facing picture window with a few blots of color in front of them as if painted there. Seems to Monica (she'd need binoculars to be certain) that the blots of color are pairs of small socks and a small bathing suit, oddly suspended between window and drapes as if hung there to dry in the sun's last, low rays. Children's bathing suit and socks, but Annie Rosenwasser, husband Nils and two children are gone. Warren Rosenwasser and his two children are gone also, leaving parents Fred and Naomi to themselves again: Warren back to Alabama, Annie and family back to Denmark.

Monica notes that "summer evenings and early summer mornings are the best hours of the day", but doesn't say best for what, what exactly, only that the Regans' splendid old elm is almost at its full, green wingspan, deeply anchored and stirring just a little in its shifting green masses and layers: departing or returning gulls seem to orbit in breezes bound with a few clouds within a circle of blue sky: Regans' little universe includes the anchored but sailing ever-so-white frame house.

Not visible from Monica's vantage point on the porch, of course, so how does she know that the ocean too is astir with green life gliding through it as if there were gulls underwater? Not the green of the Regans' elm, but the ocean's strong and fizzy green soda with a little extra green juice in it.

Monica notes that it sometimes happens on ABC Street and most likely on every street, if only someone were paying a particular kind of attention to the passing of others across the level, superficial landscape of the local universe, that someone appears who the one obsessively looking/recording knows only in a purely visual way, with only a bit of broken and intermittent story-telling attached to add some flavor of personality and history.

Alexis Ilinopoulos is a familiar ABC Street figure for Monica in exactly that way and here she is "now" after an absence of how many years exactly Monica would have to be able to delve into the pages of her by-now-vanished ur-Chronicle to have a clue.

Joshua Coffin is tossing a baseball back and forth with one of his substitute Dads — the tall, thin one with a pony tail who Monica has seen many times (number of times exactly not recorded or known) shadowing Lena's little, athletic body and sorrowful plum face in a somewhat doggy way. Makes it his business to play with all three children like a good, store-bought daddy ill-suited for the role and, for that reason, easy to return for a full refund.

Wanda Baer crosses paths with and says something hearty and cheery to Joshua as she passes, stops by Monica's porch briefly to tell her for no obvious reason that she's headed for Manhattan. Not even a minute passes after Wanda's headed north —> on ABC Street toward Coast Boulevard and a right turn on the Boulevard for the long walk to AAF Street and the beginning of either a long bus or subway trip to Manhattan or left for the bus that will take her to Brooklyn for another long but different subway trip to Manhattan before Alexis Ilinopoulos stops to continue a tale left off how many years ago or, more likely, to begin a new fragment of a new tale with only the most tenuous connection to the years-ago-broken tale.

"Let's see": Alexis Ilinopoulos' tale is, like most, only a tale if smashed bits of dozens of parts-of-tales are looked at as one tale when they're all pressed together into a few sentences at one time in one place.

Sharp borders of time, porous borders of space or the other way around.

She's living in Maryland now and so much happier than she ever was here! Can it only be the warmer weather? What does Monica think? Could "weather" ever possibly explain anything? OK. She's originally from D.C. so being in Maryland does feel more natural and that probably matters, but still. She's working for the D.C. police just like she always wanted: both a probation officer and a school crossing guard. Comes naturally to her. Does Monica remember that her kids always complained that she was like a cop? Always on their case about something. Hasn't been here that long (nothing remembered or recorded and possibly nothing said about how long she's staying, only that she's here, etc.), but already her social life's pretty good. A date right now in fact! Waiting to be picked up and on the lookout for the guy's car, if she can only remember what make, model and color the damn thing is! If they don't connect, no big deal to walk over to the Salem Inn. Got to assume he's got enough brains to meet her there.

A few drinks, dinner, then who knows what.

So, all in all, life's not too bad.

If there's no more of Alexis' chopped-up/pressed together tales that may = one tale does that mean her date's car has pulled up or that she's walking north?: slim, athletic figure in tight, light-colored slacks and what-colored sneakers making a quick turn left on Coast Boulevard toward the Salem Inn on the corner of Salem Avenue and ABI Street.

The space around Monica, just occupied by Alexis Ilinopoulos, is immediately filled with a pleasant aroma of cooking through open windows in Lena's second floor front kitchen/diningroom/etc., but how does Monica know that Lena's cooking alone? For example, Babette may have walked over so they can cook and have a family meal together with the children, but without Greg, Andy or Grete.

Monica isn't sure and wishes someone would check: is this the same scribbled note already transcribed about "Sonia"? Sonia, whose parents bought the apartment house "Stephanie Knorr" was living in "a year ago", runs into Monica under the dark green trees on Coast Boulevard "in muted sunlight" and cool breezes. Note adds, contradicting itself, that Boulevard's muted sunlight is, still and all, capable of giving off uncomfortable heat.

Also: for reasons Monica can't figure out "now" Chronicle slides into a note about Sonia from December 14, '75: at around 4 p.m. on a rainy Wednesday Sonia is sitting next to Monica on her porch and — not noted why — continuing a tale begun when?

"A year ago", when she was only seventeen, Sonia moved to this neighborhood from Milwaukee and for a long time she was restless and unhappy and longing to be back in Milwaukee (who or what she left behind in Milwaukee she no longer has any idea!). One of the few things she liked here from the beginning is the closeness of the ocean: leave your house, walk a short distance, first on sidewalk, then on sand, and go swimming. It can be enough to keep you alive.

Swam a lot and, not at all clear, somehow already knew Wanda Baer and went swimming with her or, more logical, that's how she met Wanda Baer! By accident, in the ocean, diving through waves like two lunatics who need the ocean to relieve themselves of something!

She was living in a crummy apartment on AAF Street and that could easily explain why she seemed to always be running into Wanda Baer. By the time she met Wanda with Monica and Wanda introduced them she was already living in the crappy Park Hotel with the truck driver she'd just married.

Happy to be married if for no other reason than to get out'v her parents' house! Her father wouldn't talk to her because she didn't marry an Albanian! — so that's another blessing.

Now she's pregnant and shocked that she doesn't mind it. Looks at it as part of her new freedom. She's married and she's pregnant so no one questions what she does. She can go out late. She can drink. She can hang out pretty much anywhere with anyone and no one's gonna raise an eyebrow. A lot of the time her husband's there, of course, but even when he's not she's already got the USDA stamp of approval on her butt!

No longer in December of '75, but still talking to Sonia as if one long sentence is able to be pulled out like well-chewed bubble gum from then till now, July 8, '76, able to re-form and re-connect no matter how many broken strings of it stick to table, paper or fingers.

Sonia looks lousy: depression or something related to it has passed back and forth across her face a couple of dozen times and ironed it flat and here's why:

baby's due in September, but

husband's out of work and

husband can't get unemployment (Sonia can't come up with a logical reason why not) and

husband's in the hospital (reason not known, not given or not recorded) or, suddenly remembered:

husband needs an emergency eye operation, but

they have no money left and

they've moved from AAF Street to a damp and moldy unfinished basement apartment at 175 ABD Street (that is, almost parallel to the beach-block house where Monica has her apartment) and

they pay $140 a month for what's really not much more than a mattress, a stove and a half refrigerator in the basement near the boiler, the hot water heater and the landlord's washer/drier and

dim light above, damp cement below, because

her goddamn father gives no help! And

even if her father offered help (which he doesn't!), she wouldn't take it, because

she doesn't want anything from her family! though

she did borrow a dollar from her mother the other day, because she had to take a bus so

she could visit her husband in the hospital and

she plans to apply for Welfare, but, honestly,

she's too shy and embarrassed to go to the Welfare office alone, so

a friend who's already on Welfare promised to go with her though

she wonders what the point is! Why bother applying for Welfare, why go through the whole charade, when you know — if you're really honest with yourself — when you have one of those rare moments when you are honest with yourself —that at the age of eighteen your life is really over, because

it may not get any uglier or stupider, but

it won't get any less ugly and stupid either, so

there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to look forward to, except

more of the same, that is:

dreams of traveling are over and

the only dream that's still a lie is the dream she's had since she was born, which is

TO GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER FUCKN PARENTS!

Johanna (Jojo) Coffin is visiting Monica on Monica's porch because she's been saving up a few things to tell Monica for her Chronicle. Has Monica written down, for example, that Rosamond loves to play "Ring Around The Rosie" because, of course, "Rosie" is what everyone calls her and she loves it when they all have to sing "Rosie" a million times while they're playing! She's just the opposite. Hates being asked about "Jo" in Little Women. Every grownup seems to think it's going to make her happy to be compared to Jo. They ask if she was named "Jojo" because her mother wanted to raise a little "Jo". Does Monica know?: why is it that whenever a grownup thinks they're saying something clever it's always stupid?! How can she be Jo? She has an older brother and a baby sister! So there's nothing in common. And her personality's nothing like Jo's. And what about the fact that her mother is absolutely nothing like the mother in the book!? What is it, what is it exactly, that makes them say things that are so dumb? When she grows up is she going to get that dumb?

Rosie is with Jojo "now" and pulls her away from Monica so Jojo can chase her around the porch. Jojo — as she's being pulled — says that what Rosie really wanted was to play with Joshua and Joshua's best friend Sergei and sooner or later Rosie'll figure out that that's never going to happen. Can't explain to her yet that it's just exactly when you show them that you want to play with them that they enjoy leaving you behind. Maybe it's exactly at that second that they discover how much pleasure they get out of that. So Rosie has a lot of disappointment ahead of her before she figures it out. Joshua and Sergei of course went off somewhere — probably not very mysterious or interesting — and never gave Rosamond another thought. So she really had to let Rosie come with her, even though she was right for worrying that that would make it hard to remember all the things she planned to tell Monica.

It's not that Rosie doesn't have her own friends. She has two good friends — Erika and Sonny — who both live in the big, ugly old yellow brick apartment building between Grandma's and the boardwalk. (Big, ugly thing actually blocks a lot of Grandma's ocean view, especially now that she's moved downstairs because Grete and Andy wanted to live upstairs in Grandma's place.) She tried to trick Rosie into being in the mood to see Erika or Sonny, but of course it didn't work. It's just that she doesn't want Rosie to start looking for the unhappiness of being left behind.

A little later on the same day Johanna and Rosamond are back on Lena's little orange front porch square and Lena's screaming because Rosie is ripping up her newspaper.

What else on the same July day?

While Monica is typing (editing) her Chronicle an unrelated memory interrupts her. A lost and detached fragment of conversation with Sonia drifts back and Monica feels a responsibility to get it down, even though she'd rather be paying attention to something else.

Sonia says: this is the awful thing about having a baby: the baby is real: once you give birth to the baby there's no going back. The baby is the famous "arrow of time" that goes one way only. And what can you do about it? Nothing.

Yvonne Wilding, Melissa Aiello, "Laura" (no memory or notes reminding Monica "now" who — who exactly — "Laura" is) and Sonia are all pregnant in July '76 and the Chronicle notes that, while "Laura" leaves ABC Street and the neighborhood, Yvonne (who generally keeps to herself) will become friendly with Sonia and Melissa.

Not noted exactly when Tommy Liman bounds up and down Monica's steps quickly to tell her (for her Chronicle) that he's hearing a lot of cicadas behind his house where he's never heard them before!

Lou, the rolypoly mailman, delivers a letter from D'ARC Press to Monica, working in the usual southwest-facing corner of the front porch:

"Dear Monica & David —

"Enclosed is the proposal for AIR [AS IT RETURNS]

"I am sorry to have kept it so long. . . . "

Monica's already begun reading, but Johanna (Jojo) Coffin hops through her reading almost at once and Monica can tell that reading D'ARC's letter isn't going to go smoothly, as always when she's outside on her front porch work space where nothing that happens can truthfully be called "an interruption". Monica's known for a long time that writing and reading "out here" are porous and that whatever passes or passes through belongs there as much as what's already there or intended to be there.

Let's see: Jojo asks: "Am I a person? Am I still only a person? Or am I a JUMPING BEAN too?!"

Jumps around to make her point.

"If I'm always jumping around then I'm halfway between human and jumping bean! Don't you agree?"

"The project looked very interesting, but our plans for D'ARC Press have been in such turmoil that no decisions could have been made sooner."

"I know I'm silly! I know I sound silly, but Daisy doesn't care if she's silly, so I decided, 'why can't I ever let myself be silly too?!'"

"As it turns out, we have decided to discontinue the press and all its publications."

Now Daisy Brennan's there too (or she's been there all along but hasn't said anything, just remained pale and translucently beautiful in the background, so not noted) and complaining that Jojo keeps pestering her to let her play with her (Daisy's) new Red Riding Hood doll.

"It's new and I've hardly had a chance to play with it myself, so it's not fair!"

Jojo counters by explaining that Daisy's Red Riding Hood doll is fun because it's not just that Red Riding Hood turns into the Wolf, but that they both turn into Grandma when you turn it inside out — and she'd just like to do that a few more times.

Daisy says that she just discovered how — how exactly — Red Riding Hood and the Grandmother turn into the Wolf! And she wants to be the first one to have fun with that!

"It's my doll!"

"Well," Jojo says, "I always say yes when you want to play with 'Potsatina', but I'm not going to any more!"

"For the time I will continue to distribute D'ARC Books, but no new editions can be considered. Thank you for submitting AIR to us, I hope you will be able to find another publisher.

"Yours sincerely,

"Jane Crawford."

On July 9 twins pass twinning on the west (opposite) side of ABC Street, heading north —>, single harsh and rumbling voice of the twin who does all the talking swelling in volume and resonance as it approaches and passes, diminishing as it heads in the direction of Coast Boulevard.

A. "Who knows what he needs?!"

A. "A DRY HOLE!"

A. "you ain't got nothn'!

"he ain't got nothn'!

"an' I don't need it!"

A. "pass by!

"pass 'm by!

"don't give me none of this fuckn' bullshit!"

Also on July 9 or earlier "yesterday" or on another July day and only being chronicled "now" Lou the rolypoly mailman delivers another letter to Monica with an unfamiliar return address: "KHM Agency Inc.

"355 Lexington Ave." on the envelope and, inside the same address repeated on the letterhead with this addition: "General Agent for the Continental Assurance Co." and then cryptically "from CNA":

"Dear Monica

"It was terrific talking to you on the phone the other day and am looking forward to meeting you — after all these years!

"Tried to reach you on the phone today, but was unsuccessful. Therefore this letter.

"I wanted you to know my schedule:

"Leaving for Maine tomorrow.

"Will return to the city on July 18 and

"Move in with my friend Susan (her number is 928-4875 in case you want to reach me, though no one will answer during the day as she works and I'll be working also).

"Planning at this moment to be in your neighborhood the weekend of July 24-25. Hope this is convenient for you.

"I'll call you next week and make definite arrangements.

"I'll send a card from Maine. (Really looking forward to it because I'm absolutely exhausted! These two weeks in the big city have been too much for me. Not used to all the noise and action around me.)

"I shall take myself to the Maine woods and contemplate my experience.

"Speaking about contemplation, Susan and I are going to take a TM class when I get back. Can't wait! Obviously I really need it!

"So — expect my call next week. And we'll make plans to get together and catch up on all the news, if that's even possible!

"Love,

Ellen Grace" (in red ink)

It's unusual for Rosamond Coffin to visit Monica alone (without older sister Johanna watching over her), but she knows that Johanna likes to talk to Monica when she has something important to tell her for the book Monica is always writing on her porch and she also knows that she sees Jojo's best friend Daisy Brennan do the same thing, so she can't stop herself from running next door to show Monica that she's wearing tap shoes! Jojo's taking tap lessons so she begged for a pair too! and someone who used to take tap lessons and doesn't need them anymore gave her hers!

Not recorded, but Monica's sure that Rosie's already gone back to her house by the time Tommy Liman stops by to give Monica an update on ABC Street's insect population.

Let's see: 1. For the first time in his life a cicada landed on a leaf behind Hank Forest's house and he caught it!

2. He also has two dead and dried up cicadas from the same location.

3. He found a banana spider (where Tommy Liman found the banana spider not shared or not chronicled).

4. Went hunting for stuff to feed the banana spider and found a grasshopper! He hasn't tried it yet and he's excited and of course Monica's welcome to come over and watch if she wants to!

Is it Tommy Liman or someone else who tells Monica that Joshua Coffin plans to start acrobatics "next year"?

This too: next door on the same July day or one close to it: Andy Forest pulls into the cracked and weedy driveway (color, make and model of car not noted) and waves hello to Lena Coffin, sewing in sunlight on the Coffins' big, raft-like second story porch. Andy draws Monica's attention by waving and calling out to Lena so she notices what she might not have noticed otherwise: that Andy Forest's had his hair mowed severely short, almost as short as the way Greg Coffin's been wearing it lately, practically down to a stubble, but what suits Greg doesn't suit Andy. He doesn't look like himself any longer and he doesn't look like Greg, so who is he? What adds to Greg's slenderness and elegance, squares off the shape of Andy's already muscular head and makes him look stupid.

Monica notes that she hasn't seen Marian Woolsey since Marian moved, but doesn't say where, where exactly, she runs into her "now".

What interests Monica is that, even though Marian Woolsey is no longer living in the house or even on ABC Street, she has a lot to say about the people who live in the house and on ABC Street.

For example: Marian Woolsey knows about and has a different perspective on Minna W.'s leg operation. Thinks that squat little Mrs. Landlord has everyone fooled and waiting on her hand and foot. How does she know that Minna W.'s a fat little phony? Because Teddy Leary (and Monica knows that Teddy would never lie or even exaggerate!) saw Minna fly down her front steps from her little front porch (where they've got her propped up on pillows like a queen) because she thought some poor soul who stopped to comb his hair or eat a sandwich was parking in front of her driveway! So she can't be in the lousy shape they think she's in!

Teddy saw her from his front window at 5 a.m. He's on a new shift at the airport, so, at 5 a.m., he has his breakfast in their cute little breakfast nook with a window that looks straight down into the W.'s driveway. Pam Leary leaves for work between 5:30 and 6 so Teddy was able to call her over to check out what he was seeing, because he couldn't believe his eyes: the so-called invalid hopping around the sidewalk and screaming at the top of her lungs until the car pulled away.

What else does Marian Woolsey know about ABC Street? Knows that Mr. Sloth isn't dead, only ill. He was supposed to be home by now, but he had another little stroke and he's still in Connecticut.

This too: she saw Yvonne Wilding the other day (when and where exactly not told or not noted) and thought she looked lousy. "What happened to Yvonne Wilding?" Couldn't tell it's the same person! On the other hand, she always thought that Yvonne could be attractive, if only what? What exactly? If only she didn't do drugs? if only she didn't drink so much? if only she hung out with a different crowd? if only she was a different person? Laughs a little at her own absurd logic, but has this to add: wonders if Monica knows Teddy's little sister, Susie. The sweetest girl you'd ever want to meet and she knows Yvonne Wilding well and never liked her or got along with her. Marian Woolsey thinks that, in fact, Monica should make it her business to get to know Susie because she has a lot of interesting stories to tell.

The night of July 11 David makes a Hungarian dinner of Chicken Paprikash and the small, boiled flour-and-egg dumplings called nockerl or nokedl. Monica wants to keep going forward, so recipes aren't asked for or chronicled "here" and the next day, 7/12 (David's birthday), an ideal breezy summer day with extraordinarily clean sunshine, Monica feels sick. Up "all night" with painful stomach cramps and even threw up (something she hates and will do anything to avoid).

Last night's dinner had no effect on David, so Monica thinks it makes sense to begin to make a little catalogue of other possible explanations for her bad night.

No possibility that comes to mind feels entirely logical to her, but decides to go ahead with her little catalogue anyway.

Let's see:

a) wonders if she "swam too much": in the ocean "three days in a row" and, swimming and diving through waves, could easily have swallowed water

b) the only other possibility — a psychological one, if that's the right word for the ways memory and family stay active and potent in us forever — that seems even remotely likely is the unacknowledged toll taken on her by worrying about Kitty. Kitty's been calling lately with problems and Monica always feels compelled to answer, sometimes interrupting her work (something she wouldn't do for anyone else) and the Chronicle has said no to any attempt to document the conversations.

Monica knows that what's un-written is also un-digested. So she has to consider the possibility that her un-digested, un-chronicled worries about Kitty, added to a little unhappiness about neglecting her own work out of an out-dated sense of responsibility for her sister, is more likely to have made her throw up all night than David's delicious Hungarian dinner.

Under a blue sky with well-defined, drifting clouds (hour of day not noted) and with strong ocean breezes keeping space clean and quiet, Monica hears clearly (consciousness sharpened by Tommy Liman?) cicadas drilling their way through dense leaves for the first time.

Monica hasn't talked to or even seen Nicole Renard for a long time (exactly how long not noted), but there she is "at around 6 p.m." on the same day walking south on ABC Street in the direction of Babette Coffin/Grete Forest's house, holding hands with a guy she introduces as "Steve from Seattle".

Let's see: Steve (who doesn't know Monica and doesn't even seem to know much about her) has a lot to say to her about himself, as if what she thinks might benefit him in some way, while Nicole stands back, observing.

Describes himself as a "filmmaker" and says that it's because he's a filmmaker that he's in New York. Therefore not in New York, Monica notes, because of Nicole!

What else? He "knows a lot of people", already has "an appointment with CBS" though, frankly, PBS seems a lot more logical to him. What he's showing CBS is a documentary he's already done and that's been shown (where, where exactly, not told or not noted) about world hunger, particularly in "Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines". Talks for a while longer, but with less energy, as if he can tell that the words "world hunger" and "Bangladesh" haven't had the effect on Monica that he'd expected, but the truth is that Monica is pre-occupied by Nicole Renard, trying to figure out if Nicole was as bored and un-impressed as she was and also if holding hands with "Steve" has any deeper meaning than that he's one more in a history of long-distance love affairs with built-in obstacles she's always seemed to prefer.

As 7:30 p.m. on the same July day, under white clouds that are too thin to block sun from rifling bright angles of late afternoon light through a massed row of trees on Coast Boulevard between ABC and ABD Streets where Monica (looking straight up from below) can see the blinding angles flying along leaf after leaf.

Leaves are bright and rustling over Monica's head when she runs into "Sonia" again.

Tight t-shirt (color not noted) over round belly. Mantra on t-shirt (color of stencil contrasting with unknown (un-recorded) color of t-shirt not noted) reads: "IF IT FEELS GOOD DO IT!"

Sonia has a long story to tell about her husband "Zappo". Decides to begin her story with Zappo already in the hospital, but Monica needs to have Sonia retell the story of how he got there. Truth is that Monica not only forgot the story of how Zappo ended up in the hospital, but wouldn't have remembered that Sonia's husband is named "Zappo" if Sonia hadn't just reminded her and would have had to shuffle back through her hastily-written notes to remind herself of both the outline and details of Sonia's multiple stories that more-or-less hang together as one story.

What happened is this: Zappo was beaten up by "a much bigger guy". Zappo's "a small dude" and the other guy (name not told or not recorded) isn't that tall or heavy, just muscular. Zappo knows the guy. They both know the guy, in fact, and, even worse, Zappo got the guy his job bartending at the SandBar.

She (with Zappo) used to hang out at the SandBar and sometimes she still does. So it's not like they never saw him or they avoided him or they dropped him for some reason, so what's behind the attack? No good explanation. All she can come up with is that, wherever she's lived, no matter how many times she's moved hoping that life would be different and better, she's always found the same stupidity. Stupidity is the thing you can't get away from. We always underestimate it and always, always get a kick in the ass. You can never get to the bottom of a stupid person's motives, so why try? One dummy got it into his head to say something about Zappo to another dummy and sooner or later one of these local bar dummies heard that Zappo talked trash about this bartender and, because he's also a dummy, he liked the idea of believing it and next time Zappo came into the SandBar he punched Zappo in the eye.

Sonia thinks it's the eye socket bone that's broken, so they'll have to operate through the mouth or the nose. Hard to even think about. He's in the hospital and terrified because it's exactly the same eye that was once injured in a trucking accident and where he had no sight for a long time (exactly how long not noted or left vague because Sonia has no idea).

So far he's in the hospital five days and they haven't operated yet: no idea what they're waiting for.

What else? Only good to come out of it is that the hospital put Zappo on Medicaid, so Welfare has to pay their rent. Wants to know if Monica can tell that, though she's calm outside, she's nervous and trembling inside. Can hardly contain it — so is it visible? Audible in her voice? Worries her that everyone can see what a mess she really is.

This too: she wants revenge. There are guys who know the whole stupid story and feel the same way, so they're out to get the guy and something ugly could still happen.

What is its nature?

It goes on.

How does it go on?

It walks by horizontally.

Sheila Ascher died unexpectedly in the ICU unit at NYU Langone Hospital in New York City on Christmas Eve 2020, at 9:30 p.m. Dennis was with her because a kind nurse brought a bed in and allowed him to live in her room despite Covid restrictions.

Infant in her carriage on a city-street-that-still-has-some-trees-on-it loves to be outside.

Little girl who's outgrown her carriage loves to sit on the front stoop of the brownstone where her family has a second or is it third floor apartment and ask questions.

Who are you?

Where are you going?

Why?

What do you do?

What does that mean?

Her father lovingly calls her "Little WhaWho".

And now Monica loves to chronicle it as it goes by.

And she still loves to ask questions, even if they're very different ones.

Sheila Ascher believed that her father was looking out for her. More than once, for example, she had a serious fall and injured herself. She could have easily suffered a head injury, but didn't and she felt her father's protective presence. I knew her father well and can say with certain knowledge that he was a good and kind man, respected by everyone who knew him. And I know that he loved Sheila completely. If their love for each other was the basis for a spiritual bridge of some kind — if Sheila was right about that — that gives me, as a lifelong skeptic, some hope of finding Sheila again and a reason to temper my skepticism.

I have to live with the heartbreak of not being able to save her. What I can do (and it isn't satisfying) is continue to add my touch of editing, as always, to whatever Monica's Chronicle was already edited by Sheila and waiting for me in her workbag. Sections will continue to appear as before, possibly a little more slowly, and when the edited Chronicle is done I'll have to figure out what's possible, using the knowledge I have from a near-lifetime of working together.

Our chance meeting has always felt like destiny, a transcendent moment for me and for both our lives and there's so much we shared in work and living that we felt that we'd lived several distinct lifetimes: different periods in different places with different central interests and even different casts of characters. Sheila chronicled a lot of it in writing and on micro-cassettes, but there's no time and I'm not capable of going back and organizing it all, so, as always, no one will ever know our whole story.

We both knew and talked about the fact that neither of us would have accomplished all that we did or would have been able to go to the extremes of what we were capable of without the miracle of our meeting.

The simple and truest truth: I was in paradise and now I'm not. Life couldn't have been fuller and now it can't be emptier. All that's left is for the Chronicle to keep putting one foot in front of the other in its infinite, horizontal progress.

Same July day or another many almost-invisible events are happening simultaneously within a small radius:

Greg Coffin's been working on his coffee-colored stationwagon "all morning and into the afternoon". Chronicle says that he's trying to fix his carburetor, but doesn't say how Monica knows that and also has to admit that it's only speculating when it guesses that the length of time Greg's struggling under the hood — sweating, banging, twisting and cursing — means that he doesn't know what he's doing.

Lena Coffin is vacuuming again, but in what room, in what room exactly?

Grete Forest is easily having more fun than Greg or Lena, playing ping-pong with the lanky, pony-tailed guy, the would-be-substitute-husband-and-daddy who's attached himself to Lena as if he has dreams of making a life here — as if he's landed in a readymade life pre-tested for a musician by Greg Coffin, even though Greg and Lena aren't divorced or separated and Greg's right there in the driveway "now", long, graceful body bent and grumbling under the hood of his car while ponytail's whacking ping-pong balls back and forth with Greg's sister Grete (married to Greg's band-mate and best buddy, Andy Forest) in Greg-&-Lena's enclosed front porch ping-pong room.

Let's see: what else is happening simultaneously with Lena, Grete, Greg and ponytail on the morning-into-afternoon of this July day?

Low, wide and exotic "mimosa" trees, scattered at distant intervals on and around ABC Street, have been trying to bloom for days and all seem to open "now", at once, as suddenly red and wide open as handkerchiefs whipped out of pockets.

This too: so many cloud blue hydrangeas are suddenly full and blooming and foaming over as the beautiful portals out of how many paved and boring backyards and front lawn squares that David, "later in the day", is able to fill Monica's favorite glass vase (description earlier in Chronicle) and old glass lemonade pitcher with them.

Simultaneous in one way, possibly not in another way, Monica can't be certain when she first notices and chronicles the birthday balloons decorating the massive ochre pillars of the painted stone front porch of the hacienda-style multiple dwelling at a slight NW diagonal across the street from Monica where Nancy Wattle and her husband and two waggle-headed boys, Hank and Willy, have an apartment (Monica's never been in it, so has no idea of its size or even if its facing the porch and ABC Street or in the rear with an inevitable view of fenced-in yards and the rear facades of houses fronting on ABD Street).

Not noted whether or not the birthday party's in progress and not noted either how Monica knows that it's little Willy Wattle's birthday that's being celebrated.

No out-of-town license plates of visiting relations recorded.

Same day or another not noted and no date on card from old friend Ellen Grace vacationing in Maine:

"Dear Monica,

"I wonder if you'd love it here as much as I do.

"Woods are beautiful and of course you'd love that.

"But it's the kind of beauty that = tranquility, and I have a feeling that it might just be too tranquil for you. Tell me if I'm wrong!

"I know you wouldn't like this: the cabin we rented's deep in the woods so of course you're never going to see someone passing! and therefore obviously never going to have someone stop to tell you a story!

"For me the wonderful feature (probably the reason we chose this cabin) is that we're literally two feet from the lake. So all I do every day is have a simple little breakfast, swim, sun myself, do a little sketching or work on my needlepoint and then toward evening we drive into town for a movie or a meal.

"You know how much this kind of life suits me.

"I really don't need much more to be happy.

"So all-in-all it's a perfect vacation!

"Perfect vacation for me, probably not for you!

"Love,

"Ellen Grace."

Let's see, what else? Monica feels the need to chronicle the information printed on Ellen Grace's card: "Maine: 'Pine Tree State'

"Capitol: Augusta

"Area: 33,425 sq. mi

"Population (1970): 993,663

"Motto: 'Dirigo'

"Guide Flower: Pine cone

"Bird: Chicadee

"Tree: Eastern White Pine

"23rd State Admitted to the Union".

Same day in July or the next. Hastily sketched notes run continuously with no date divisions: begins or continues with an ambiguous image in the Rosenwassers' second floor (above the Arlington sisters) North-facing picture window. Bright and layered glare of the distant world today replaced by a murky grey-shading-to-charcoal, as if the depths of the grey North Atlantic were captured inside an aquarium and something large and black were swimming and turning gracefully there.

Black-in-grey — swimming creature and its obscure environment — suddenly flipped up as easily as something small and lightweight flicked with a fingernail, showing a weirdly festive red-and-white underside that flashes briefly and doesn't even bother to swim away.

Outside, on windblown ABC Street, leaves are also flipping over: from the Regans' massive elm where the simple action of one leaf flipping or a twigful and then a branchful of leaves flipping is repeated how many times to make a monumental pyramid of units, pyramid of leaf-units stacked on pyramid of leaf-units, all flipping from green to silver underside and back again — green/silver/green/silver repeated how many times and then for how many half-turns and quarter-turns and fold-overs and how many different rates and angles of flipping, intercutting silver with green in beautiful, unpredictable ways.

Not only in the Regans' massive elm, but in smaller trees on and beyond Coast Boulevard all the way to Salem Avenue.

Wind feels as if it should bring rain, but it doesn't.

Does the Chronicle announce "I was here" or "I am here"? "Fully conscious in every instant of my existence."

Unfamiliar blonde little girl in dark red playsuit is having trouble walking the Coffins' big black Newfoundland, Grendel. And absolutely on the same July day and likely just minutes after the blonde little girl passes struggling with Grendel a surprising number of ABC Street children appear together: Daisy Brennan

Riley Liman

Joshua Coffin

Rosamond (Rosie) Coffin

Martina (Tina) Lima

and one or two others Monica's sure she forgot to list:

all seem to be listening with interest to Jojo Coffin talk about her puppets. Content of what Jojo's saying blown and jumbled and partly erased by breezes and by distance, but it's clear to Monica that she has something to say about her puppets that all the children, the girls in particular — from two-year-old Rosie through four-year-old Daisy and all the way to ten-year-old Tina Lima — are in love with. All the girls clamor to see Jojo's puppets, but Riley Liman and Joshua Coffin are bored. They say that they have their guns with them and invite the girls to come away with them and play a different, more exciting game than any game they can play with Jojo's stupid puppets!

Jojo of course knows what they're doing and says "I'm going upstairs to get my puppets!"

Lena's suddenly there, intervening sharply.

"Well, are you going to do it now or not!? Either do it or don't do it, but stop all this endless talking!"

Adds that she knows that Margaret expects Daisy home for lunch so Daisy really has to go.

She's already taken Daisy by the hand and started to walk her home (<— N) and Daisy's crying that she isn't ready to go home! She wants to play with Jojo's puppets!

Riley and Joshua try to convince Jojo to forget about her puppets and come with them, but Jojo says they can't fool her again. She's let them talk her into stuff before and she hates playing their games because "I always have to be the robber!"

Children disperse like birds that are suddenly alarmed by something and fly up into a tree all at once. Who ends up playing what not noted.

Just a few minutes later Greg Coffin waves hello to Monica from the driveway while he's getting something out of his old coffee-colored stationwagon for his sister, Grete, who's behind him. Monica can see clearly in bright daylight and reproaches herself for not noticing before that Greg's hair has gone from sandy brown to sandy grey and it may be that that makes her take a more focused look at Grete.

Grete and Greg both have aged, but when? when exactly?

One more invisible transformation that happens even while we're looking — looking consciously and taking notes! — and surprises us.

Similar to or utterly different from the moment when the enormous green and orange shade tree in the corner of the yard suddenly loses its density of leaves in a windstorm and then we discover that crows are roosting in the empty brambles of light.

Sky seems surprised when there's a little blue in it.

Friend who you thought you'd always love because, more than anything, of her/his idealism and indifference to money, you now find hard to listen to, to the degree that you don't even think of him/her as a friend. How did that happen? And how did you not notice it happening?

Let's see: beautiful Grete Forest, whose adult face and voice are sometimes too girlish, just a little tell-tale tension at the edges of the unusually wide, well-shaped mouth, looks worried. Wrinkles in forehead and near the eyes seem to be allowing Grete's future-face to furrow permanently into the bone, while Greg's only turned grey.

White sheet thoroughly covering the interior of the Rosenwassers' picture window from one end to the other, amplifying several glaring remote projections, though no specific image is recorded. White sheet also acts as a blank surface for Monica to chronicle the fresh events of the day as if starting a new project entirely.

Edgar Zacharias — who neither Monica nor David has heard from for months (exactly how long would take research in rough Chronicle notes) — called "yesterday" to tell Monica that he's just back from a long, much-too-long, trip: SYRACUSE

ROCHESTER

ISRAEL

GERMANY

FRANKFURT

and probably other places he can't think of at the moment, all for "business commitments".

Does Monica say or only think that she finds the expression "business commitments" odd in Edgar Zacharias' mouth where, ordinarily, there's only erudite talk about and advocacy for what's called avant-garde or alternative literature, art, music, etc. Edgar Zacharias quickly clarifies: when he says "business" he means "journalism", which for him amounts to the same thing. Like it or not, it needs to be done. If he doesn't write about these things, who will? And he has enough currency that he can get an article about Moholy-Nagy, let's say, or LaMonte Young into a large circulation magazine or newspaper instead of a downtown journal with only a handful of readers.

Point is that it may not look that way to others, but he has no trouble telling Monica that he hates to travel! He likes to be in his own home! He'll take it a step further: he likes to stay inside: can happily spend the whole day in his apartment. And here he had to be away for six weeks. Even shorter trips are too much for him, so he has a lot of recuperating to do.

Monica can hear in Edgar Zacharias' tone that he's decided that he's been chatting long enough. Not bothering with an awkward transition, he abruptly says that he had a specific, immediate reason for calling: he'd like to visit Monica and David "tomorrow" (that is, today!) and, if it's ok with them (as if he's being courteous), he'd like to bring Sid Van with him.

Says "Sid Van" as if Monica and David should know who Sid Van is, but they don't.

If they haven't already met, he thinks it could be important for that to happen. Sid Van is interested in a lot of the same things they are. No examples chronicled of the things Sid Van is interested in that Monica and David are "interested in", because Edgar Zacharias gives none.

Let's see: "it could be beneficial", he encourages, for Monica and David to make it their business to get to know Sid Van, because in one way at least Sid is a giant step ahead of them: he worked hard at it and now he's his own printer! So he'll be in control of printing his own books and, with the kind of designed pages Monica and David are experimenting with, that may be "the smartest way" for them to go!

"By the same token", Edgar Zacharias adds, as if first musing about it, he had the thought that it might benefit both Monica and David and Sid Van — all of them! — to meet "Mario D'Iaccano", so he's asked him to come too!

Then, while Edgar is talking, or only later in retrospect, it strikes Monica that he (Edgar Zacharias) seems to assume, even more than he did with Sid Van, that Monica and David are sure to recognize the name "Mario D'Iaccano" and be impressed. (David, in fact, whispers to Monica that he isn't sure, but he thinks he remembers seeing the name "Mario D'Iaccano" in some connection, not sure what, what exactly, with a Small Press called (if he remembers correctly) "Oolp", though he has no idea what "Oolp" publishes or what it has to do with them.)

"At 2 p.m." Edgar Zacharias calls to let Monica know that he'll be "a little late".

"I've been detained because Mario D'Iaccano hasn't arrived yet."

At what time — what time exactly — not noted, Edgar Zacharias arrives without either Sid Van or Mario D'Iaccano. He's with a woman he introduces as "Ann Hirshorn from Philadelphia".

"Ann and I need to talk to you both about the work of yours that Ann would like to include" in a major exhibition that Ann is mounting called "Beyond the Page".

Monica records nothing (Chronicle refuses to accept anything?) about what's said at the meeting between Monica, David, Edgar Zacharias and "Ann Hirshorn from Philadelphia".

Let's see. "Out of order" or, because it's here, discovered only "now" while scanning sheets of rough notes before filing them away not to be seen again for how many years, decades or millennia, making a different kind of order:

Nicole Renard calls out to Monica cheerfully while passing, heading North —> or <— South not noted, that she's going to a soccer match! (Not noted either or, more likely, not told, what soccer match, professional or amateur, and/or where it's happening, that is, in a stadium or in Central Park, etc.).

Long waves of golden/brown hair (hair that always seems to have sunlight in it) around soft oval of face of a lightly-toasted autumnal hue.

Typical Nicole Renard clothing: long, lightweight and fluttering-in-the-breeze skirt, this time a seemingly hand-dyed hemp-like shade and homespun texture the eye is meant to feel.

Ash-green blouse, also lightweight, fluttering and hand-dyed with unusual clay-colored buttons.

Image Monica would like to make linger, as one of the more beautiful human images in ABC Street's passing and floating image world.

Also out of order (that is, it's here, so in that obvious way it can't be out order, because the order of things in the quickly-sketched rough notes of the Chronicle is whatever order they're in, but Monica can't ignore the fact that a note is sometimes "here" unattached to other notes that ordinarily lead up to it or link to it in some way — unattached note likely having drifted away from its little cluster of notes and just wedged itself here like a branch that gets carried downstream and miraculously gets stuck between centuries-old rocks as if it belongs there):

Monica finds herself here in this detached note, in a car with Nancy St. Cloud and Nancy's husband, André. Nancy's in the back seat next to Monica (relative positions, left or right, behind the driver's seat or behind so-called "passenger seat", not noted) and André 's father (visiting from where not noted, but likely noted earlier in the cluster of notes detached note broke loose from) is in the front seat next to André, who, of course, is driving. Monica notes that this is the first time she's met André's father, but that she's seen him before, only a few weeks ago when she visited Nancy in Nancy-and-André's apartment. Monica remembers "now" that André showed her photographs of his father "then" and wonders if she wondered then as she's wondering now why, why exactly, it mattered to André that Monica know in advance what his father looks like. (Hopes — if she doesn't thumb back through her notes — that someone else will be curious enough to see what, if anything, she wrote about being shown photos of André's father "a few weeks ago".)

Nancy says something in her quiet, girlish voice that's not heard or gets ignored by son and father in the front seat and Monica notes that "a familiar, wistful expression " passes across Nancy's face (one of Nancy's expressions — more accurately one of Nancy's several faces — that Monica knows well, the face of a sad and beautiful girl with long and straight chestnut brown hair) just as an ocean breeze sends a wave of unexpected coolness through the car.

On an undated day in July, which may very well be the same day though Monica doesn't say so in her notes — but logic tells her later that she must be working on the front porch in her usual SouthWest corner or on the front steps wedged up against the southern shelf-wall of the two shelf-walls that frame the steps when Lou, the rolypoly mailman, arrives, because she records a card for Allison Meehan from "YARD BIRD SHOPPING CENTER Located Between Chehalis and Centralia, Washington. THE MOST UNIQUE AND COMPLETE FAMILY SHOPPING CENTER UNDER ONE ROOF IN THE NORTHWEST."

"Dear Allison — don't have much to say, so say hello to everyone for me and be good! See you soon.

"Love DEE-DEE".

Monica gets an odd, hard-to-express pleasure from the near-perfect emptiness of this card.

This too: as soon as Monica sets foot on the porch, before she sits down to work in her usual corner or on the steps and before Lou, the rolypoly mailman arrives, she immediately sees a cardinal fly by, not North or South, but "headed East", therefore from ABC Street over the cracked and weedy driveway between the house where Monica lives and Lena-and-Greg's chipped white stucco/orange brick-and-tile, toward ABB Street. And, seconds later and maybe even more startling than quick dart of red, the rarely-seen-on-ABC-Street blue of a Blue Jay (almost, but not exactly the same as the luminous blue-in-blue caught in little pools between clouds) settles in "a small tree" (visible on a branch, because it doesn't fly into the darkness of the Rhinebeck pine's deep and shaggy boughs).

Monica notes also that rain "yesterday" left a deep and weighty feeling to the air "today", with sunlight hovering but unable to land.

Let's see. Rough notes say that "Jimmy X"'s cousin lives near Oregon, but Monica realizes for the first time that Jimmy X is actually Jimmy Kropotkin!, because Jimmy is the only child of Nelly X and Bill Kropotkin. Therefore, though there are many X's and only one Kropotkin in Monica's Chronicle, and, though the X family of women-only is strong and it's even possible to say dominant, Jimmy's given last name in the real world of July 1976 is "Kropotkin" and therefore, even if not changed retrospectively by Monica, can be by any possible future reader.

Jimmy Kropotkin stops by for only a minute or two to say hello to Monica (seems to Monica that his unusual visit has something to do with the fact that he's with his cousin, Holly X (Leila, Nelly and Philida X's prodigal sister Amy's daughter), in for a short visit from a northern corner of California "near the Oregon border"). Sketchy notes aren't written clearly, but seem to give the name of cousin Holly X's California town as "Hoo…Hills". Also not clear to Monica "later", re-reading her rough notes, if Jimmy says that he visited Holly in the wooded mountains of northern California and heard "a forest full of cicadas whirring" or if Monica is situating her little conversation with Jimmy and Holly within a dense bed of cicadas-in-trees "now".

On another page, detached from what the Chronicle has to say about the two minute visit from Holly X and Jimmy Kropotkin, Monica notes that Holly's hair is an extraordinarily pale blonde — different from the extraordinary pale-blonde-ness of Lily Romero's in what way?, in what way exactly? — and that her eyes are an arresting blue not exactly the startling Blue Jay blue of a tiny pool of sky trapped among clouds.

Monica notes that Holly's "eight years old" now and that they've met at least once before, "possibly four years ago", and, in that four years, Holly's become a different person (that is, she doesn't at all match Monica's memory of her).

In the same small, detached note Monica scrawls barely legibly, as if running out of time, that "July 17 was the apex of summer" and from that high point the turn toward something else — turn away from summer — is apparent.

Chronicle also observes (its memory better than Monica's) that Holly X's birthday, October 2, when she'll turn eight, is the same as Monica's brother Lowell's.

What else almost-simultaneous on this day because rotating within the same tight radius?

Little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin is singing from Lena-&-Greg's raftlike second story porch, but what the song is not recognized or not noted, so only the sound or a weak memory of the sound of Rosie's singing voice lingers.

Edgar Zacharias has left ABC Street, headed back to a house-size loft in downtown Manhattan.

Wanda Baer's parents — unnaturally clean-and-scrubbed and oddly-smiling father Oscar and far-more-likeable mother, Harriet, profound unhappiness eternally stuffed inside a thin pancake of sweetness — seem to be looking for Monica or Monica-and-David together, wandering back and forth along the middle section of the beach block of ABC Street. One of them spots Monica and David working near each other in Monica's usual corner of the front porch. Oscar Kurtz explains that they've walked over from their apartment in one of the corner houses at the intersection of Salem Avenue and ABB Street to give them a plant.

Oscar is, in fact, cradling a heavy clay flower pot and plant with unusual colors (whether colors of leaves or flowers not noted, therefore of course, not noted either whether plant is a flowering plant or not): "yellow, purple and maroon".

Monica would love to know (that is to chronicle) what kind of plant it is, but neither Oscar nor Harriet seems to have any idea. And, more important for Monica, Oscar and Harriet Kurtz walk away (toward the boardwalk for a healthy stroll in the fresh sea air) before Monica can even get a clue why they walked all the way from their apartment carrying a heavy potted plant for them.

And this question — "Why? Why would Oscar and Harriet Kurtz want to give me (or us) a plant?!" — bothers Monica for days or longer.

Lou, the rolypoly mailman, arrives with a card from Thea, Monica's friend and former tutoring pupil when Thea was a wildly precocious 15-year-old, and mercifully stops Monica from trying to get to the bottom of what's behind the odd gift from Wanda Baer's parents, Oscar & Harriet Kurtz.

Card is from the "HERAKLION MUSEUM" and pictures "THE SARCOPHAGUS FROM AGHIA TRIADHA":

"Dear Monica and David,

"Long space between communication.

"I've changed somewhat, unfortunately not enough to be at peace with myself.

"I've been traveling for a month and I'm in Greece now. The experiences I've run into have been very rich and sparked certain 'revelations' — or maybe 'spontaneous awareness' might be better.

"I was really ready for this trip!

"Soon I'll be leaving Greece for Northern Europe and there's a good possibility of staying in Denmark for a year or so.

"Do you already know this? After graduating I went through a big depression, lost close friends, etc., but is that really the answer? Then, in April, I gave a fabulous solo concert! And I knew right away that I'd taken a big step in my work!

"Will write later.

"Love,

"Thea"

An ocean breeze blows through what Monica's reading and through the day. Day's "swampy atmosphere" dissolves just like that into a different day that's "wonderful and breezy" with the childish blue-and-white sky that's expected. Monica makes a note to herself to think about the right word for the childish sky's particular blue, knowing that finding the right word will take time and be difficult.

What else on the same July day?

Endless back and forth hollow toking of ping-pong balls next door.

Pleasure of following the meandering path — random zigzags across lawn and shrubs to Monica, probably not to the butterfly — of a white butterfly. For how long? how long exactly?

Monica tries to figure out why the huge red lettering on the side of a white truck driving slowly South <— on ABC Street seems familiar (as if the truck passing or even being parked on ABC Street is a common occurrence she's never paid attention to):

"FUTURISTIC FOODS — FUTUREMART FOR THE SMART SHOPPER".

Flurry of near-simultaneous human activity that Monica has no choice but to get on paper quickly with her not-sharp-enough pencil as if happening one after the other.

Two of Pat Corcoran's nieces, Iris and Amy, arrive at Pat's front porch door only feet from the corner where Monica's working, as usual. They've met before and pass a minute or two saying a cheerful, content-free hello.

Nicole Renard walks by in a long skirt, as always, (color and texture not recorded, to Monica's "later" regret) and short-sleeve white top (category of top also not noted) again or still with "Steve-from-Seattle". Waves hello, but this time doesn't stop to add to her story or even to the story of Steve-in-New-York.

Exactly simultaneous with Nicole passing and waving Andy Forest's old and faded one-and-a-half-tone blue Chevy wheels sharply into the driveway. Andy's long and muscular guitarist's arms-and-hands on the wheel, beautiful and girlish Grete in black halter top next to him.

Andy has to maneuver in the driveway, waiting for Leo Romero (locally glamorous, starkly whitest and palest-pale-blonde wife, Lily, already sitting in the car) who's waiting in turn for the also-beautiful, dramatically black-haired band singer, Luisa, to slide into the back seat of the car, gingerly carrying a black party dress on a hanger, trying not to crease it.

Let's see: who else is flurrying almost-simultaneously next door in driveway/on sidewalk next to/in front of Greg-&-Lena's old white stucco and orange brick?

Babette Coffin, mother of Greg and Grete and sharing a split "mother and daughter" with Andy and Grete at the ocean end of ABC Street, mature and attractive woman with an accent that seems at once French and Austrian, appears carrying little six-year-old Hank Forest in the crook of one suntanned arm, pushing Hank's carriage with the other. Stops in front of Lena-&-Greg's to settle Hank in his carriage.

Lena (appearing instantly, suggesting to Monica that she may have been one source of the ping-pong sounds in Lena's enclosed front porch "ping-pong room") joins Babette on the sidewalk, talks Rosamond into climbing into her stroller without too much resistance and the two of them head off single file — Lena following Babette — in the direction of Babette-&-Grete's just as Nadja returns from lifeguarding (on which beach Monica's never known) still dripping seawater and toweling off. Dark and toasted skin beautiful against lifeguard's blue swimsuit.

White butterfly is below the spot where Monica's working, settling in the grass long enough for Monica to look up from the scrap paper she's sketching ABC Street on to allow it to settle here as well.

Monica's notes say that she's "on the boardwalk" on July 20 and that, because she's there, she runs into an elderly couple who used to spend their summers in the same groundfloor rear studio apartment — in the big cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where she has her attic house-atop-the-house — that the strange retired pharmacist, Lon Gurion, now lives in (though he's seldom seen).

Not noted whether it's the elderly husband or the elderly wife who decides to begin telling their tale of a "winter's flu in the blizzards of February".

One of them says: "snowed in all winter".

"Lived in our bathrobes for four months!"

"To be honest, we slept most of the time."

"Woke up mainly because one of us had to have a drink. . . !"

"And once you're up you'd heat up some soup."

"Not one soul came to visit!"

"Except for the cleaning woman. . . "

"Can you call the cleaning woman a 'visitor'?"

"Stayed only long enough to vacuum and make sure the place was clean."

One of them says that both of them were too weak to clean or do anything else.

"Except use the telephone a little."

"And that's how we did all our shopping."

Something is said about "the new tenant" and "Lon Gurion", but no details of what's said recorded.

Let's see, what else about "the elderly couple"?

Now its not one, but both of them who've decided — standing a little uncomfortably for a long time in July sunlight on the boardwalk — to tell Monica (who they really don't know very well) their "winter's flu" tale.

One of them thinks that this is the experience that's taught them both whatever they really know about old age and death.

"We found out that we're old!"

"Or it's what made us old!"

One of them says "like Ancient times" and the other adds "like The Plague!"

Others — strangers and people they know — were dying all around them every day.

"Piling up like dead flies between window and storm window."

"We were sure it was the end."

"I think one of us said to the other: 'so this is how it happens'."

"Underneath it all, nobody believes that death is real, until. . . "

". . . until you reach the point where everyone you know is dropping dead and you say to yourself 'there's no good reason we shouldn't be found dead on the windowsill tomorrow morning, just like everyone else'."

He says that he couldn't sleep. Paced the floor from one room to the other and back again, "afraid to lie down".

"Now it's four months later and here we still are."

"Yes, we're still here, but the feeling is still here too."

Just the other day he suddenly, for no apparent reason, had a violent attack of coughing.

"And the same terror came back."

One of them, then the other, recalls a forgotten detail.

"Do you remember? The apartment was a hothouse."

"Nonstop steam."

"Thermostat at its highest possible degree!"

One of them remembers this too: finally both realized how unfair they'd been to the cleaning lady!

"She has a family and she keeps coming and going and she could easily get her family sick!"

"We never thought of her once!"

"I think we told her to stop coming, but she wouldn't listen."

" 'this is how it works', she said. 'I help you and then God helps me'."

Days she couldn't come she'd always call.

"So 'the cleaning woman' was the only person we saw or heard from for the whole duration of the Plague."

It seems to be true in Monica's rough notes, but she wonders "later" if it's true or even possible that it's on July 20 that she first notices that peaches in the neighbor-to-the-west-of-the-Salem-Avenue-back-yard (where Monica is once again house-sitting) are "ripening" and that the ripening peaches are "a beautiful rosy green".

And, on the next folded scrap paper page of rough notes, peaches are described as "palest green with some rosy bruises", but also "ready to be picked".

And then: "summer colors: the rose flush and weird green of sunset".

Past the mid-point of summer, what Monica now thinks of as Tommy Liman's cicadas can be heard drilling through and beating their wings up against heavy boughs of massed leaves everywhere.

Monica notes that she loves the lucky accident of seeing a Blue Jay eating a peach in the grass. Movement attracts her eye and then startling little angle of blue in green comes into focus.

Pecking at a ripe peach, not just for sustenance, but eating with visible pleasure, just like a person savoring a mid-summer peach with peach juice dripping from her/his beak.

Eating a peach with pleasure in tall grass just as breeze picks up in "late afternoon".

Let's see: "out-of-order" notes for July 20 seem to indicate that Monica and David drive back and forth (what make, color and model of car or whose car — definitely not one owned by Monica — not noted) from ABC Street to Salem Avenue, back to ABC Street, once more to Salem Avenue and then not clear whether they remain house-sitting in the Salem Avenue house or return to Monica's attic apartment on ABC Street.

This much is certain: the interior of the old car, which had been parked in direct sunlight, is "burning" and smells just the way the interior of an old car left in the sun should: seats uncomfortable to sit on, steering wheel hard to grip.

Whether on the way home to ABC Street or on the way back to Salem Avenue not noted when Monica sees — heading East or West on Bay Drive — the still-blazing sun drop into Jamaica Bay as if plunged there like a boiled egg that needs to be cooled off.

On ABC Street briefly.

Reason for going to ABC Street not noted, possibly because it's likely and it's logical that she's bound to find more shade to work in on the ABC Street porch than in the Salem Avenue back yard: on the broad grey boards of the front steps, if not in her favorite Southwest corner of the porch shielded by the height and shadowed depth of the Rhinebeck pine.

Working for at least a short time in the relatively cool shade of the front porch steps, Monica hears Greg practicing — not scales and not on his piano, in the more organ-like mode of his synthesizer, playing what sounds to her like a Bach "Prelude".

Back in the Salem Avenue back yard:

Sun "still burning" in the surrounding wall of hedges with "harsh white light" that wasn't there earlier.

Burning light in hedges, but cooler breezes "at 6 p.m.".

With the sharpness of cooler breezes (straight down the back yard channel from the Atlantic North —> to the Salem Avenue back yard) the penetrating smell of mowed grass bypasses everything else and goes right to the brain. Mowing may still be going on, as green as a cucumber being peeled right under the nose, and grinding blades of an old mower may help sharpen the edge of green headed toward Monica's brain, pen and paper.

What else?

Copper light on the leaves of the peach trees turns their color to a weird shade of green, but what green exactly? (Monica makes a marginal note to herself: time needs to be spent searching for exact terms for shades of green, using the names of green fruits, green vegetables, green birds and so on. And she wonders when, when exactly, "now" or "later", she and David are able to own books that will help them name colors, books about the chemicals that create colors in flowers, for example, or the history of dyes and pigments in art and clothing, names of colors in minerals, leaves, etc. etc.)

Bah-wah is playing in the tall grass in warm sunlight/in cool breezes.

Pink medium-hard rubber Spaulding ball bobbling pleasantly in mouth with a little half-serious chewing and drooling.

Tires of ball.

Wanders around perimeter of yard now blazing with light trapped in green hedge-walls.

Pulls up and chews a few bitter but tasty grass-like weed-stalks, possibly as an aid to digestion or as a food-substitute or just for something to do.

All the while sniffing the mouth-watering woodchip and smoking meat juice-and-fat aroma of neighbor's barbecue rising and drifting on breezes through and over hedge-wall from what direction not noted. David smells it too, also finds it mouth-watering and mouth-watering aroma seems to inspire him to eat a juicy mid-summer peach. Bah-wah gives David a mild, almost plaintive "I'm-hungry-too" bark deep in her throat that barely makes it out into the atmosphere where it's audible.

Bark gradually gets more insistent and audible as if it's the neighbor's fragrant, dripping-and-sizzling steak David isn't sharing.

Of course David can't resist and offers Bah-wah a bite of peach, but she spits it out in disgust.

He should say to her, but doesn't: "I'm the one who's hungry! You licked out a whipped butter container (with a fair amount of butter deliberately left in it for you) and I saw Monica feeding you cream cheese from her hand — and I've had next-to-nothing!"

Exactly when on July 20 David begins to show signs of a strange illness not noted and, because Monica rarely records the time-of-day of an observation, the time isn't recorded when she first writes that David is running a high fever and that his whole body — face and neck most dramatically — is covered in a fiery red rash.

Not clear when Monica first notes David's odd rash and fever and, after that, the progress of his illness is chronicled in sentences and parts-of-sentences scattered through pages of notes about her old friend Ellen Grace.

Ellen Grace called "last night" to tell Monica that she's staying in Washington Heights with her friend Sylvia (for how long not told or not noted).

Monica records "out of order", pages later in her rough notes, a few details about Sylvia that she realizes at once — reading quickly through her notes — "belong" here if anyone reading her Chronicle later, later still or even later than that, is going to have a clue about who "Sylvia" is.

Let's see: Ellen Grace tells Monica that Sylvia is a friend from "the Santa Fe era" of her life. Sylvia, according to Ellen Grace, was forced to leave Santa Fe "ten years ago" and moved to New York when her mother died and there was no one else to take care of her father. Now her father's gone too so Sylvia's alone in Washington Heights and happy to have a visit from Ellen Grace.

After her first conversation with Monica she couldn't get to sleep!, Ellen Grace has no trouble admitting in her easygoing, good-natured way. She doesn't mind saying that, after all these years, hearing Monica's voice was emotional! For her, childhood is never that far away and she thinks Monica knows how much she (Monica) meant to her.

Monica is paying less attention to what Ellen Grace is saying than to the sound of her voice and chronicles at once that Ellen Grace is talking even more slowly than at the unusually slow rate Monica remembers (how many years ago, how many years exactly, not remembered) and that the noticeable slowness may or may not be related to her pronounced "drawl" or "twang" that never used to be there. Monica wonders, but can't figure out, if the twang or drawl is regional. And if regional, what region? California or New Mexico? Are there recognizable California or New Mexico accents? And if there are, are they twangs or drawls? In any case it's certain that Ellen Grace no longer sounds like someone from New York. Sounds like a New Yorker's idea of an "out-of-towner".

Monica only chronicles what interests her (or, put another way, the Chronicle only accepts what interests it), but she has to admit that there are times when someone tells her something that surprises her and gets her attention: she learns for the first time for example that Ellen Grace was vacationing in Maine with her cousin, who she refers to oddly as her "mother's sister's daughter" (no name given or, Monica is certain, it would have been chronicled), and, because she was alone with her cousin for such long stretches of time, her cousin told her things that Ellen Grace would have remained ignorant of for the rest of her life!

"No one tells me anything!"

Mother's sister's daughter is older than her (how many years not told or not noted) and, as Monica knows well, her own sister, Valerie, is twelve years older, so she's always treated as a child who shouldn't be told anything interesting or serious about the family!

Ellen Grace can't remember if it was back in the cabin, late at night, around bedtime, or if it was over dinner in town, maybe after a glass of wine or two, that her cousin alluded to "a dark family secret"!

When Ellen Grace pressed her she clammed up. Claimed that she didn't know what the secret was. But maybe she really didn't know anything beyond that hint, because even that little bit, that nothing, was too much for her family!

She tried to follow up. When she left Maine she wrote to Valerie and asked her point blank if she knew anything about "a dark family secret" — one that likely involved their parents, or the cousin wouldn't have been so weird about it. And she got an answer that's either a lie or the answer a baby would get and useless and empty either way:

"Yes, I think there's something weird, something 'mysterious', but I don't know what it is. I can only guess and your guess is as good as mine. Or, if you want me to, I can play detective and try to deduce what it is from little bits of evidence. If I'm playing detective I'd say that it has to involve your ex-husband, Elliot."

Some of Valerie's "evidence" shocked her. For example: she had no idea (no one told her!) that Elliot lives near her parents! He moved back into the house her parents bought them when they were first married. And that means that he's living practically next door to them! And, of course, Valerie lives only a few blocks away.

"Elliot is what he always wanted to be: my parents' son and my sister's brother. Elliot is still married to my family and I'm divorced from everyone. I don't live near any one and no one tells me anything."

But, Ellen Grace says, she still doesn't see how any of this information solves anything. How can it be the "dark secret" her cousin hinted at in Maine?

Valerie promised to dig a little deeper and write to her with whatever she discovered, but of course she hasn't written and she's being kept in the dark, as always.

What else?

Ellen Grace hops from subject to subject.

Says that "the Santa Fe era" of her life will soon be over. James is being given a promotion and that means moving to La Jolla, so that's probably definite.

Changes the subject abruptly: she can't conceal her disbelief that Monica's sister, Kitty, who of course Ellen Grace knew well, but a long time ago, in childhood, was able to endure the rigors of medical school and become a doctor!

Says something like: "Are you really telling me that Kitty — the Kitty I knew, who cared more about saving up to get herself a cashmere sweater like the rich girls in her class than anything else — was able to knuckle down for four years. . . ?!"

Makes it clear that she isn't saying that Kitty didn't have a first-rate brain, but still. . . .

Another subject: wonders if Monica knows that her (Ellen Grace's) friend from high school, Linda, is aware of the fact that Monica lives on ABC Street. This is why she's asking: Linda's mother (name unknown, unspoken or un-recorded) lives two or three blocks from Monica and has a close friend named "Sylvia Greengrass" who lives directly across from Monica on ABC Street and even seems a little obsessed with Monica's comings and goings. So she's not sure if it's Linda's mother on her own or if it's Sylvia Greengrass through Linda's mother who now and then passes information to Linda about Monica — and sometimes even Monica and David both — even though, as far as she remembers, Monica had no interest in Linda in high school and probably wouldn't know her if she walked right into her.

Ellen Grace herself lost touch with Linda for years and years, but for some reason was inspired to get in touch with her now, so she can give Monica a thumbnail picture of Linda's life according to Linda.

Linda lives in what Linda calls "the North Village", at 151 W. 16th St..

She works for a publisher and, according to Linda, is so dedicated to her job that she doesn't take a lunch hour and even brings work home with her.

Works such long hours (and doesn't mind it!) that "the other night" her boss drove her home "at midnight".

At the same job for four years and still only making $14,000 (but she doesn't mind!).

Let's see: Ellen Grace thinks that Linda's job must have something to do with fashion because Linda is obsessed with clothing and with her own weight. For example: she knows what Linda weighs because Linda bragged to her that she weighs "only eighty-eight pounds!".

A fact that Monica doesn't need to know, Monica's Chronicle will probably spit out and that even she doesn't need to know herself — but she does know it and so why leave it out of Linda's thumbnail story about herself? Linda seems proud of the fact that she types "one hundred words a minute". Developed her typing skills working temporary jobs for $5.50 an hour.

At least two facts that Ellen Grace almost forgot and that Monica might find interesting enough to put in her Chronicle: Linda's mother told Linda that she saw Monica and David walking on the boardwalk "recently" and that Monica "looks exactly the same" as she remembers her (how many years since she saw her last not noted) and describes David as "tall with long hair". Also, according to Linda or to her mother, Monica is, not surprisingly, "a professor", but a professor of what, what exactly, Linda had no idea and would like her (Ellen Grace) to find out.

Ellen Grace wants to know if Monica knows this fact, because she didn't: Kitty was friends with Leila X in high school! Makes no sense to her. Can Monica think of one thing Leila X and Kitty had in common? Aside from the fact that they were both good-looking and both intelligent — but in such completely different ways they could have been from different solar systems! Doesn't Monica agree? And it's not just that Kitty was fashionable and Leila X wore that weird home-made X clothing, it's something more profound and hard-to-put-into-words.

This will interest Monica too and may be just as surprising: Kitty knew and sometimes hung out with Leslie Greengrass and Leslie's crowd! "All these little connections can make your head spin!"

"On July 21" Monica's in the Salem Avenue back yard, sitting under dripping hedges after the second shower of the day. David's strange illness is one reason Monica's on Salem Avenue, not on ABC Street, because the Salem Avenue house where Monica sometimes housesits in the owner's big groundfloor apartment is a far more spacious and comfortable place to be sick (small bedroom with its own bathroom and a door that closes for a surprising degree of isolation and tranquility) than Monica's three room attic house-atop-the-house.

David still has a fever (102°)

red spots on face, down across neck and all across back, legs and arms

"drowsy" feeling that doesn't go away

persistent low-grade headache

all seem to run parallel in Monica's rough Chronicle notes with changes in the condition of the peaches in neighbor-to-the-west's back yard.

Let's see: Monica notes that the peach tree (or is it "trees"?) seems (seem) to be "wider and taller" than the last time she made note of it or them.

Peaches "hanging high".

Summer Olympics on tv also seem to span David's illness and the evolution of the peaches next door, but no details noted so far about the Olympics except that they're taking place in Montreal and that David's headache and profound drowsiness keep him not so much from paying attention to the Olympics, as from having any desire to pay attention to them or to anything else, even his writing.

Monica's put David in the small, side bedroom and he's asked her to close the venetian blinds against the bright light that otherwise would enter through two unusually tall windows facing neighbor-to-the-west's low ranch house.

David says that drowsiness and aching head plus drawn blinds and warmth in the small bedroom on "a hot summer day" summon up for him the very specific isolation of a dark and quiet room in summer, memories of his childhood near-fatal illness and endless recovery.

Sound of a dog barking (not noted whether sharply audible or muffled, near or distant, deep or yelping, etc.) only adds to the re-awakened sensation of childhood illness and isolation.

Someone says "German Measles", but Monica has no idea then or now what that means.

Monica notes the strong smell of frying onions through a window or windows open again after a light rain, but doesn't note in what room — in what room exactly — the smell is strongest.

Many brief notes about Ellen Grace may be in order, but the order they're in resembles no order.

Let's see: Ellen Grace's husband James calls from Santa Fe and, afterwards, Ellen Grace tells Monica that "temperature is always a big topic, particularly in summer". For example: James says that it's 120° today and it's unbearable, "dry heat" or no dry heat.

"When you arrive in Santa Fe you feel like you've landed on Venus!"

"A typical winter day goes like this:

"25° when you wake up

"so you're freezing and

"you bundle up and

"you need to heat house and car and

"by the time you leave for work at noon

"it's 80° and beginning to be stifling."

Ellen Grace says that Valerie never leaves the house — never stays outdoors — for long.

What else?

Ellen Grace says that she "woke up at 7 a.m. to get to Floral Park at 9". She bought a pair of sunglasses in Floral Park "a week ago" and loved them, but tried them on yesterday and hated herself in them! Linda didn't help.

"You look awful! You can't— absolutely cannot — meet Monica wearing sunglasses like that!"

So she had to exchange them (what Ellen Grace was doing buying sunglasses in Floral Park not noted or not told) and had to get up early to do that, but — because she and Linda were up "late" last night ("4 a.m." in another, detached note) — Linda was fast asleep in the morning and couldn't go with her as planned.

Later, Linda made up a story that the weather report was for "an awful day" ("way too hot" after she'd just told Linda about her conversation with James about Santa Fe's Venusian heat!), so she wouldn't be joining her (Ellen Grace) — also as planned — at the beach when she (Ellen Grace) visits Monica. Even though Linda's father lives nearby and has been looking forward to Linda's visit forever.

On Saturday July 24 Ellen Grace and Monica are reminiscing in the Salem Avenue back yard and Ellen Grace is emphatic about how much she loves Monica's yard, even though Monica's gone out of her way to make it clear that the house and yard aren't hers — that she's a long way from being able to afford a house like this — and that she's only house-sitting, though, she admits, sometimes for long stretches when the owners are in Florida, where they have an apartment, and she and David have been living in the Salem Avenue house for months, she succumbs to the illusion that the house is theirs.

Time may pass saying nothing the Chronicle wants recorded: simply drinking iced coffee and enjoying being together after years and years apart.

After a while Ellen Grace says that it's been on her mind that she considers Monica, even though they don't see each other or even talk on the phone, one of the few friends she can tell the absolute truth to, and she needs to do something about the fact that Monica knows nothing about her marriage to Elliot and how and why it ended.

Monica may remember that Elliot was the comptroller of a corporation, but she doesn't know if that explains anything or only seems to. For example: he kept all the money.

Bank account was not joint.

Every month she had to endorse her check and turn over her salary for him to deposit in his account.

When she needed money she had to justify the expense and then it was up to him to decide whether or not to dole out her own money to her!

Had to empty her purse every night!

Had to be prepared to account for any money she might have spent each day.

Sharp memory of what were sometimes negotiations, sometimes lectures at the big dining room table.

Of course, what bothers her most is not anything Elliot did, it's herself. She's spent a lot of energy trying to figure out how she ended up that way: what role her family played, etc.. She hopes that Monica can tell that all her self-examination has changed her. Some things may not be obvious. She believes she's capable of all sorts of actions she couldn't dream of before. Her view of human nature can never go back to an innocent one. The girl with the laconic sense of humor Monica knew is mostly gone, she's sure. And, saddest of all, she can never see her mother, father or sister as benign again.

Let's see: Ellen Grace loves "Monica's" back yard so much that she's begun to pay attention to neighbor-to-the-west's peaches just beyond the yard's Western bank of dark green hedges.

Monica says that she thinks Ellen Grace knows her well enough to know that there are things that interest and obsess her (Monica) that may not obsess or even interest one other human being. For example:

When she first began to pay attention to the peaches they were a beautiful, but very hard-to-name green — hard to find a common, not an obscure, analogy for the young green skin, delicate and almost transparent, possibly even more mineral than vegetable. And that started her obsession with following the slight color changes in the peaches as they've been ripening.

It seems to her that paying close attention to the color of the ripening peaches made her notice that that obsession coincided exactly with David first starting to talk about his weird symptoms and both peach-obsession and David's illness seemed to parallel — exactly parallel — the broadcast of the Montreal "Summer Olympics".

Hasn't watched much of the Olympics, but she's aware that they're there at least as background crowd sound and over-excited announcer sound.

Therefore: sound of Montreal Olympics

David's strange illness

changing color of ripening peaches

taken together equal the flavor of Monica's July.

Monica also notes (and Ellen Grace seems to find it interesting) that the fact of the three events occurring simultaneously makes it seem as if they're related to one another.

Right now the green peaches that have been ripening all month have clearly become much rosier: young green a little more speckled and invaded by a rose flush spreading under the skin and staining it as easily as ink.

David's fever is still high and the violent rash and itching haven't gone away.

No idea what's going on in the Olympics.

Starting a fresh sheet of scrap paper, Monica has the nagging feeling that she forgot to chronicle Ellen Grace's unhappiness that her unbearable marriage to Elliot "still-and-all lasted" for fourteen years!

Monica records the fact that she does not (though still lounging and reminiscing together in the back yard) tell Ellen Grace about her Salem Avenue mornings, when — even from the distance of the south-facing windows of the small back bedroom — she can feel (but only at those times when seeing is the same as feeling) the profound coolness of the dark earth under the hedge-walls.

Darkness of earth —> darkness of green of hedges, yet

"silvery leaves of early morning" in the trees above

And, even further, "the metallic glare" (not noted whether "silvery" or not) of "morning sunlight" on the full leaves of what trees? — what trees exactly — in July.

Monica has to admit to herself (but also not shared with Ellen Grace) that she has no desire to return to ABC Street, where, even in her favorite front porch corner concealed by the tall and sprawling Rhinebeck pine, there's no escape from the heat and only a floor fan to help her upstairs.

It's not clear in Monica's hastily-sketched notes who it is that points out that when we notice disparate events at the same time — deepest forest green of the hedgerows for example at the same time as rosy red of the ripened peach clusters and even at the same time as the sharp click of Bah-Wah's jaws snapping at insects and possibly also as the noted-but-not-commented-on drilling of cicadas as loud as power tools renovating a house two or three houses away — we end up trying to figure out how they're all connected.

Let's see, what else about Ellen Grace's visit?

Ellen Grace says that there are things you miss in New Mexico if you're from New York and sometimes that can become unbearable. Egg creams of course are a foreign language there and everyone knows that pizza outside New York is just weird mushy dough, melted cheese and tomato sauce. As a child, no one had to introduce her to egg creams. They're like mother's milk. But she remembers when Monica introduced her to pizza! It happened in Manhattan and she knows for sure that she didn't understand pizza till then, because she found the smell nauseating the first time her parents brought home a pizza box and lifted the lid. She didn't "get it" until the time (they were just babies and she still doesn't understand how Monica had permission at that age to travel by subway to Manhattan on her own!) Monica took her and another friend, can't remember who, to a pizza place that seems magical to her now somewhere not far from Times Square. Three girls shared a large pie and big bowls of cheese ravioli too! And that's a heavenly memory for her that she wonders if Monica shares at all.

Peaches seem to be ripening in sunlight as they watch.

No hint in Monica's notes why Ellen Grace offers opinions of Leila X (Monica is stunned to discover that Ellen Grace knew Leila X!) and Janet Dumas (Monica's sister Kitty's elementary-and-high-school friend and David's friend later, in college, who killed herself for reasons Monica's been given by Kitty, but which Monica doubts).

"Leila X had zero personality", Ellen Grace says. "Beautiful long hair down to her knees that might give someone the idea that Leila had interesting thoughts or a romantic nature, but I can't think of one thing she ever said."

Ellen Grace doesn't have her own opinion about Kitty's elementary-and-high-school friend, Janet Dumas, but knows that her old friend Linda and Linda's mother (name never known or not recorded) both knew her well. Linda's mother was Janet Dumas' elementary school teacher and, even then, Ellen Grace knows, saw that Janet was "brilliant" (later, in college, Monica knows, because David's told her, that Janet Dumas used to seek him out because he was someone she could talk to about her obsessions with Chaucer and Milton) "but," according to Linda's mother, "psychologically fragile". Even at that early age you felt that you had to be careful: that this is someone on the edge, a child who's too kind and too sweet, always with a too-warm approval-seeking smile and not really knowing that she had an exceptional brain. "If you don't know, then the internal pressure to prove yourself never stops. And I always wondered what the real story was in the Dumas family."

Linda adds nothing to her mother's surprisingly thorough analysis that Monica has no way of judging the truth of.

Not noted how (or when and where) Monica gets to read Kitty's husband Hap "Happy" Huntington Blank's June 20th "Father's Day" note to Alyosha, but logic tells her that it can only be Alyosha who shared it with her on one of his visits when he likes to sit next to her on her ABC Street front porch, see how she's doing, tell her about recent conversations with the cast of characters he's always cultivated around his work life away from home, characters Monica's become familiar with from his visits and who she and her father love to share stories about. And, once in a while, he asks for her advice. ("Now" Monica can easily picture him shaking his head (grey hair mowed short above his kind, oval face), not having any way to know what to make of Hap's note because it's so far out of his experience.) Later — not "now"? — Monica thinks that it's remotely possible (but unlikely) that Kitty's the one who shared Happy's note. Unlikely because Monica knows that Kitty'd be reluctant to give her blessing to language so alien to her it would give her a headache:

"Dear Alyosha,

"Father's Day. Our first together! And I am so in love with your daughter! Without that experience which Kitty and I create together, I would never have had the opportunity to create with you the experience of our, yours and mine, relationship. Of course, without you there would be no Kitty and, at this moment, without Kitty I would not exist as I am. So I want to thank you for having created me too!

"I love you Alyosha, my father

"Hap."

And from Kitty a simple card:

"Dear Dad,

"I'm so glad that you're my Dad.

"I love you,

"Kitty."

It walks across its own surface and has no interest in what's below, in reality's so-called layers and depths. It might even be fair to say that it's in love with the visible world's surface and believes completely that everything is at all times available on the surface of the world and that, therefore, the statement that "the surface is everything" isn't absurd.

Generally goes by at a walking pace, but sometimes passes Monica's porch at the speed of a teenage girl on a bicycle in a hurry to get to her friend's house in the middle block of the three ABC Street blocks between bay and ocean. Sometimes even passes at the speed of a car eager to turn left or right on Boulevard, Avenue or Drive, breaking away from the eternal horizontal of ABC Street.

Not noted when or where — when exactly — Monica runs into Wanda Baer, who has a few broken fragments of what must be longer tales she urgently needs to tell Monica and no way to know if the longer, more complete tale ever gets told.

Wanda Baer starts to tell Monica about two friends — her "Estonian friend" Imbi Kulla and her "French friend" Madeleine LePlace — as if she has interesting things to say about them, things that would interest Monica for her Chronicle, but their stories don't get further than the fact that they were the two friends who talked Wanda into going "dancing in the Duchess" (something she never liked!) and letting herself be talked into that is the reason she ended up meeting Pat Czorny's sister, Janey! At the bar, getting a drink for Imbi, she started talking to the woman next to her in the usual way and still "at this minute" can't say what, what exactly, made her realize that she was talking to Pat Czorny's sister! — sister of one of the tenants in the Salem Avenue house where Monica house-sits!

"Janey" Czorny didn't have much to say about herself (she's a secretary, obviously much more articulate and better-looking than Pat, who Janey thinks is "slow"). What seemed to interest Janey Czorny more than anything else and what they ended up talking about so long that she (Wanda Baer) had to have a margarita or two was that old story about Pat Czorny's ex-lover, Linette. Wanda Baer says that she knows that Monica knows "the Linette story", because she's sure that Monica's already told that incredible story before, a long time ago, either in her Chronicle or somewhere else.

Abbreviated version of the Linette story goes like this:

Pat Czorny's ex-lover was a twenty-four-year-old blonde (Pat, as Monica knows, is at least ten years older than that and seems to like her girlfriends to be blonde, younger and better-looking than her), who, depending on who you are, is either "sexy" and attractive or a sleazy slob. Treated Pat like dirt and Pat seemed to like it, but there wouldn't be a "Linette story" if Pat Czorny was the only one who enjoyed being treated like shit by Linette. The married manager of the Liberty Bank branch on AAF Street seemed to like it even more. Left his wife and kids for her! Embezzled a lot of money and lost his job! For what? What exactly? We assume we know — we can say to ourselves 'lost everything for a pair of too-small white shorts' – but we don't know that that's all there is to it. Could be more complicated or it could easily be as simple and stupid as our first thought. The only thing we know for sure is that nothing really happened to Linette at all. Pat Czorny broke up with her, of course, but is that a serious consequence? Last she (Wanda Baer) heard Linette was living with Pat's sister (not "Janey", another sister, "slow" like Pat, in upstate New York somewhere) and Pat's completely recovered and in love again with an even younger little blonde (not even eighteen!), apparently a sweet and wholesome little girl who still lives at home!

Looking at her quickly sketched notes "later" Monica is surprised to see that she and Ellen Grace haven't left the Salem Avenue back yard and that Ellen Grace hasn't stopped telling the tale of her marriage: how and why the marriage ended, life after the marriage, etc..

Where, where exactly, the tale broke off for a long digression isn't perfectly clear to Monica, but she picks up where it makes sense to her:

Ellen Grace says that she couldn't get Elliot's last words out of her mind: his derisive "that's ridiculous!" when she confessed that her job made her sick with boredom and his commanding "Out of the question! You have to pay your way!" when she said she had to quit.

She left Elliot a day or two later.

A coworker named James, a divorced engineer fifteen years or more older than her, helped her move with his grown son.

Older, divorced with a grown son and a Mennonite too!

Why did she ask James to help her and not some other coworker? He'd told her that he had a friend who was moving out of her very pleasant apartment, but is that the reason — the real reason — she chose him? Is that believable to Monica?

Ellen Grace says that there's a long story she could tell but that she's going to leave out all the stuff leading up to her marriage to James. Simplest truth is that she knew she was going to marry him while she was watching James and his son carry her boxes!

Let's see: did she forget to mention that it's not just the grown son (age not told, not remembered or — not exactly the same thing? — not chronicled): there are two grandchildren, a seven-year-old and a one-year-old! Monica knows that she never wanted children of her own. Never wanted them and — truth is — can't stand being around them! "Can't stand children" probably the simplest way to say it. His son doesn't interest her and the grandchildren are just annoying. What is that whole "grandma/grandpa" thing about? Grandchildren are just a nuisance and a bother. She's always assumed that Monica agrees, but does she? Do any of these devoted grandmas and grandpas really like it or is it just one more universally-shared boring story? Gets repeated so often it's truer than the truth.

"This might be even worse: his whole family loves me!"

Family members wrote some effusive notes.

"'You're the best thing that ever happened to James.'"

"'You're the best thing that ever happened to this family!'"

But, aside from one niece of James' who's become a good friend, she hates them all!

"I've become 'That Forsythe Woman'!"

Ellen Grace has made herself laugh with a different sound than the laugh Monica remembers, if only because she's found the freedom to say what she never used to feel free to say. Or the reason's too deep or too shallow for Monica to figure out.

What else does Ellen Grace still have to say in the Salem Avenue back yard about her long marriage to Elliot?

"Elliot thought of me as his possession." And her mother had no problem with that. It was the divorce she didn't like!

It went something like this:

"There's never been a divorce in this family!"

And "how do you expect me to hold my head up?!"

"How could you do this to me?!"

Went on like that for two years until her mother stopped crying and disowned her — not all at once but gradually — while Elliot gradually became her son: had dinner there every night and, before long, moved in on weekends.

Who-hates-who most in her family is hard to untangle.

Let's see:

Mother and father hate each other openly. Monica might even remember what the atmosphere was like in their house. There's a good reason why no one ever wanted to visit. Once you'd breathed in that miserable air, you'd never want to taste it again!

Next, she (Ellen Grace) supposes, is her mother's hatred for her. Why — why exactly — she's never understood. Can't be as stupid as this true fact: she was never as appealing to her mother as any one of her mother's cast iron pans or her blue-enameled Dutch oven. Mother loved cooking. Dumber than that, she loved her kitchen. And nothing about her compares to the teentsiest thing in her mother's kitchen, a pancake turner or a garlic press. Logic says that there has to be more to her mother's hatred of her than that stupid fact, but what is it?

Fortunately, her father's nowhere near as bad. He at least always liked her better than Elliot. In fact he may have seen through Elliot before she did. Remembers him asking what she saw in him. "Why would you want to be stuck with someone I can't stand talking to for ten minutes?!"

Can Monica explain this? Her father hates her mother, but last Mother's Day, when Valerie arrived, her father waited to open the door just so he could tell Valerie off: how could she allow her mother to cook all day on Mother's Day? Never occurred to her to take her mother out for dinner? Too much to ask once a year?!, etc..

It had to be about something else, but, as usual, she has no idea what. Unless it's really about money. In this sense:

Valerie and her husband have the only good marriage in the family. Valerie had cerebral palsy as a child and it left her with serious back issues and one bad leg. So her mother's always harped on Valerie's body and her "deformities". How could anyone ever find "such deformity" attractive? And so on. It mystifies her mother that Valerie's husband loves her so much that he doesn't see her as deformed.

Ellen Grace was only a child when Valerie got married and nothing about Valerie ever interested her very much, but she does remember that Valerie and her new husband couldn't afford to live on their own and that it was a big deal that they not only had to live in the poisoned atmosphere of her parents' house, but that her father had to "set up" her husband in business. Business failed and her father lost $50,000! Or so she was told.

For some reason (when Ellen Grace had already left home) everything changed: the four of them (mother, father, Valerie and her husband) moved together to Santa Fe. Valerie had the idea of opening a nursery school (supposedly Ellen Grace's father set them up in that too!) and now they have a chain of five or ten nursery schools, sixty or a hundred employees, etc..

With all that success, she doesn't think her father was ever paid back. So maybe that's really it, not Mother's Day.

Elliot does their books so he's part of the business too and she's the only one left out. So it's lucky that she and James have a good marriage and plenty of their own money. Or her life would have been a disaster!

Monica is on ABC Street, on the front porch in her usual spot, with a desire to get back to work, which is and isn't the same as paying attention to the horizontal South <—> North flow of figures from Monica's daily image-world and unknown beachgoers toward and away from the beach.

Old Rae Ryan is returning to her place in a corner rocker on the Regans' porch, under the Regans' enormous Elm and in front of the door leading into (Monica notes that she has no way of knowing which) the Regans' groundfloor apartment or directly into Rae Ryan's narrow little studio. Monica doesn't know for a fact where Rae Ryan is coming from, but knows this much: old Rae Ryan always picks the shortest path to and from shopping for the handful of items she's able to carry (that is, short walk on ABC Street north —> to Coast Boulevard/seven long avenue blocks east on Coast Boulevard to AAF Street/unknown distance north —> on AAF Street and possibly beyond on Bay Drive east to the supermarket and then likely the identical path in reverse).

Slow, careful steps carrying next-to-nothing, to keep from straining a weak heart.

Hat (style not noted), as always, royal blue, but with a white pattern (too far away to describe) against the blue.

Leaf green umbrella, also with a white print against beautiful green, dangling from wrist.

Rosie and Jojo Coffin pass together on bicycles (coming from where? where exactly?) in the direction of grandmother Babette's house near boardwalk-and-beach, where, most likely, they'll drop their bicycles and head for the beach only a few steps away, with or without Babette.

Let's see: who else gets Monica's attention moving this way or that on ABC Street? Two of Pat Corcoran's nieces, Iris and Amy, who Monica has met before but couldn't say she knows beyond a few words of greeting, exit through Pat's front porch door exactly where Monica likes to work, so Monica feels compelled (Chronicle compels her) to record the little she knows about Pat's nieces without at all remembering how she knows it:

Iris and Amy are both brunettes.

Amy is 22 and Iris is 23.

Of the two younger sisters who aren't visiting today with Iris and Amy there's another brunette (14-year-old Joan) and a solitary blonde-and-blue-eyed 15-year-old, Connie.

Trying to make her list complete, Monica adds that there are also two nephews, one 26, one 14, who rarely or never visit Pat Corcoran.

It's not at all clear to Monica (and not clear either why it would even come to mind), but there may be another blonde niece, name and age unknown, therefore seven nieces and nephews in all.

Let's see: both Monica and her Chronicle debate the value of recording the details of Pat Corcoran's family (likely told to Monica on a day when Pat Corcoran stepped through her porch door and then right through whatever Monica was chronicling, talking and then talking some more just because Pat's mouth hasn't figured out how to stop talking once in starts), but Monica overcomes the Chronicle's reluctance because she feels bound by the mission she set herself "today" when she sat in the corner rocker behind the Rhinebeck pine with wide wing span of stacked planes of heavy boughs: to clear up the "loose ends" of incomplete notes that have been accumulating during Ellen Grace's visit, including notes on slips of pink "telephone pad" paper scribbled during a conversation with Ellen Grace.

Either Monica or her Chronicle has had enough of Pat Corcoran's nieces and decides to clear up another loose end. Or what later appears to be a decision is just a question of the permeability of whatever space we're in: space unstable, story-telling a scramble to keep up with it.

While deciding what loose end to bind up, Monica hears Babette Coffin, just below her in the cracked-and-weedy driveway, say to son-in-law Greg: "He could park over here."

Sentence is ordinary, but voice is a beautiful and mysterious blend of Viennese and French accents.

"Well," Greg says matter-of-factly, "All I can do is all I ever do, which is what I can do, so let's see."

"Always the voice of reason", Babette says and they laugh together as the only two who get the joke.

Not noted what direction Nicole Renard comes from: there she is in the driveway, beautiful as always, mint green blouse pulled down from both shoulders to show more dark caramel skin, waves of golden/brown hair against it. Dressed for hot summer, yet always an air of coolness, of breezes blowing through whatever she's wearing. (Monica tries to work out an analogy in her notes between the way Nicole looks and an iced tropical drink with both mint and caramel in it, but gives up because she doesn't think there is such a drink or should be.)

Nicole's rushed over in a childish way to say hello to Babette and Greg (important members of Nicole's beloved adopted family since childhood when Nicole's extraordinarily busy and successful mother, Mildred, deposited Nicole in Babette's care (long story that's already been told or still needs to be told or re-told elsewhere)).

Says that she's just arrived. Planned to drop off her car and visit at least overnight! but now she's been offered a lift back to Manhattan tonight, so she has a conflict and doesn't know what to do.

"Maybe Monica can help me figure it out, like she always does!"

Wanda Baer and unnaturally babyish and lisping, pretty little blonde sister, Cindy Kurtz, are returning from the beach only minutes after Nicole Renard rushes excitedly into the driveway, but oddly Wanda doesn't stop to say hello to anyone, not even to Monica. Straight up the orange brick steps, quickly through Lena-&-Greg's front porch ping-pong room and upstairs to her narrow little elbow of an attic apartment.

Now Monica finds out who — who exactly — Greg and Babette were trying to set up a parking spot for in the crowded driveway, where there's always jockeying and maneuvering for space for Coffin/Forest tenants and guests: an unfamiliar guy pulls into the narrow slot Greg points to and is immediately out of his car carrying a few things: what looks like a solitary 45 rpm record (label impossible to make out from Monica's distance, no matter how hard she tries) a circular drum case lettered "VAN PATTEN" and another instrument or piece of equipment.

Unfamiliar guy enters Greg-&-Lena's house quickly through the side door (already unlocked) without saying a word or looking back.

Luisa, the band's beautiful singer, follows close behind him carrying a plant (what kind not visible or not noted), but Monica notes that that doesn't prove that Luisa was in the car with the unknown guy with the drum case and his 45 rpm record. And this may not prove that they were in the car together either, though they entered Lena-&-Greg's house one after the other: minutes have hardly gone by when Monica hears notes of a recorded ballad, live drums being played quietly with brushes over recorded ballad and then Luisa's voice, also quiet and soulful:

"I say that you're the best thing FOR me

"cause you're my IN-SPI-RA-SHYUN!"

Dies out immediately, with nothing further.

Squat little Mrs. landlord Minna W, in a brandnew flowered housedress, is on the tiny stone porch of her boring pseudo-modern just north of the spot where Monica's working. Even from the other end of her porch Monica can see that Minna W's watching As The World Turns on her little black-and-white outdoor tv with one leg up on a cushioned folding chair.

Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle is returning from the beach with her two waggle-headed boys, Hank and Willy, and she's in a terrible mood.

"What?! What did you say!?"

Little Hank Wattle answers meekly "What?"

"'What?!'" Nancy mimics his meek tone, somehow adding a layer of bitterness.

"'What?' 'Why?' 'How come?' Do you ever listen to yourself? Do you have any idea how sick I am of listening to you?"

Old Rae Ryan seems to be returning along exactly the same path she followed earlier. Her second walk of the day! This time she's wearing a sweater, but says to someone Monica can't see that it's terrible to have to walk in this heat! Can't at all figure out what made her do it! And now she can't wait to get to her chair in the shady part of the porch and sit under their beautiful Elm.

Old Rae Ryan, settled in her rocker on the Regans' immaculate front porch, takes her usual pleasure in greeting anyone who waves or nods to her heading toward or away from the beach.

Pat "Twiggy" Garvey goes by and seems to be seeking Rae Ryan out to say hello to, the first of many who pass un-chronicled.

Monica tries not to pay too much attention to the horizontal flow of life on ABC Street because she's determined to keep clearing up the loose ends that accumulated and always accumulate when an unexpected event shoulders all others into the deep background. Sticks to her plan to transcribe in a roughly coherent way the small leaves of pink telephone-pad-type scrap paper that she used (because it was all she could lay her hands on) talking on the phone with Ellen Grace "around 10 p.m. on Sunday night".

Ellen Grace says that she had "a weird letter" from Valerie: "more irritating than anything else".

" 'Something secretive and terrible is going on between Elliot and our parents! Just the way you suspected!' "

Same mystery re-stated, with nothing added.

Ellen Grace abruptly changes the subject or it's the pink slips of paper that have no continuity (scraps of paper missing, others illegible).

Apropos of nothing, Ellen Grace says "Why did I have to be born now?! Now, in this nothing age!"

Why couldn't she have lived at the turn of the century, between 1870 and 1900, when everything that mattered was happening! Every important revolution in art and music and writing happened then or has its roots then! Doesn't Monica agree?

Changes subject again: to Linda and what's most irritating about her.

"She lives to shop!"

Ellen Grace says that she herself enjoys shopping, but not every minute of her spare time, as if there's nothing else! Linda's putting pressure on her (Ellen Grace) right now, for example, to go shopping together so Linda can change her (Ellen Grace's) look entirely. Wants to throw all the beautiful floral print blouses and dresses that she loves in the garbage and "tone everything down" so she'll look like she belongs in New York.

Sums it up this way: "Linda is hard into men and clothing. Period."

Linda is always fashionable and most of the time it looks great, but not always. "Two years ago", for example, she came for a visit and got off the plane in Santa Fe in platform shoes that were so high Linda almost fell coming down the stairs. Highest of high heels, skirt below her ankles: Santa Fe wasn't ready for it! Can't remember if she was honest and told Linda how ridiculous she looked. She knows that she walked right past her, but probably only said "I didn't recognize you" and not "I didn't want to recognize you"!

Monica notes that transcribing the broken narrative of her pink-scrap-paper telephone conversation with Ellen Grace is interrupted for a few seconds (less than a minute) by Yvonne Wilding, passing on the porch and going out of her way to say hello with the unimportant information that "Al left for work at 6:10 this morning!" just so Monica would have to turn her head and see that, overnight, Yvonne had dyed her hair a flaming red-orange.

Ellen Grace (on Monica's out-of-order pink slips of scrap paper) says that Elliot's sister Naomi is schizophrenic and — if it weren't for her (Ellen Grace's) family, the family she provided for Elliot and that's now his family much more than it's her family — Elliot would be "a recluse" and probably a little nuts himself. Never had any friends, never had the capacity for making a friend and now, because of her family, doesn't feel he needs one.

This too: "The only person in my family worth maintaining a relationship with" is her niece, Sissy. There's more about her relationship with Sissy she'd like to tell Monica, but there are other things on her mind that are more pressing, so it's up to Monica to remind her if she wants to hear more (that is, if she wants to chronicle more!) more about that friendship.

Ellen Grace thinks it's more interesting to tell Monica about her high school friend (someone Monica may remember, though of course Monica wasn't friends with her) Jill. Does Monica remember Jill? The signs were already there in high school, when it was rumored and probably true, though no one ever knew it for a fact, that Jill had seduced one of their teachers (identity of teacher not remembered or not chronicled).

Ellen Grace says that she knows that Jill's story is going to be a bit scrambled, jumping around in time, but she doesn't know how to straighten it out without distorting it.

Let's see: her (Ellen Grace's) mother never approved of Jill, even in high school, and at some point banned her from the house. Her mother:

a) may or may not have heard the probably-true rumor about Jill and the teacher

b) didn't approve of the fact that Jill always showed up with a different hair color than the time before: was sure that that was "a sign of something" she wouldn't like if she knew what it was

c) could tell before anyone else that Jill was already pregnant in her junior year of high school

d) was psychic and knew — also before anyone else — that Jill would go on to have six — at least six — abortions in the next five years

e) hated Jill most because she was able to talk her (Ellen Grace) — who, of course, as Monica knows, was a pushover back then — into letting her dye her (Ellen Grace's) hair a ridiculous Hollywood shade of blonde

f) put her foot down and essentially broke off her (Ellen Grace's) friendship with Jill over her pathetically weak objections.

Didn't hear from or see Jill again until she was already married to Elliot and living in their big beautiful house in Santa Fe. Suddenly there Jill was on the telephone. Apparently (though she can't trust anyone's version of the truth) Jill had appeared out of the blue in one of Valerie-and-her-brother-in-law's mini-chain of nurseries, saying that she'd come all the way from New York because it was urgent for her to "get in touch with your sister, my high school best friend, Ellen Grace".

Made it sound as if there were "urgent things" she needed to tell her (Ellen Grace) after all this time. How much she'd missed her all these years for one thing and could she stay for a few days?, a week at most, etc. etc..

She (Ellen Grace) is nowhere near the passive pushover she was in high school, but still — out of curiosity? — said yes, ok, "but only for a week".

This is when it gets scrambled. Jill's stories may be stirred together with what she once knew of Jill's life and thought she'd forgotten. For example: when did she find out that, aside from suddenly visiting Valerie in one of her nursery schools, Jill somehow found out that Valerie had undergone still one more painful spinal operation and, while Valerie was recovering, Jill showed up in Valerie's hospital room with a huge bouquet of flowers!

Not sure if that happened way back when Jill first re-appeared, or now, when she's re-appeared again after another long (twelve year!) absence! The timeline is broken and can't be repaired in her brain.

This much is clear and definite: when Jill first looked her up in Santa Fe and asked if she could stay a week Elliot hated her immediately and even invited his cousin, someone he can't stand either, to stay with them for the same week!

Turned out of course that there was nothing "urgent". All Jill wanted to do was reminisce about high school ("the best time" of her life! and "I sleep with my high school yearbook on the telephone table next to my bed") and tell her endless details of her pornographic sex life.

After a few days she had to admit that her mother and Elliot were right for once and she asked Jill to leave. Jill of course was "deeply offended", because — doesn't Monica agree? — stupid, repulsive people are always the last to figure out that they're stupid and repulsive.

Didn't forgive her (Ellen Grace) for another twelve years!

Ellen Grace says that she almost forgot this interesting detail: thinks it took about ten seconds after she asked Jill to leave that Jill married "a man from Idaho" she met in the crappy apartment house she'd moved into. She doesn't think that Jill and her new husband had "a dime between them", but now somehow they live on "a nine acre ranch with horses" and Jill has discovered that she's "always loved horses" so a horse ranch must be her destiny, though Ellen Grace can't imagine where in Jill's life in New York she ever met a horse!

Monica is sure that there's a lot more to her long telephone conversation with Ellen Grace, but "at this moment" can't find the rest of her pink telephone-pad slips of paper.

Monica finds a few free-floating sentences on pink telephone pad paper that she or the Chronicle considers worth saving, but the Chronicle's no longer certain "now" who the sentences apply to. Seems logical that they're about Ellen Grace's sister, Valerie, and also about her husband, but she'd like others not her, no matter when, to figure it out.

One free-floating note says: "Loves jewelry. Ten diamond rings and a ring on every finger. Husband's no different. Also has a ring on every finger. And, in general, they love to shop for jewelry together."

Extra-long red-and-white van lettered (not noted whether red lettering on white background or, less likely, white on red)

RED BALL VAN LINES

rumbles slowly S <— N (having just turned onto ABC Street from Coast Boulevard or from further north — from Salem Avenue or even from Bay Drive — not known or not noted) toward the ocean end of the block.

Monica stops paying attention and has no idea where the RED BALL van stops, if someone's moving in or out and so on.

More odd facts on loose slips of pink paper that, because they are small and loose, have no (can't have any) particular order and that Monica keeps coming across at random as she chronicles. Fact this odd, for example: Ellen Grace's straight-arrow husband, James, has developed a close friendship with Jill's apartment-house-husband-from-Idaho-turned-horse-rancher, Al. What got them together not told or not noted, but pink slips suggest that they shared strong opinions about Ellen Grace's old friend, Linda:

a) they both felt an immediate dislike and

b) didn't hesitate to call her "unattractive" (James) and "the most unattractive woman I've ever met" (Al).

This too: James and Al have "hit it off" to the degree that they're thinking of going into business together! Al (Monica has no idea what Al's original profession was) has apparently invented still one more gas-less engine based on different principles than all the others. James, who is an engineer and an inventor with dozens of registered patents and who earns his living as a "security expert" (de-bugs corporate offices, sells surveillance and anti-surveillance devices he's invented, with Ellen Grace managing their very-successful business, creating advertisements for scientific and electronics magazines, etc.), has examined Al's plans and finds them promising.

"So", Ellen Grace says, "weird as it is, Al and James seem about to go into business together!"

Let's see: Monica finds more "loose ends" and needs to figure out if they have to be tied up or left loose as they are:

Greg-&-Andy's band, which always practices in Babette-&-Grete's open garage, is practicing in Greg-&-Lena's front porch ping-pong room. "Unusually loud and not very good" (bad in what way exactly not noted). Also abnormal: what Monica hears is clearly a man's voice singing, not Luisa's, and that too makes the band sound odd and out-of-sorts:

"SAY THAT YOU'RE THE BEST THING FOR ME!

"'CAUSE YOU'RE MY IN-SPIR-A-SHUN!"

Monica's mother Betty calls for no more important reason than to share the information that Kitty and Happy paid a surprise visit to pick up a few things they'd left behind when they stayed earlier in the summer. It didn't take long for Kitty to get irritated when she couldn't get a lid to screw onto the jar it looked like it belonged to and Happy offered to help as if he could do a better job and then couldn't do it either. Betty wasn't sure if that irritated Kitty more or made her feel a little better. Kitty snorted when Happy failed, but she's not sure how to take that. Seems to want Monica's opinion but doesn't get one.

Betty found this odd too (the real reason she called?): when they left, Kitty said to say "hello" to David, but didn't mention Monica. Wants to know if something happened between Monica and Kitty that she doesn't know about, but Monica can only answer that if something happened she doesn't know about it either.

A little more (another free-floating pink slip of paper) about James and Al and their gas-less engine:

Story is (according to what was told to Ellen Grace, then told by Ellen Grace to Monica) that Al's invention is still being ruled on by the U.S. Patent Office, therefore "Patent Pending" until when no one can say. Delay doesn't bother Al because he needs "at least another $30,000 to finish building a working prototype". And to get the prototype done, because he's not an engineer and James is, he will, of course, need "a lot of help form James". So Al's project is going to demand a lot of work by James with no guaranteed reward and she (Ellen Grace) isn't happy about it, unlike her family, who for some reason are all gung-ho.

Valerie for example says that she's so sick of the nursery business despite their success that she's already invested a thousand dollars in the gas-less engine and sees that as an opportunity to semi-retire.

Valerie's enthusiasm "seems to have rubbed off on mom and dad" and they've invested a thousand dollars too.

And Elliot (afraid as always of being left out) also chipped in a thousand!

What concerns Ellen Grace is that even Valerie has to admit that their confidence is based entirely on Al's facts and figures — and what, after all, they really know about Al is nothing.

This is what Al is telling them:

1. he's been offered five million dollars not just by one oil company, but by "several", not to build his engine!

2. turned down the five million because he's holding out for twenty!

3. added his own money to everyone else's to bring the total up to the thirty thousand they need — so now they can finally get to work building the prototype!

4. not only is the thirty thousand enough, Al thinks, to start building the prototype, it should be enough to finish it. And possibly even enough to rent a warehouse!

5. the only thing they have to worry about now (according to Al) is piracy! The big oil companies could save a lot of money by stealing their secrets and they all have an army of spies! So this is where James' expertise in industrial espionage will really become important. . . .

And so on.

Doesn't Monica agree that it's alarming that Al's tales are accumulating and multiplying as they get closer to actually having to produce something? To her it seems as if he's already worked out ten explanations for his failure.

Ellen Grace says that she's sick of it all.

Needs to get away from Al and Jill and Valerie and the endless chatter about "Al's invention". It sometimes even makes her fed up with James — even though she knows it's not at all his fault and she can tell he's sick of it too.

Needs to be back in her own place where it's quiet: no one talking, especially herself! She's never talked so much crap in her life!

Wants Monica to think about it: when was the last time she (Ellen Grace) was alone? Could Monica live that way?

Right now she's staying with her cousin (Monica makes a mental note to check if that matches what she's already chronicled about Ellen Grace's visit to New York).

Before that she was in the cabin in Maine with the same cousin (mother's sister's daughter)

in Washington Heights with Sylvia

with Linda and her mother in Linda's mother's apartment.

Did she leave anyone out?

Monica feels the need to check everything out and wonders if she'll ever find time to do it.

Not noted who tells Monica that "Leo Romero is not playing in the band" and then doesn't tell her if that means that Leo's reluctantly gone back to cleaning carpets for the family business in Brooklyn.

Leo hates the family carpet cleaning business as much as/more than the family hates his drumming. A never-ending argument and the reason Leo hardly ever sees his family.

Leo Romero's story comes to mind when locally glamorous, platinum-haired Lily Romero waves hello to Monica and gives her a warm smile from the sidewalk in front of Lena-&-Greg's. It's easy to see that Lily is pregnant and that she's due to give birth any minute. And Lily's pregnancy gives Monica an instant explanation for Leo's sudden, urgent need to make money.

What else about Leo & Lily? Lily can be heard saying to another woman unseen or unknown to Monica: "Two nights ago I thought 'this is it!'. So it could happen right now, here on the sidewalk!" And the other woman says "You're not the only one!"

"Have you seen Melissa? or Sonia?"

And still another voice says: "So many of us due to deliver this summer or fall!"

"Cool autumnal breezes on a perfect summer day" can be seen circulating through the branches of the Regans' enormous Elm, stirring an extraordinary spiral of golden light through leaves that would otherwise be still and green.

Spiraling of golden light through green masses is what draws Monica's attention.

Not noted if stirring of Regans' Elm happens at exactly the same time as Monica notices Themis' replacement's (another handsome Greek Cornucopia Diner worker and therefore likely a buddy of Themis') blonde girlfriend sitting on the top porch step, leaning back against the square base of a pillar and making an afternoon's project of polishing her fingernails and toenails.

Not for the first time Monica thinks that Themis' replacement's girlfriend is more the idea of "the attractive blonde girlfriend" than she is actually attractive when seeing her gets beyond the idea of her. Thinks this too: sitting on porch steps in autumnal breezes through July sunlight, getting lost in a task that takes some concentration, isn't the worst way to pass a day.

Wanda Baer wants Monica's advice: Nadja sent Wanda a card that's basically an invitation, but more than an invitation because there's other stuff written on it.

Here it is: "Please join Andy and me to celebrate our seven years together. We're getting married on the beach where we met! SO PLEASE JOIN US SUNDAY AUGUST 1 1976 — 9 P.M. AT THE OFFICERS' CLUB FORT CAREY, WINDY PASS R.P.N.Y. — R.S.V.P. (212) 474-4410."

She (Wanda Baer) needs Monica's help deciding whether or not to go, of course. But the part that's really confusing is this: Nadja wrote some other weird stuff in the margin: "We can't go on meeting in hallways! HOPE YOU CAN COME! Love, Nadja and Andy".

Does that make any more sense to Monica than it does to her? All they've ever done is say hello and goodbye in Lena's downstairs hallway! Without that there'd be nothing! There's never been a hint from Nadja — and definitely not from Andy — that they wanted to be any friendlier than that.

What does Monica think?

Or, put it this way, how full of shit is Nadja?

For example: does Nadja really want her (Wanda) to come to her wedding?

What possible difference would it make to Nadja?

Another thing that makes her wonder exactly how big a liar Nadja is, though she seems so laid back and nice:

nice accent

nice smile

nice body obviously (long, loose and eternally suntanned)

nice, enviable lifestyle (bicycling, surfing, sunbathing, lifeguarding, sounds of pleasant, sensuous love-making everyone in the house can hear, travelling to only the sunny, beautiful regions of the world to earn the few dollars they need to support their ideal way of living).

That's all there is to Nadja as far as she (Wanda Baer) can tell. And what does any of that have to do with her? True she (Wanda) goes to the beach and likes to swim, but otherwise — as Monica knows — her life is a neurotic mess, not at all like Andy-&-Nadja's sunny, athletic one! It's obvious, for example, that Nadja could not have been cursed with a father like Oscar Kurtz!

Everything about Nadja is nice, but she (Wanda) knows that the story Nadja tells about her (Nadja's) sister is bullshit. According to Nadja the sister is "a brilliant film editor" who graduated from "The London Film School" (might be impressive if anyone ever heard of it!) and is now supposedly working and "very successful" in New York City. So successful, in fact, that Nadja's sister (name not remembered or never known) can "be helpful" to her (Wanda Baer)! Nadja says that for some reason she told her sister that she, Wanda, is "interested in film" and has advised Wanda in a supportive way that she and her sister both think that "a career in film" would be "perfect" for her (Wanda)! The sister of course can help her "easily".

Has to confess that she let herself believe this bullshit story for a second and was tempted. Knows nothing about film, as Monica knows, and being the idiot she is was tempted anyway. Took a few minutes to realize that it was meaningless to get someone a crappy film job: everyone's slave doing shit work like a beginner in any stupid job. And then you can tell some other gullible idiot a bullshit story about " working in film", just the way Nadja talks about her sister.

Needs Monica to explain: why would Nadja go to all this bother? What could Nadja possibly want from her? So there's a lot for Monica to think about and get back to her about before she decides to go or not to go to their stupid wedding on the beach.

On July 27 Monica is sitting on the porch but hasn't started working yet. Condition of not-working leaves her open to physical sensations that are also memories that have no certain place in memory. Yesterday's aroma of ocean-in-breezes that had more of late August in it than of July (next season in this season?) lingers a little today in the coolness of grey sunlight. Seems to Monica that summer is fading prematurely from the trees.

Everyone knows that there's an autumn melancholy (body can feel the world draining away from it), but Monica finds herself asking if there's also a summer melancholy that goes unnoticed. Fading of summer within summer, which may or may not be the same as the melancholy sensation when memory of another time breathes across the skin of this time (mind's skin in skin of forearm).

Without warning Lon Gurion is "here". Talks to Monica, but no record in Monica's notes of length of time and not one word of what he said either. The strange space that Lon Gurion (retired pharmacist (according to Lon Gurion) with thin, worm-like moustache) always occupies, whether telling his odd tales, parroting the loony conspiracy theories of someone named "Peter Beter", or simply standing silently and too close while Monica is talking to someone else, is thoroughly filled by the memory of a tale about Lon Gurion told to Monica on the boardwalk by "Joe" and "Connie" who lived for the span of last summer in the small downstairs back studio that Lon Gurion occupies "now".

After Joe and Connie had left and Lon Gurion rented the studio he called them. "I'd like to keep your phone to save myself the expense and bother of installation and I'll just mail you a check every month when the bill comes in." Something to that effect. It didn't take long for them to realize that this Gurion character, who they hardly knew, was asking for a weird favor. He could simply not pay and they'd be left holding the bag! And then solving it would be a huge headache.

Naturally they said no, it was too complicated. But that didn't stop him. They found out (lucky for them the woman at the phone company remembered talking to Joe and knew what his voice sounded like — not at all like the weirdo Gurion's, clogged and coagulated!) that Gurion had called the phone company, impersonated Joe and told them not to remove the phone! Never found out how or if Gurion wriggled out of trouble.

Let's see: one other tiny little tale about Lon Gurion: Monica's rough notes say that a woman Monica has no memory of knowing named "Marie Collins" warned at least one neighbor that the odd-looking man who'd rented the little downstairs rear apartment in the big cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling was always peering out between the slats of his blinds without turning on the lights in his apartment at night: she could see yellowish light from a streetlamp shining off his eyeglasses. What or who he was peering at she has no idea! Can't imagine what there'd be to attract a man like that, but of course you never know. Someone smarter than her might be able to figure out which windows — which windows exactly — would be visible from all the angles the odd-looking man's windows face and then figure out if there's something to tempt him! Everything about him is creepy for sure, so her only advice is: "keep your blinds

drawn at all times!"

Let's see: Anne Marie keeps passing Monica on the front porch, carrying what seem to be heavy cartons out of the house to a car waiting in the cracked and weedy driveway. Pauses to talk to Monica and has a few stories — or broken bits of a few stories cobbled together into one story — she seems to need to tell:

Doesn't know if Monica's aware of it, but they haven't seen each other for awhile. She was away for what never had a chance to become a vacation because she was called back suddenly on Sunday.

Artie's in the hospital.

Another serious accident on his motorcycle!

This is the story as far as she can get it clear: no idea what Artie was doing in Brooklyn, near the shopping center where, apparently, there's a new road being laid down just as you get near Korvette's or Mays and — maybe because it is an unfinished road or just because Artie is Artie — he turned, probably too sharp and fast, into the wrong lane.

Head-on collision, so he's in St. John's with a broken leg and a concussion!

And here she is, having to do everything!

If Monica has the patience she'll tell her the whole story: she and Artie are moving. In fact, tomorrow was supposed to be moving day and that's why she's breaking her back dragging all this crap over to the other place.

Reason for the move is another story. Or it's more than one story.

They needed a new kitchen floor. Original one was ancient and a mess. Artie talked to W., the landlord. Conversation seemed to go well. W. always comes across as nice and reasonable: a squat little guy dancing around and laughing. Artie made the argument "I'm handy, so I'm willing to do my own installation, but I need you to pay for the materials". W. agreed that that sounded fair and they shook hands on the deal. So Artie had no problem laying out the money for the flooring, she didn't mind helping him install it, but when Artie went back to W. with the bill W. got all landlord-y and hostile! Denied that he ever agreed to anything and refused to pay what he promised. So Artie's counter-move was to deduct exactly the amount W.'d agreed to from his next rent check.

Landlord of course returned the check.

Artie retaliated by not paying his July rent.

So Artie lost his security deposit and so far he's gained nothing.

After a while Anne Marie admits that the story that she just told is true but less than half the whole truth.

Truer truth is hard to tell because it's embarrassing like all the stories inside the first story it's easy to tell and that we tell so many times we begin to think is the whole truth.

Truest truth is that they're running away from Yvonne Wilding and Al Szarka!

Does Monica know how the second floor is laid out? It's screwy and she never liked it, but the bathroom that belongs to their (hers and Artie's) apartment is in the hall. You have to leave the privacy of the apartment, usually through the bedroom door because it's closer to the bathroom! So you always have to be careful and remember to get dressed, etc.. It's nuts, but she was able to live with it. This is what was unlivable: it started to get obvious that Al and Yvonne knew everything about their habits and schedule. Nights when Artie wasn't home because he had a late shift (a few nights every week) she'd find Yvonne or Al in her bathroom or they seemed to deliberately leave evidence that they'd just used it! Does she need to spell out the disgusting details?! Yes! The most disgusting thing Monica can think of! Or her (Anne Marie's) favorite bath towel crumpled up and soaking wet! They have their own bathroom, so what's the reason? Is it enough to say "because they're pigs and that's what pigs do"!?

Does Monica agree that there's no point talking to or arguing with people like that? What would Monica do? Wouldn't Monica, wouldn't anyone move? Or should she feel defeated? Somehow she feels like a coward — but aren't they just being smart? She wishes she felt happier, but she doesn't — she's miserable.

A little bit more: they're not going far: just to the second floor of a nice two family house on the beach block of ACI Street. So they'll be paying 300 a month plus an extra 300 to an agent for an apartment that's no bigger than this one. Plus all their labor. Did they do the right thing is what she needs Monica to tell her.

Grete Forest bicycles by, gliding through Anne Marie's desperate question that's also its own answer, in shiny blue athletic shorts and (color not noted) halter top, warm smile hello to Monica while solid little infant Hank makes happy, watery sounds audible to Monica on the porch as if he wants her to know how much fun it is to be rolling across the world of ABC Street in the familiar basket of his beautiful, suntanned mother's bicycle.

Pale sun and mild breezes stirred a second time by mass and velocity of Grete, Hank and bicycle headed south <—.

Monica wonders: what is the emotion that seems to have something to do with the stirring of one time through another? Memory stirred by what through the present moment feels like the strange almost-emotion called "nostalgia", but what is it? What is it really?

Monica thinks: "sweetness of a summer evening": but exactly how long ago is the "summer evening" that's returned to her now? This moment in time may be full and ripe, but the time stirring through it is not.

"How many summers are sitting here with me now?"

Not every moment of existence, but certainly this moment now on the porch, has not just one other time layered in it, building up inside "the present moment" to a strange awareness. And this awareness — sense of many-other-times-in-one from a simple stirring in the air — may or may not be one of the emotions that can't be named accurately.

Let's see: what else does Anne Marie have to say? May grumble again "I have to do everything!" and then feels compelled to tell Monica a story about her tooth. "And in the middle of all this I have to have a tooth pulled!"

Anne Marie says that she'd already had a painful abscess and a root canal (how long ago not told or not noted), but the dentist did a bad job and now because of that the abscess has come back under the same tooth so she needed a second horrible root canal! And, after two root canals, her dentist (second bad dentist?!) is admitting that the only real, permanent solution is to have the tooth pulled!

Abscess and root canal

Idiot Artie breaking his stupid leg

Moving a thousand heavy boxes to a new apartment

No help with anything and everything in a hurry:

This is what her life amounts to now and her only relief seems to be to tell her story to Monica!

Monica doesn't know where the expression "the grid of time" comes from, but here it is now in her mind and then directly onto paper.

"The grid of time" and "the sweetness of a summer evening" don't seem compatible as ways of thinking about memory or about the question: is memory always, at all times, melancholy? Inevitable melancholy of memory what stirs the air on a summer evening in an odd way?

Not often, but once in a while, all the moments leading to "the present moment" are present. Feel that we're breathing again air breathed before: breeze across forearm is familiar and carries unmistakable aroma-memory. Not what we think of as memory because: it's outside us. As if we find ourselves surrounded by what usually stays in the mind and we can feel what's lazily called memory in the breeze and smell it in the air.

Monica's always loved Proust's long novel (read Swann's Way before she was twenty), but she's very clear and certain that in her Chronicle she herself isn't "searching" — for "lost time" or anything else. Believes that there's only one reality, one lived life and any record of life — retrieved, conjured or even recorded while staring at it — is another reality, therefore fiction.

If time is lost or inert in memory the answer is: in place of memory, writing. "Search for Lost Time" an idea that inspires a parallel life in language, what Pasternak called "My Sister Life".

A lifetime of present moments, recorded directly and largely without memory. Whether it's in Swann's Way or the Chronicle, which have no resemblance to one another, we have an eternal present in language and the implied melancholy knowledge of not being able to live again in reality.

Allison Savas and her wiry, irritable husband Jacky are looking for Grete Forest and seem bothered by not being able to find her. Suddenly Grete's in front of them and they greet her with impatience, not warmth. "There you are!" etc. Grete wants to know if they were the ones Babette saw looking for her at their house. They don't answer but Jacky grumbles about some boxes he had to carry.

Grete seems to have just returned from a bike ride: shiny black gym shorts and a pale blue t-shirt with black letters, from Monica's angle improbably with most of the letters spelling "GRETE".

As Allison and Jacky Savas are leaving with a "see you later!" from Grete, Allison thinks to ask if they're all going together to hear the band play somewhere tonight.

"No, not tonight — and who knows when! Haven't had a gig for a while."

Sun has returned, but altered by where it's been. Monica quickly chronicles what she sees this way: "deep golden red burning in grey shingle". And, a slightly different way: "old grey shingle of front porch, worn and porous, suddenly turns a weird, deeply saturated golden red". And "golden red soaked up by porous grey shingle makes a color that can't be found anywhere else on Earth".

"And, a few yards away, in the isolated needles and green-black masses of the Rhinebeck pine as well."

From her position on the porch behind the massive pine (with its burning golden-red-in-blackest-green) Monica is sure that she hears Twins passing Twinning — audible but unseen: the unmistakable alternating rhythm of deep, rumbling grumbles and oddly expressive silences, but no distinct language she can record. Also hears (whether simultaneously or not not chronicled) the distinctive twittering of a pair of Mourning Doves as they take off in flight: quick view of white along the scalloped edges of their tails and slight clatter of wings against bodies as they pass Monica's corner of the porch, heading East above the cracked and weedy driveway between the porch where Monica's writing and Lena-&-Greg's massive white stucco/orange brick.

Monica again encounters the phrase "the grid of time" in her notes without having any idea where it comes from or, at first glance, what it means.

Sun so hot it burns through thinking as easily as through the thin rubber thongs Monica's wearing to protect the soles of her feet from burning sand.

Beautiful day of swimming both alone and with David and then beautiful day again on their blanket with late lunch: kind of sandwich not noted though Monica often asks David to make: grilled cheese sandwich with or without tomato

thermos of creamy iced coffee with at least a dozen ice cubes (for Monica)

thermos of black iced coffee with only a few ice cubes (for David)

jelly donuts perfectly made by famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street (not-too-sweet high quality raspberry jelly filling/slightly spongy, but light and never doughy dough/light sprinkling of granulated sugar to give slight crunch to thin, lightly fried skin of dough)

no other food or drink noted, though there must be a bottle of ice cold water for Monica.

Sandwiches, coffee and donuts (with or without a solitary cigarette) seem to be what Monica needed to have the strength to wrestle with observations she made "yesterday" with only a few scribbled barely-legible notes that she's now, despite the sun's naked blaze, trying to make sense of.

1. Sun "setting in leaves" (unable to burn through leaves)

2. That is: leaves — singly and in masses — have no choice but to "contain" sun

3. "Two weeks ago" leaves were "the flimsiest of containers"

4. Sun burned through without being contained "even for a second"

5. "Rays pass through leaf after leaf at the instant of touching"

6. Now each leaf is "a vessel that holds light inside it until light dies out"

7. Masses of trees and "each shrub and hedgerow a burning bush"

8. Light can't escape: stays trapped and therefore —> how many spindles of incandescence?

9. Can't answer the question whether "leaves grow stronger as summer advances", but asking the question satisfies her

10. Past experience (someone else can figure out how many years exactly) of chronicling light with as much interest as chronicling passing residents of ABC Street reminds her that "in the fall leaves inevitably will become the color of the light they hold".

Takes a few bites of her sandwich and for some reason starts wrestling, in the thought-erasing sun of the lid-less beach, with the problem (because her mind's chosen to make it a problem) of the difference between writing and painting in her devotion to telling the truth of what's in front of her at any present moment. To show the truth of the surface of the world laid horizontally before us is an enormous and difficult mission and should be enough to occupy any writer's/any artist's life. Occurs to her that time could be the difference: time in every sentence, no matter what. And time never in any brushstroke: but wonders within the same sparkling grain of thought how she, who's never painted, can have any idea what's possible or impossible to get into a brushstroke.

For example: thinking about yesterday's unusual light: is there such a thing as "yesterday's light" in painting? And/or what, what exactly, would it mean for a viewer's sense of time if a painter's brushstrokes could suggest that the odd red-gold of that moment's sunlight (that moment — that moment only) was as much about the worn-out resistance to sun's blows, the porous exhaustion of ancient grey shingle, as anything else?

Problem is: now Monica isn't looking at what's laid out in front of her on the beach any longer. Brain is filled with yesterday's "deep red-gold" burning in leaves equally as in dull and granular grey shingle and in edges of thousands of thousands of pine needles of massed boughs draped down over massed boughs.

Monica gives up: too much difficult thinking instead of enjoying the special pleasures of sipping creamy iced coffee from the screw-off cup/lid of her thermos and tasting ocean that can't help sweeping across and into miraculously still-warm-and-melting cheddar inside crisp and buttery fried bread, acid red edge of tomato or not.

Returning to sandwich and coffee blessedly cancels thinking until she's back on her porch "a little later".

Chronicle refers to a "letter" from Ellen Grace, but documents nothing but a short, formal note and the text of a business card that Ellen Grace enclosed.

"Dear Monica and David: I had a wonderful time…last weekend…" etc. ... "can't wait to see you when I come back on August 7!"… etc. "Thought you'd like to see James' business card ":

"GOLDEN ENTERPRISES

4824 Golden Lane

Santa Fe, New Mexico

INNOVATIVE GREAT

THINKING IDEAS

JAMES HEFFERNAN"

And also on the card (makes no sense to Monica, but there it is undeniably in front of her, so she's compelled by the Chronicle to record it):

"MORGAN GUARANTEE TRUST CO.

23 Wall Street

Curtis Milleson, Ass't Vice Pres."

Monica takes a few minutes (while absorbing and storing light that = space revolving by imperceptible degrees around her rocker in its spot in the southernmost corner of the front porch) to quickly (without having planned to) scribble a list of manuscripts recently sent to literary journals and small presses that haven't been accepted or returned yet:

Two "Twins Twinning" texts to Dorothy Dorm's So What?

"Snow" (story without sequence or development, built out of units of equal weight, each numbered "1" and each one about/or taking place in snow) and "Diagram" or "A Diagram" (Monica realizes while scribbling that she isn't sure) to Chelsea

Complete manuscript of Green Inventory, novel-length "concrete" language narrative based on Monica's Chronicle, to Oolp Press (Monica would like to or wishes someone else would thumb back to see why, why exactly, "Oolp" came up in the Chronicle not too long ago)

Query to an agent (name not noted) about what novel also not noted, but Monica does make sure to record that the query was sent "three weeks ago"

"Revised" version of a formally interesting story, "Winter/ /Winter", still being read at Exile magazine in Toronto

"Arm in the Gears" absurdly at The Atlantic (Monica notes the senselessness of this submission)

Notation about the New York State "CAPS" grant finals (no explanation given)

Query about what not noted to "Seabury Press"

And "Noise Text" still at Da Vinci magazine

"Out of place", but in the same list, a reminder to herself about Food Stamps.

What's absorbed and stored while scribbling her list spills out onto scrap paper like this:

light of summer and light of fall find their places in the wide wingspan of leaves:

fountains of green that long ago sprayed upward with force are now bent and curved by gravity in every direction:

so that Monica finds a full green gaze wherever her eye travels:

seems to Monica "now" that some leaves are polished with a blinding brilliance they didn't have before, while other leaves are growing weak in the weaker light of fall.

Green world is radiant with a jungle's tangled and woven density, but a different, not-very-distant future is visibly lurking there — visible for an instant then blinking and disappearing, revealing itself only with the snap of a twig and a twinkling of sun on dark gold fur.

Time in other time, as always.

Not noted if and when Anne Marie tells Monica — or how Monica can possibly know without Anne Marie telling her —that Artie Tilden was released from the hospital "yesterday": "cast all the way up to the hip".

Not clear in Monica's quickly scribbled notes if it's Monica who says or Anne Marie who mutters: "the price of being timid, I guess".

Note clearly written in green ink taped to a pile of long boards stacked haphazardly on the porch (exact location not noted): "Al: sorry I couldn't cut these for you the way I was supposed to. Saw's on the fritz again! Jacky."

Young man named "Timmy" knocks on Pat Corcoran's front porch door just behind the chair where Monica's working. Wants to know if "Iris & Amy" are still visiting, but Pat's answer for once is inaudible because Monica's immediate sound horizon is thin and porous and also because Greg Coffin's practicing, using a Bach fugue to re-tune his being as usual, and the scaffolding of piano notes through Lena-&-Greg's second floor front-and-side windows makes a far clearer and sharper horizon above Monica and to her left (south) than Pat's whispered reply.

Young man named Timmy tells Monica for no good reason that he's "just back from Texas" as he leaves, bounding with giant steps down the porch stairs.

Dominick Ianni is mowing the two wings of Sylvia Greengrass' dry, closely-shaved lawn inside its little brick-and-iron-spiked fortress wall and it seems to Monica that Dominick Ianni's not-saying-hello is a little more emphatic than usual. "Just last week" Dominick Ianni and Monica had an argument. Monica's squat little landlord W. or squat little Mrs. landlord Minna W. had apparently made an arrangement with Ianni to mow the grass of both of the W.'s adjoining properties. Bah-Wah was visiting and tranquilly dozing near Monica's rocker, happily not working like Monica to chronicle the sounds and smells filtering into her dreams — similar to breezes travelling all the way from the ocean and ruffling her fur — and Dominick Ianni spotted her and refused to mow the two dead humps of the front lawn unless Monica took Bah-Wah inside. Monica wouldn't wake Bah-Wah up, he yelled at her and the next day the W.'s didn't seem to notice that the lawn was exactly as dead as it was the day before.

On a July date not noted Mikki pays Monica a rare visit, driving out to the beach in Margo's old VW (color not noted): therefore Monica's Chronicle's suddenly flooded with fragments of stories about Mikki and Margo. Monica notes that anything she chronicles about Mikki and Margo must be told her to by Mikki, who in every way flows outward, so much so that others sometimes feel flooded and even submerged by this or that they weren't prepared to get from Mikki, while Margo is like a mollusk that won't open, even with a tool that's made to open it, a mollusk that's clamped itself closed because it doesn't want to open — possibly because somewhere along the way from childhood it's learned that clamping shut is an effective weapon, enjoyable for the mollusk and frustrating, sometimes infuriating for whoever it is that's stupid enough to want something that isn't even alive inside the closed shell.

Flood of news and micro-stories from Mikki.

Tiny bubbles of dead air or foul gas from the locked mollusk that still-and-all is capable of a speechless suction that pulls the little it needs to survive from others.

Margo took an apartment in or near Cold Spring Harbor, an easy drive to school.

Margo and Muffy spend their weekends in the Berkshires (drive there in Margo's VW or in an un-chronicled car of Muffy's) in one of two "cottages" on an estate that used to belong to one of the Carnegies.

Contradictory tales explaining why Muffy gets to use the "cottage in the Berkshires":

a) Muffy's mother's (name not told, not remembered or not chronicled) close childhood friend married a Carnegie and, though the friend and the Carnegie are "long-since divorced" and "he's living in Bermuda with his fourth wife", Muffy's mother was for some reason "given" the use of the cottage "forever". The only one in the family who uses it is Muffy, not her mother, who has her own inherited money and doesn't need the cottage or thinks of it as no big deal.

b) Frederique Furneaux's lover and ex-student, "the genius" Polly Cryer's sister lives in the second, neighboring "cottage" (mansion and two cottages the only residences on what's referred to as "the estate" (how many acres — how many acres exactly — the estate consists of not known or not noted)).

c) Or both contradictory stories are miraculously true and there's an extraordinary, unexplained coincidence involving Muffy's (un-named) mother and Frederique's lover, the brilliant Polly Cryer.

Mikki wants Monica's advice. How should she solve this? It bothers her — it more than "bothers" her, it makes her angry — but at who? at who exactly is always the question — that she's not allowed to use the spare cottage on the Carnegie estate on weekends, while Frederique's always there with Polly, the genius who's actually done nothing so far and who Frederique, with all her intellectual arrogance, her air of superiority so many people hate her for, fawns over her like a housepet, a toy poodle, a marsupial baby begging to snuggle in mommy's stinky pouch. And the reason she (Mikki) is banished from the stupid "estate" is because Polly Cryer doesn't want her there. "If you let her come while I'm there you can just stay home too!"

There's more.

This is why her situation's impossible: Polly Cryer wont let her go to the Berkshires and Frederique won't let her stay in her stupid place, her little Fire Island getaway. Why not? Because she doesn't want to think about her (Mikki) being there with Marsha. Doesn't want Marsha "polluting" her apartment, is the way Frederique puts it. Thinks Monica knows that Frederique's always been disgusted by Marsha. There's no other word for it. It's disgust. And Monica also knows that there are some valid reasons for that. There's a side to Marsha — a strong side — that a lot of people would find "disgusting". It's fair to call Marsha "dirty". So someone with Frederique's fastidious, puritanical nature is bound to find her disgusting. Stuff that doesn't bother her (Mikki) — that (to be totally honest) may even attract her — as a dark and squishy puddle to wallow in — would be viscerally repulsive to Frederique.

No secret that Marsha has problems and that it's exactly Marsha's problems that make her seductive.

Right now Marsha is depressed and needy — again!

Needs her (Mikki) to be the caretaker. And at this moment she has nothing to give and could use some taking-care-of herself. "My needs always seem to come last."

This too: Marsha is making impossible demands just when her therapist is talking about her own restlessness and dissatisfaction and is basically unavailable: taking a break and may even move to another state!

"My therapist is going to change her life before I do!"

Let's see: anything else about the little constellation of Mikki, Margo and Muffy?

The night before Mikki has to go home to Eldridge Street Monica and Mikki decide that the three of them should have a big lobster dinner together and drive (in what car not noted) along the coast, around the curve of the Belt Parkway, to the ancient and cavernous seafood restaurant, Lundy's, in Sheepshead Bay. Over the long dinner with its ritual of pre-determined courses Mikki lays out her reasons for having to rush back home.

Marsha called Muffy in a panic because she didn't know Monica's number. Desperate because she couldn't figure out how to reach Mikki and furious because she knew Muffy would be able to. Long story about Con Ed: they removed the meter tonight and now there are no lights or anything else! She knows that Mikki reminded her a thousand times about all the warnings she was ignoring and bills she wasn't bothering to pay, but it's not her fault! It's the previous tenant's fault! She didn't pay her bills — so she (Marsha) inherited the problem! And then Margo had the apartment next door and everyone knows that Margo's way of dealing with bills is to throw them in the garbage! Long list of other reasons she's not to blame, but the Chronicle's tired of the Con Ed story and of Marsha and won't accept another sentence about it. Only this: Margo says that she's sorry she ever let Mikki talk her into subletting her apartment to an irresponsible slob like Marsha. "a) I could easily have sublet it for a lot more than $126! and b) subletting to anyone may be illegal so, because of Mikki's sick obsession with Marsha, she could end up needing a lawyer!" etc. etc. Margo's habit of endlessly holding on to a point.

Mikki counters that since Margo's rent is actually only $86 she's making a nice $40 profit and that, plus the $94 she gets from unemployment, is Margo's only income (since she's always a "student" who doesn't have time to work like the rest of them) till her father Mel starts giving her $50 a month and then her grandpa kicks in for another hundred because they're all so thrilled that their pot-head fuckoff Margo got into medical school!

Conversation shifts to a different set of complaints.

Margo says that she can't stand living with Muffy. No air conditioning, for one thing. Has Mikki's big floor fan, but that's no match for the hot air that gets trapped up there. How much better would it be to live in Monica's neighborhood, where there's always an ocean breeze! Right now, for example, don't they all feel the mysterious, cool fog that's blowing in? And you can hear waves breaking and just the sound of it cools you off!

Mikki's only comment is to complain about her own body.

"I've been fasting hard", but tonight's gargantuan meal is making her feel bloated and she hates it.

Monica says that she knows that Mikki knows that she always gets "bloated" when there's a conflict she can't handle. Lost Margo to Margo's frantic cramming for medical school, and that led to digging up Marsha with all her problems — exactly the kind of "filthy" problems that are poison for Mikki — and here she is — no surprise to anyone — puffed up and jowly.

Lundy's meal ends as always with a big wedge of very good cherry pie.

What else?: On her way downstairs from the green front (west-facing) studio of her three room attic house-atop-the-house to the front porch for an afternoon's work Monica can't help noticing that Artie Tilden — who fled his apartment and moved to a smaller, more expensive apartment about a mile west in a more upscale zipcode of the same neighborhood because he was afraid of a confrontation with Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding (or just with Al Szarka's snarling mouth and too many sharp incisors) — left a big hole with broken edges in his door: ripped the lock and lockplate out and took them with him, leaving an annoying job for who? for Al Szarka or for landlord W.?

Fionnuala Regan is visiting her parents Joan & Al and, as usual, she's on the sidewalk in front of the Regans' immaculate white shingle, under the great wingspan of the enormous Elm, keeping an eye on little Matthew riding his tricycle back and forth. Chronicle's attention is drawn to Fionnuala Regan's blonde hair: she's cut it much shorter than Monica remembers it and her short hair seems to make Fionnuala look "short and pudgy". Paying attention to Fionnuala 's hair for the usual internal Chronicle reasons immediately migrates the Chronicle's attention to little Matthew's blond hair and then immediately to trying to figure out the difference between one shade of blonde hair and another: Matthew's shade of blond is much paler than his mother's: pale and lightweight as everything that's often compared to cornsilk. For reasons only the Chronicle can explain, it also thinks of Margo's blonde hair and calls its blonde "dark, dry and coarse", not exactly like straw, but still a useful way of understanding the quality of little Matthew's hair, pale and silky, shifted easily into new patterns by the slightest breeze.

Monica notes that she's known for a long time that the Chronicle has a mind of its own and it's one of the Chronicle's Chronicle pleasures to make connections and comparisons for no reason easily explainable in the short term.

"Out of order": it's Monica's guess that a fragment of information broke loose from her conversation with Mikki and Margo over thick and creamy New England clam chowder or cherry pie and coffee at Lundy's and drifted all the way here, in the middle of rough notes about Fionnuala and little Matthew Regan or about Fionnuala and another set of loosely connected events on ABC Street.

Margo talks a little (too little for Monica to learn anything) about working for "the famous feminist author" Chesney Philmont. Margo finds doing a little research for Chesney Philmont's next book "exciting", but she needs to earn money and Chesney Philmont is only paying her $4 an hour! Office is in Chesney's big, handsome apartment on West End Avenue so it sometimes feels worth the low salary just to be able to be in that space a few times a week, but she can't afford it, so Chesney needs to find someone a little younger who'll be even more thrilled to be in Chesney Philmont's presence.

Quickly sketched in and "out of order" notes say: "unusual activity in the brick house" on the other (west) side of the street, the corner house at the intersection with Coast Boulevard.

Son well into his 30's, even 40's, lives in the brick corner house (little fortress and observation post atop a wraparound lawn that slopes down at a severe angle to a low brick wall that attracts tired passers-by) with his seldom-seen mother and father.

Another sentence, far away on the same scribbled scrap paper page, says that the "son" and the man Monica usually sees him with left the house "a little earlier", but it seems to Monica that it's been "a long time" since she's seen "either the mother or the father".

Monica notes on another sheet of scrap paper that the "unusual activity in the corner house" may have been a funeral, though the only evidence of that is a chauffeured limousine waiting for hours at the curb and pairs and solo figures in black suits and formal dresses up and down the short, steep diagonal of steps from sidewalk, past the mound of lawn to the tiny porch and front door on the ABC Street side of the two-faced backward "L" of the house. Monica adds marginally in tiny, illegible scrawl that the tiny front porch is big enough only for one beach chair where the son — never the father or mother — can sometimes be seen methodically unfolding and studying the stiff, oversized sheets of The New York Times.

If not a funeral, the only other possibility is a wedding, but the waves of energy that reach Monica across the very long diagonal from the opposing corner to her concealed spot behind the Rhinebeck pine are unhappy ones, almost visible as a slowly blowing mist of shadow.

Monica notes finally that "the old people on the block have been dying" and makes a tiny catalogue:

Enos Greengrass is certainly dead, leaving Sylvia Greengrass alone and gloomy in her little brick and iron fort

Impossible to be certain if Mr. Sloth is already dead or if he's dying somewhere out of view

"Now" there seems to have been a death (at least one death) in the "corner brick house".

Monica has the nagging feeling that she's left someone out.

"In the morning" of what late July date exactly the drilling of cicadas is so loud, so massive and universal, as if in every branch of every tree, not only on Monica's block or all of ABC Street from ocean north —> to bay, but on all the neighboring streets, that Monica (or the Chronicle) finds the word "drilling" mild and inadequate and writes instead that "the cicadas are roaring".

Riley Liman stops by, surprisingly not to talk about the cicadas (though as if driven to her porch by the cicadas), but to let Monica know that she won't be seeing him "for a while", so won't be able to keep her up-to-date about his experiments cause he's "going to a camp in Mississippi": "a four-to-five-day trip by bus" and he's looking forward to what he might find at "all the stops the bus will have to make along the way". Seems to Monica that Riley is more excited by the bus ride than by the idea of going to camp "in Mississippi of all places".

While Riley's talking to Monica about his trip he's jumping up and down with all of his force on the porch's wide, grey-painted boards as if he's curious about the world of plants and insects and other life that live below them and wouldn't mind crashing through to it.

Riley says that one thing he is looking forward to in Mississippi is the chance to dive into the "unbelievably deep lake" his mom keeps warning him that's famous for swallowing a lot of people down there. If he doesn't come back Monica'll know that their lake really is some kind of genuine Bermuda Triangle!

Monica follows his path toward home (S <—) and sees him find a way to jump hard on the roof of a car and leave a good sized dent.

AUGUST 1976

August 1 seems to be governed by an internal force that won't allow a story to get told. Every story that begins is immediately fragmented and then the fragments are blown into bits.

Monica is on the ABC Street front porch instead of in the Salem Avenue back yard as she was for the last days of July, because she didn't want to see the rotting brown bruises on neighbor-to-the-west Blanche's overripe peaches . Not sure if she was really smelling the too-sweet smell of late summer fruit and flowers that are no longer fresh and rosy, but knows that she doesn't want another day of avoiding the aroma of what's drifting in breezes.

Crisp sound of leaf brushing against leaf under a suddenly electric blue sky is (for Monica) the premature sound of winter. "The presence of things to come." Kernel of the next season always in this season if we're able to pay another kind of attention, the attention a dog, a wolf or a bear pays lifting its snout up into the wind and taking a few hard sniffs.

Monica gets a rare phone call from Wanda Baer next door: voice is low and urgent, her nearly-inaudible whisper charged with emotion. Says that she has two stories she needs to tell Monica for her Chronicle, but she's terrified of being overheard and accused of snooping. So she'll only tell one of them — not the one she knows only because she really was snooping — went out of her way to eavesdrop on a private (very interesting!) conversation between Babette and Tina Lima that's really none of her business. Tina confided some surprising things to her grandmother (who of course is not anyone's idea of a grandmother) and she'll have to find a better time to share that story with Monica. Even telling Monica the other story is a big risk (a nightmare if she got caught!), but she can at least lie to herself and say that it's fair game for her to hear and see everything if they choose to act out their family dramas right under her nose. She does live here after all, even if no one ever thinks to check if she's home from Manhattan and can't help hearing everything.

She left out this simple fact about Tina Lima that sets the stage for the other story: Tina came back early from Nadja and Andy's stupid wedding on the beach. She (Wanda) may have been the first to leave: left the beach at about 1 a.m. and came home to the strangeness of a big, empty old house. The celebration was still going strong: pitchers of sangria and margaritas and big tables of food and bonfires and the smell of woodsmoke all along the wide, deserted beach up there near Fort Carey. Should have been fun, but it wasn't. Could be that it's her fault because she hates the kind of people Nadja and Andy are friendly with. Knew in advance that she was going to hate everyone there, but that's not the point of the story.

Tina and Babette came home not too long after her and Lena and the children maybe ten minutes after that. Lena was in a terrible mood: angry and crying at the same time. Yelling at the children, so of course they were crying too. Lena seemed to be complaining that she'd had to leave the party early because she had to get the children in bed, but the children answered back that they couldn't understand why they weren't allowed to stay up late with everyone else. Why couldn't Lena just leave things alone for once! Worries about them so much she makes it impossible to have fun! And of course that only got Lena angrier and also made her cry more. At that second, Wanda Baer says, she hated Lena for the stupid way she is with the children. Children were miserable and needed comforting, but Lena left them alone and locked herself in the bedroom, where she never stopped crying. Doesn't Monica agree that that's the definition of being a narcissistic parent?

A short amount of time later (how much time, how much time exactly, not noted) Wanda Baer says that she can tell from Monica's silence that Monica doesn't see it the same way. Wanda thinks — and she wishes Monica would tell her whether she (Wanda) is for once cutting through her own crap and sensing something accurate — that Monica thinks that Lena deserves some sympathy and understanding. Ridiculous as it might be, Nadja and Andy's wedding might have depressed her. Isn't Monica thinking something like that? that you could look at what happened in a completely opposite way? You could try to look at it from Lena's distorted point of view. She has to admit that she never tried to do that and wouldn't have thought about it if it wasn't for Monica! But she still doesn't totally disagree with herself: the misery of the children and Lena's complete indifference to it matter. But this is how Monica is right: why doesn't Lena ever matter? Isn't that what Monica's thinking? Why do we always skip over Lena? Monica's reminded her that she knows that once-upon-a-time Lena and Greg were as young and good looking as Nadja and Andy and supposedly much more talented than Andy and Nadja will ever be. Lena was in graduate school or something. A promising film editor or maybe it was something similar and Greg obviously was going to be a successful concert pianist or a famous keyboard player with a rock band. And that's why they were attracted to each other in the first place. Children's misery may actually be Lena's misery in a different voice. Children may not have any idea why they're howling and inconsolable. They think they're angry with their mother, but it might really be something completely different. Old big house is filled with cosmic misery that Monica senses over there in the house next door, while she (Wanda)'s in the middle of it and senses nothing!

Wanda says that she hates to admit it, but Grendel, the big black Newfoundland, understands more than she does, because Grendel's been barking and howling for no apparent reason all night and keeping her from sleeping. Grendel seems to be funneling something the house can't hold and it's traveling out the windows and who knows how far. Prays that that never happens to her: that look in the mirror and horrible flash that Lena must have had tonight that it's too late: you've let everything happen that you promised yourself you'd never let happen and now there's no time. Couldn't that make you want to kill yourself? and isn't that what Rosamond and the dog know better than anyone?

There's this too: if she knows then Lena must know that Greg's sick of everything — of the responsibility for three children that prevents him (she assumes that's what Greg tells himself) from being free to play the music he loves and that would have made him famous and celebrated for his brilliance instead of having to play the commercial crap he's forced to play to support everyone like a good husband and father — and that's why he's bored to death and fed up with his skinny, nervous wife who's lost her beautiful little plum-face and the clear brain that used to be behind it. Can't stand looking at her running up and down their rundown mausoleum's ten thousand steps with a mop or a vacuum cleaner like a fuckn lunatic who's also a squeezed out lemon every goddam day!

Wanda Baer waits forever for Monica to tell her if that's what she was thinking.

Exploded narrative of the day continues.

Monica records two bits of information one after the other as if they're related logically or in some other inevitable way.

Sound of cicadas — drilling through individual leaves and masses of leaves and then through bark and through how many rings and layers of wood and then through wave after wave of space — is extraordinarily loud "today", but only for a short burst and then it's oddly quiet.

Monica is reading the newspaper (which paper not noted) and she's interested as always in fresh, credible news reports of life on Mars (what kind of life exactly not noted).

On the spur of the moment, thinking of all the splinters and fragments of stories exploded from within so they have no chance of finishing themselves that she's about to try to lay out as the horizontal narrative of the day, placing a rough splinter from one sheet next to a fragment buffed and rounded like sea glass from a distant other sheet, Monica decides to make a short list of exploded fragments with a common thread that she's just noticed:

SHORT LIST OF VISITORS TO ABC STREET & WHO THEY'RE VISITING ON AUG. 1

1. On the boardwalk, Monica and David run into the mother from the L-shaped brick house at the corner of the west side of ABC Street (side facing Monica) where it intersects with a leafy section of Coast Boulevard and learns for the first time that her name is "Mrs. M.".

Monica adds as an aside that she and David are only on the boardwalk — therefore are only meeting and talking with "Mrs. M." for the first time, standing with light packages of groceries in their arms — because they decided to take the long way around on their way home from shopping for a few things from a small store they don't like on the local shopping street (AAF Street) or from the superior supermarket a few very long avenue blocks (East) further away on Bay Drive just so they can walk with a view of the ocean from AAF Street to ABC Street.

Mrs. M. has a few exploded fragments of a story she seems to want to tell Monica, as if she's been paying attention to Monica writing on her porch at the same time Monica's been paying attention to her:

Let's see: Mrs. M. (what she looks like not noted) says that she's taking a walk because she "had to get away from the house". Endless parade of visitors. That's what happens — what she expected to happen — of course. They're being kind and they have to make their condolence calls so you'll know they were kind. "All that sympathy" is nice, but she can't take any more of it.

Re-reading her notes, Monica finds them thinner and shorter than she remembered and she seems to have written a note to herself explaining why there are so few notes: story of the husband's death, note says, is long and interesting and involves the son in some weird way, but, for reasons that aren't given "here", that long, interesting story seems to have already been told elsewhere. Somewhere else, but where? where exactly? Has to be searched-for and Monica is troubled that she isn't able to place that exploded fragment where it originally landed alongside other exploded fragments it seems to belong with.

2. "Out of order": August 1 is a Sunday and Monica notes that, among other "early Sunday morning sounds", she hears at 6 a.m. through her red room (south-facing) windows or, more logically, through the front green studio casement windows almost directly facing the Wattles' across the way, Hank and Willy Wattle's father (no name ever known or ever recorded), former Marine with a bad leg, aggressively hosing his car. And then, two hours later, at 8 a.m., from exactly the same vantage point, Monica sees and hears a woman (no description given) on the sidewalk calling up to the broad brown-and-ochre hacienda-style front porch, "Nancy? Nancy is that you?! Did you have a good time in Michigan!?". Woman on the sidewalk seems to know the names of Nancy Wattle's Michigan relatives who visited not long ago and inquires after them one by one as if it really matters to her.

Not clear in Monica's notes, so she has to try to figure it out logically: "earlier" or "later", "before" or "after" someone calls out from the sidewalk to Nancy Wattle again — this time while Nancy's watering the potted plants hanging on the porch — Monica sees Nancy mowing the two walled-in squares of Sylvia Greengrass' front lawn: a kind act Monica's seen before and that suits Nancy's big, kind and sweet face under a clumsy, cropped haircut that looks like it was done by Nancy to herself using bathroom mirror and garden shears.

Monica tries to reason out the likely timetable. Notes say mowing takes place in "early morning". Therefore mowing may very well have been happening while the Wattle husband-and-father was hosing his car with enough force to pry loose ancient wads of caked-on dirt and clotted grease.

Early Sunday morning chores.

The sound and flavor not only of a Wattle Sunday morning, but of many Sunday mornings along the three block horizontal length of ABC Street and beyond.

3. Not chronicled when or even if Monica has a conversation with Pat Corcoran's nieces, Iris and Amy, but she reasons "now" (while typing (editing)) that there's no other way she could know that Iris and Amy both work in Manhattan (commuting by subway from which borough not known or not noted) for a firm called "Sperry & Hutchinson" on the 7th floor of an office building at 42nd and Madison.

Iris is in a chatty mood, relaxed and happy after a long day at the beach (reason for the nieces' frequent summer visits to Aunt Pat?) and a few good swims in the wonderfully spicy and tumbling July Atlantic. Begins by telling Monica that her full name — her real name, the name she thinks of herself as — is "Iris Sheridan" — mother's maiden name she uses as her middle name and loves the sound of, a name you feel you've heard before somewhere, name of someone who's done something. Loves the sound of that and the idea of that, even though she herself has no ambition. What's Monica's opinion?: is it an "ambition" if your goal is to do nothing but have a good time? Can't that be an ambition? If it's so easy to do why doesn't anyone do it? Everyone she's ever known got sidetracked: worked their asses off and got what, what exactly, for it?

Even at work her aim is to do as little as possible. By 11 a.m. she's basically done working. Thinks for a second. Let's see if she can break it down for Monica accurately:

coffee breaks are twenty minutes

she takes forty and no one ever says anything

boss goes to lunch at noon

so from noon to one she hangs out with her friends and kids around

rest of the day is not much different.

She figured out a long time ago that as long as she's able to get a certain amount of work done, no one cares how she spends her time.

Amy still hasn't figured that out. Amy works too hard, but she (Iris) can't get her to change. Of course that's why, at the age of twenty-five, she's only graded a "four" and Amy at twenty-four is a "five". And that's factoring in that she (Iris) has been working at Sperry a lot longer!

In her opinion Amy's just one of those people who're "too good for her own good".

Takes a straight one hour lunch break, though no one would care.

Hasn't figured out that the harder you work and the better you are at it the more work they load on you with no added reward. And Amy is very good at her work and does a ton of it! Result is: though they love being together and do just about everything together, they're always separated at lunch hour and she's afraid that sooner or later the difference in their natures is going to end the good times they have together and maybe even their friendship.

Out of order and Monica has no idea how this splinter of information about and from Ellen Grace drifted and got lodged here: Ellen Grace told Monica (when? when exactly?) that her old friend "Juliette" (her best friend in high school) was already wearing stockings in sixth grade! Does Monica remember that? Does Monica remember Juliette? She's the one who always seemed ten years ahead of everyone else. Not ten years ahead of Monica, but certainly ten years ahead of her (Ellen Grace) and everyone else! Monica can probably guess how it ends up: Juliette is married and living a predictable, affluent life "in Rhode Island of all places".

Also "out of order", but only a little: Monica thought that she'd found in her rough notes everything Pat Corcoran's niece Iris had to say, but she's come across a few sentences that had drifted to the raft of another folded sheet of scrap paper and that seem to Monica to have a different tone about Iris' sister Amy: calls Amy "dumb". What else can you call it but dumb, she says, when you can't get someone to understand how much she's being taken advantage of at work?! This too: Amy has no curiosity about anything. She's your basic stick-in-the-mud. Furthest away from home Amy's ever traveled is New Jersey! Result is that she'd love to travel with Amy, but can't. Always has to look for someone else. The best and smartest of them all is the youngest, Ellen. For example: Ellen made the choice not to follow them to Sperry & Hutchinson, thank god. Has a job that's just a job within walking distance of home: job is just Ellen's way to be able to contribute to the household, the way she (Iris) still contributes $30 a week, because they all know how hard their mother's worked all her life to raise them. But she knows that Ellen's also putting something away every month because she has a plan — and she can't wait to see what that is.

Premature autumn light is sparkling on the needle-leaves of the Rhinebeck pine like water from a sprinkler. And for the ear only, too far in the background for Monica to see, leaves of the Regans' enormous Elm and leaves of smaller satellite trees are making sounds just a little softer than "rustling" to create the audible universe.

Let's see: Monica spots the un-named Wattle husband & father (doing what chore in front of the big brown-and-ochre hacienda style multiple dwelling not noted) and the two waggle-headed Wattle boys Hank & Willy, but not Nancy. And someone (not noted who and Monica wonders "later" who could possibly know and then tell her) is certain that Nancy went alone to Michigan to visit the relatives who just came to see her in New York.

Monica has no idea who Bernardine Cremieux is: the Chronicle speculates that she's a friend of Wanda Baer's, but knows for certain only that "Bernardine Cremieux" smokes Phillip Morris cigarettes.

On August 2 Monica is sitting in her usual corner, her writing corner, behind the Rhinebeck pine on the ABC Street front porch, and comes across another "out of order" fragment that's drifted onto another scrap paper page: a few lost and interesting details about Nadja and Andy's wedding-on-the-beach. Note says that Nadja and Andy were married by Nadja's father! Note adds simply that "Nadja's father is a minister", but Wanda Baer (or another unlikely reporter about the wedding enjoying giving Monica information for her Chronicle) failed to ask the right questions, so the story of Nadja and her father remains hollow.

This too: not all at once, but throughout the long night, someone (who, who exactly, not known or not noted in Monica's displaced-and-relocated scrap paper notes) estimates that between four and five hundred people showed up and had their share of liquor, home-made salads and dips, Grete's famous hummus and tabouli, a hundred different kinds of salsa and chips and Babette's spectacular German Chocolate Cake.

Monica's back on the porch after a break for swimming: cold breezes in thin sheets through the water and just above it/the same cold blue as the low breaking waves of the Atlantic below it. Monica's able to get down only the quickest possible note: that she felt herself swimming from August to September with very little resistance from breaking waves or heaving masses of unusually dark blue water.

Monica and David often share a late lunch on the beach (a special pleasure with its unique tastes and smells known only to those addicted to beach and ocean), but today they wait until they're back on the porch:

David's grilled cheese sandwiches with or without a sharp red edge of tomato, crisp and buttery just the way Monica loves them

Which pastry exactly out of all the possibilities from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street not noted

Extraordinarily creamy iced coffee for Monica (close to ½ heavy sweet cream and lots of ice stirred together with mild coffee by David in a tall glass with a long "lemonade" spoon) and black coffee for David.

Laurel Lenehan passes and stops to talk to Monica while Monica's still enjoying her sandwich and coffee with David. She has a few things to tell Monica (doesn't think they add up to a "story", but she's sure that Monica would still want to hear them for her Chronicle). Needs to get home so she's in a little bit of a hurry and wonders if Monica can walk a little way with her while they talk.

FRAGMENTS OF A NOT-QUITE-STORY TOLD TO MONICA BY LAUREL LENEHAN WHILE WALKING ON COAST BOULEVARD

Laurel wants to know if Kitty told Monica that she (Kitty) and Happy invited her to drive out with them to Oyster Bay on Long Island for some sort of Bicentennial thing that she thinks was also some sort of museum thing (what museum they have out there in Oyster Bay she has no idea). Also not perfectly clear to her, because she has trouble understanding Hap sometimes, but it seems he's part of a musical group or a singing group that was asked to perform at this Bicentennial museum thing on Long Island and — again, she may not have understood him — but she thinks Hap said that he might be asked to do a solo and that in some way he's the star of the show!

Let's see. She knows there's more. More like a fair or a flea market than a Bicentennial celebration: all sorts of vendors and booths and tables with food cooking and jewelry cases and albums of baseball cards and stuff like that. She found an interesting bracelet made out of old teaspoons, but it was a little too expensive for her so, to make her feel better, Happy bought her a three dollar ring she didn't ask for or want. Kitty noticed that she looked unhappy and got her something she also didn't care about but a little nicer for seven dollars. Ambrose Junior (who came along for the ride) saw what was going on and got angry (Monica knows how easy it is to get Ambrose angry) and pulled twenty dollars out of his pocket for the original stupid spoon bracelet she wanted!

Asks Monica to stop her if she's already told her the story about her friend Janine. She's sure she told her that she's not talking to Janine anymore. What Janine did — what she did exactly — isn't interesting. She's always known that Janine is a snake-in-the-grass: dangerous only if you have no memory and let yourself think she's a friend. Problem is that she's forgiven Janine all kinds of shit because she knows Janine's story. Would like to know if Monica agrees with this lesson about friendship: knowing someone's horrible story too well makes you sympathetic and it's exactly that sympathy for someone's horrible story that gets you into trouble. Too much sympathy makes you stupid.

Janine's parents had a long, ugly marriage. Got divorced not that long ago and now the mother, who's always been a sloppy alcoholic, is as drunk as ever, but alone and living in one of those crappy rooming houses on the beach block of ABB Street. Father's the same monstrous pig he always was: raped Janine when she was only seven! And then again at ten. Always after Janine's ass so there has to be more monstrous shit between seven and ten that she doesn't know about because Janine never told her. Mother was as useless then as she is now.

Let's see: Ryan (who, as Monica knows, is the smartest of her brothers) feels exactly the way she does: after the last stupid, snaky thing Janine did to her he (Ryan) won't have anything to do with her or her family. But Ambrose and Finnley (who's so innocent he sometimes takes a month to smell what everybody else smelled a week ago) still talk to Janine's father. Could be that they just don't care that he's a monster and a pig as long as they get to use his hunting cabin in the Catskills or the old motor boat he lets them take out on some swampy lake up there.

Something happened just recently. Janine's father (name not noted or never told) invited them all up to the Catskills cabin for the weekend. She and Ryan said no, but of course Ambrose said yes so Finnley said yes. What's impossible to understand, or it's too ugly to let herself think about it, is that Janine said yes because she'd be sleeping in the same room with Ambrose and Finnley so she'd be "safe". According to Ambrose this is what happened: he and Finnley drank with the father as usual. Doesn't remember if Janine drank or how much she had if she did, but she slept more like the dead than they did. Ambrose is sure he heard someone creep into the room and has a feeling he saw someone carry Janine's body out as if he was carrying a corpse.

She (Laurel) doesn't want to dwell on the fact that her brothers did nothing: if she lets herself think about it too much she'd have to stop talking to them and that's one thing she just can't do. She'd welcome Monica's advice, of course.

The desire to continue to exist, put into words, can't help stammering with yearning: write it all down: this happened: this day happened: it existed: I existed in it: this day didn't go away: because I wrote it down: this day happened and continues to happen as long as someone is reading it.

Back on the porch after a short walk and a long conversation on Coast Boulevard with Laurel Lenehan Monica doesn't have time to keep memory from turning the fragments of stories Laurel's told into something else before Wanda Baer stops by because (she says) she has too many things on her mind that she has to — absolutely has to — tell Monica before they get scrambled. She's relieved that the breeze has picked up and the atmosphere is so much cleaner and cooler so she can sit on the porch with Monica and get her help trying to make sense out of all the little bits of other people's lives buzzing in and around her head.

Let's see: hasn't seen Monica lately so no way for Monica to know much (anything!) about her new circle of friends. May remember her Estonian friend, Imbi Kulla, but there's a new French friend, not Madeleine LePlace, but Sabine, and new Italian friend, Valentina (no last name for "Valentina" or "Sabine" given or noted). There are stories about each one that Monica might find worth chronicling and then there are all the cross-connections, the histories and lines that have crossed and gotten tangled between them all in so many different ways that she doesn't know if she's up to mapping it out for Monica without tangling everything even more than it is. And that's only some of what's turning her brain into a crazy beehive right now!

Ok, before anything: Valentina and Sabine had a close relationship long before she (Wanda Baer) got to know them.

Valentina's younger brother was a national swimming champion who competed for Italy in the Mexico Olympics (year not known or not noted). Also not known or not noted how well Valentina's brother performed, but the only thing in the story that matters for Monica to know is that Valentina's brother was killed in a plane crash on the way home and that Valentina's never recovered from it. It's the great tragedy of her life and certainly the reason Sabine is as protective and tender with Valentina as she is. For example: Sabine (not Valentina's family) put Valentina through graduate school. Valentina has an advanced degree in Fine Art (what she studied and where — where exactly — she has no idea), while Sabine herself never even went to college. Sabine is intelligent, but self-educated. When Sabine was living in Rome with Valentina she (Sabine) supported them both by translating film-related articles from French to Italian and Italian to French. Taught herself about film by going to films every day: became one of those people you never get to know, but feel as if you know because you see them at every obscure-but-significant film screening.

Sabine was trying to learn how to write film dialogue — the special rhythm of speech and silence in film — so she could write a professional-sounding screenplay.

Wanda says that she knows for a fact that Sabine did complete and submit more than one screenplay and that it depressed Sabine tremendously that no one showed the slightest interest.

Wanda pauses and warns Monica that she's having trouble keeping events in any kind of chronological or even logical order in her head. For example: here's an event that seems to follow, but really doesn't and, any way you look at it, is "out of order": Sabine says that when they go to films together her (Wanda's) behavior reminds her strangely of Valentina's. Not so much the compulsive way she has to — absolutely has to — sit in a certain seat in a certain row or it's impossible for her to watch the film from the right angle. It's something much subtler, something no one else would notice and that she herself can't accurately describe or explain: Wanda's and Valentina's face and mouth both go through similar strange spasms or convulsions, a little wave of over-excitement, a tiny electric shock rippling through the flesh, that she never sees any other time.

And there's a whole other long, important story that's way out of order, but that's in her brain to tell Monica next:

Sabine and Valentina were on an isolated beach in Sicily. A handsome young man approached, clearly making a beeline for Valentina, as if she (Sabine) wasn't there. Valentina just had time to whisper that her heart was racing because the handsome young man was the exact double of her brother who died years ago! but here he is walking toward her on this god-forsaken beach!

"Just like that" she (Sabine) felt her twelve years with Valentina washed away. There was immediately a circle of two that she was excluded from. Excluded and erased, "just like that". And within minutes she knew that she had to leave Italy. Fortunately, her own twin brother (who she rarely thought of) had been living and working in Manhattan for years and she knew that, if he accepted her, the 3,000 mile distance would be her salvation.

What else?

Even further out of order: Valentina and the young man became a couple and had a child together. Named the child "Vera" because he wanted to name it "Valentina", but Valentina insisted that that would be absurd and "Vera" was as close as they could come.

This is the part of the story that she (Wanda) can't understand: how could Valentina get pregnant — how could she have her dead brother's look-alike's child — when Valentina hates intercourse!: can't tolerate not only the physical act, but the idea of penetration by the penis. Hates all the meanings and implications of it embedded in the psyches of both women and men. "The screwy implications of a simple anatomical reality" is the way Valentina put it.

But there's the fact that a child exists. So what's the explanation? She's wrestled with the contradiction and all she can come up with is that, because of what seems to be his devotion to her, his willingness to do anything to please her, they must have figured something out together. Could it be this weird and this simple? She knows for a fact that he shaved off every hair on his body. Shaved his body twice a week till he was as smooth as a peeled shrimp. Chest hair, pubic hair, everything! Does Monica think that could be it? Doesn't eliminate the erect penis thrusting into the nervous vagina of course, but maybe it's possible that his willingness to feminize his body for her could have taken some of the sting (and the meaning!) out of intercourse. Supposes that's possible, but — truthfully — she still has trouble picturing it.

There's this too and way-way out of logical and chronological order: Sabine says that living in Manhattan has already made her much happier. She's nowhere near as depressed and it's sort of revived her relationship with her twin brother. And that fact leads her further off the track, back into her (Sabine's) childhood, if Monica's still following and interested.

Monica says nothing, so Wanda goes on.

"This is Sabine's childhood story in a nutshell": grew up in rural France, on a farm not far from Metz. She and her brother were delivered by a midwife, which should have been normal and common, but the midwife fucked up: delivered her brother but had no idea — or forgot? — that there was a second baby — Sabine — needing to be delivered! It was Sabine's grandmother who realized that something was wrong with the midwife and had to rescue the left-behind un-born baby. Rescued Sabine, but four hours late! Delivery was difficult, of course. A horrible mess is closer to the truth. Whole left side of the baby's body was crushed. Multiple surgeries to try to rebuild what was crushed and they weren't one hundred percent successful. And, after that, much later, more surgeries to salvage her left eye. Even now Sabine worries that others (she (Wanda) for example) must be revolted by her weird left eyelid: feels uncomfortably heavy to Sabine and does in fact hang down over the eye in a way that gives her face a permanently odd expression. She's been told that another surgery should finally correct it, but the idea is unbearable.

Anything else about either Sabine or Valetina? Wanda Baer says that she has a nagging feeling that there is one more story — maybe even the most important story! — that she wanted Monica to know, but she just can't find it in her mixed-up brain. Almost has it, but it keeps slipping away like an animal that doesn't want to be caught. All that keeps coming to mind — and she's sure this isn't it — is the stupid fact that Sabine needs more sex than anyone she's ever been with before! Need is so strong that it seems abnormal to her and she hates to say that. She (Wanda) likes a fair amount of sex herself, but she can't keep up with what Sabine wants! In fact, Sabine is in some way making her a little sick of it! Sex is not — has never been — her problem. As Monica knows better than anyone (outside of Dr. DaVinci) she has plenty of crap — plenty of serious stuff — to deal with and if sex was one of them doesn't Monica agree that Dr. DaVinci would have jumped on that first thing!?

So: if Monica has any advice about how to deal with Sabine's constant need for sex without offending her it would be a godsend.

Something else comes to mind that she (Wanda Baer) left out, but she's sure it still isn't the thing she thought Monica would want to know: forgot all about Dominique and maybe all that means is that Dominique isn't important and maybe should be left out, but still: Dominique was her (Wanda's) Estonian friend Imbi Kulla's lover. Works at the U.N. doing what — what exactly — she has no idea. There's a long un-interesting story that the Chronicle rejects about why Dominique always seems to be apartment-sitting in a friend's apartment at 48th and 1st rather than living in her own apartment in the 50's, close to 2nd Avenue, and the only significance for Monica of the whole apartment thing is that the big, beautiful apartment Dominique seems to be taking care of all the time is that it's one of the places she (Wanda Baer) "disappears" to when no one sees her around Lena-&-Greg's for days at a time.

Also: Monica might find this interesting: what Sabine calls "loyalty" is very important to her, but whether Sabine's "loyalty" is different from or the same as "faithfulness" is very confusing to her (Wanda). And she's curious to see if Monica also finds Sabine's words and actions about "loyalty" confusing and contradictory.

Sabine says that she was 100% loyal to Valentina for twelve years and of course ended up feeling like a fool. So, when she came to New York four years ago, she made up her mind never to be that stupid again and that's why she's lived her life here as "a butterfly".

The problem with that story, Wanda says, is that she and Sabine have been together over a month now and, unless she's blind and stupid, she's sure that Sabine's been completely faithful. She herself (Wanda) hasn't so much as danced with anyone else and she has no sense that Sabine has either.

The other side of it is this: she knows for a fact that if Sabine thinks you've been "disloyal" to her she's capable of violence. For example: whether or not it's true that Sabine's been a "butterfly" in New York, she knows that Sabine had at least one major four year relationship here that only ended when Sabine had the stupid impulse to run back to Italy, convinced that she could revive her relationship with Valentina, even though there was no sign that Valentina was ready to blow up the very nice life she had there with her child and devoted guy who shaved his body smooth just for her and god alone knows what else. It was a dumb idea and it failed and Sabine had to crawl back to New York empty-handed and depressed.

Here's an example of what Sabine's capable of if she thinks you've been "disloyal": one night Sabine was in The Duchess and the woman she'd broken off with to go on her hare-brained trip to Italy walked past her without saying hello and Sabine took that as rude and disloyal, went to the table where the woman was sitting with her new lover and dumped a pitcher of beer over her head! Didn't know and of course wouldn't care that her ex-lover couldn't talk to her because her new lover is insanely jealous and would have ended it right there if she saw her talking to Sabine.

Wanda says she has to stop for a second: it's as if her brain's out of breath and needs a break. There's definitely something else, but what? For example: is it interesting to Monica that she just saw Kitty? It happened like this: doesn't remember why she and Sabine were with Mikki in Mikki's apartment on Eldridge Street, but at some point one of Marsha's ugly cats "escaped" from Marsha's place next door and ran into Mikki's. And that's how she found out that Sabine has a thing with cats. Sabine whispered in her ear "I hate cats! Get that thing out of here!" and of course Mikki, who's sensitive to any psychological signal, couldn't help noticing and asked Sabine if she was phobic and Sabine told her some bullshit tale about an old girlfriend who had a crazy, paranoid cat that attacked them in bed one night. Her friend now hates cats and even has a dog and she (Sabine) is left with this exaggerated reaction to every stupid cat.

The only point to the cat story is this: because Marsha let her cat loose, probably as an excuse to barge into Mikki's, they left in a hurry and headed for Sabine's new little place in the Village. And right there on Jane Street they ran into Kitty! To be honest, she was a little embarrassed, because Kitty looks like such a cliché! Platform shoes that are too obviously expensive, pretty dress that's fashionably mid-calf, beauty parlor afro: the perfect upper middleclass professional woman who's made her daring move to the Village! Of course she had no choice but to introduce Sabine to her "cousin Kitty, the doctor", but she didn't enjoy it and didn't linger to chat.

Let's see.

Did she remember to tell Monica that Sabine hates her job? Hates being a typist and thinks she's only being saved from total insanity because she's a temp and not stuck in one office for more than a few days at a time! Life was so much more satisfying in Italy! Working odd jobs and writing screenplays — even if no one wanted them!

And did she (Wanda) tell Monica that, to thank Nadja for inviting her to their wedding — their stupid "spiritual celebration on the beach" — she gave them a cholia plant she stole from her parents (mother has so many she'll never miss it!). A cholia's no big deal, it's not particularly beautiful, but of course Nadja gushed over it. (Still trying to figure out what Nadja wants from her!)

She remembers one other thing, but doesn't think it, like all the other stuff she's been able to remember, is the thing she needs to tell Monica for her Chronicle! There's something really important and it's the one thing stuck somewhere just outside her brain. So of course another stupid memory just popped in: Sabine has a friend named Robin who (for a reason she never knew or doesn't remember) lost her apartment and was desperate for a place to stay until she left on a hitchhiking trip to Canada. Of course Sabine was loyal to her friend and said ok, but Sabine's roommate (name not known or not noted) understandably freaked out. So Sabine tried to satisfy them both and of course offended both of them: made Robin leave for Canada early, just a few days before she would have left anyway, and lost their friendship — for a roommate she's never been particularly friendly with and who hates Sabine just because Sabine made her share the apartment with a stranger for a few days!

Sabine's only had one card from Robin (the ex-friend) since Robin left: a sentence to tell Sabine that she (Robin) is in Bar Harbor, about to take a three hour ferry ride to Newfoundland and the unknown beyond. Sabine of course was moved by the "loyalty" Robin showed by thinking to send her a card.

Monica scans quickly through her rough notes and finds a few things that were left out or squeezed out trying to put her notes in "better narrative order" (a principle she often ignores, preferring to leave things in the natural order of chronicling).

1. Cloudless "cold blue" sky toward sunset when a ring of tiny clouds gets lit up to a warm, rosy pink through the drying leaves of the tall Salem Avenue hedgerows separating the back yard from neighbor-to-the-west's and clouds' warm rosiness softens the blue of the sky to a different blue.

2. No explanation in Monica's notes why she's in the barely-existent ABC Street back yard (only a tiny strip of earth and grass between concrete paving and back fence (what fence is made of and looks like not noted)). Because she's there for un-chronicled reasons she discovers that squat landlord W.'s squat son Edgar's been growing cucumbers in the little strip of dark earth next to the fence. It's a startling and wonderful discovery for Monica to see dark green cucumber after dark green cucumber hanging heavily on bent-over vine-like stems along with yellow flowers of a surprising canary yellow.

3. In general, Monica reads The New York Times for the small articles on unusual events that are easy to overlook. An event "today", for example, catches her attention: ten thousand people attended an "American Legion Convention" in Philadelphia and out of that ten thousand "twenty-one died and ninety more were hospitalized". Mysteriously, no hotel employees were affected. The cause is also a mystery. Only this much is known: in all cases lungs became dangerously congested and in every case there was extreme fever, sometimes as high as 104. Also: some delirium and some kidney failure. The Times reports one gruesome detail: one woman's face swelled to "the size of three basketballs" while her husband, who'd had open heart surgery, was left unharmed.

4. Someone identified in Monica's hastily sketched notes as "Matty" or "Matthew" is skateboarding on ABC Street <— south, toward the boardwalk, and stops for a minute to find out what he always sees Monica doing with pen and paper and his curiosity about her gives her a chance to learn just a drop about skateboards. Matty says that, even though it's still possible to get a skateboard for as little as one dollar and he thinks the average price of a skateboard is [dollar amount already faded and illegible] and even though a good fiberglass board has to be at least $32, he has to spend a lot more because he needs special wheels "for slaloming" and they cost more than six-fifty a wheel! So, taking the special wheels into account, the least his skateboard costs is [amount also smudged or faded and impossible to decipher]. Monica hopes that someone with knowledge will one day be able to calculate the cost of Matty's skateboard.

5. Monica's brain needs to take a break.

She leans back out of the moment.

Leans back out of the long moment of editing August '76 and finds herself where she actually is, in December '76, in front of desk and typewriter, editing August notes.

She's in the cold Salem Avenue back yard with Bah-Wah, where she's been sitting for over an hour. What seems to have made it possible to endure the cold is the enormous mug of steaming and creamy coffee she's been sipping and warming herself with and that Bah-Wah, who's been able to overlook the coffee just to lap up some cream, has had her long muzzle in, deep in her old green-glazed pottery "DOG" bowl to the point of delirium. Coffee she's taking in along with warm cream is what's making Bah-Wah drunk.

When Monica and Bah-Wah give up and retreat inside, Monica continues working in a small back bedroom that has the same point of view (south) as Monica has through the small ABC Street red room dovecote window and the larger blue room windows (where there's only an old metal-top kitchen table that sometimes acts as a desk, most of the time only as kitchen table). Direction is the same, but the view from ABC Street's red and blue room windows is out from attic level and down on layer after layer of tile and shingle rooftops, while from the little Salem Avenue back bedroom's windows the view is straight out and up at trees and hedges from just-above-ground level.

"At 3:45 p.m. sun is burning" in the red tiles of a roof at a slight upward diagonal to the right (west) beyond neighbor-to-the-west's back yard while the sun is slowly fading from the Salem Avenue back yard itself through the long minutes that Monica watches.

Bare branches of tall poplar (in which yard — in which yard exactly — not noted) against frozen-pond-blue of sky only have enough sunlight left in them for a little shaking out by wind to sprinkle on thick green mass of pine boughs reaching over a fence, not quite able to touch the poplar's graceful trunk in a neighboring yard.

Monica leans forward again, brain ready to continue editing (typing) August notes.

Left out before and remembered "now"? or she's forgotten that she'd already remembered it and therefore is being forced to repeat it.

Let's see: Wanda Baer remembers a detail she thinks is "unimportant", yet still feels compelled to tell Monica: "Sabine smokes strong Phillip Morris cigarettes" because they remind her of French cigarettes more than any other American brand.

A picture postcard arrives from Monica's brother, Lowell, with a snowy, not-quite-urban image: "Scene d'Hiver, VIEUX MONTREAL, Place Jacques Cartier".

"Dear Monica and David,

"Here is the list of literary magazines at the bookstore where I purchased the Chicago Review: TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Va. Quarterly Review, Paris Review, Exile, Partisan Review, Chelsea, Poetry, Beloit Poetry, Sewanee, Michigan Quarterly, Yale Review, Mass. Review, Hudson, Confrontation, Antaeus, Quarterly Review of Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Antioch Review.

"I miss you very much.

"Love,

"Lowell."

And another card from Lowell (vacant spot in the Chronicle with no image or message chronicled) from Maine "on August 4".

On the same "perfect, early August day" (not noted whether August 4 or the day before) a letter arrives dated "July 30", from Ann Sue Hirshorn:

"Dear Monica and David,

"Sorry to be so slow in confirming your participation in 'Beyond the Page', to which we're greatly looking forward.

"In our annual grant request I've asked for a performance from you later in the season. So far it's all apocryphal but if something shakes loose I'll let you know.

"I'd appreciate knowing approximate footage for 'Space Novel. . .' and bio data. If you've any questions not covered in the enclosed invitation, please let me know. Looking forward to hearing from you."

Monica notes that the "enclosed invitation" is a xeroxed form dated "July 12" and decides to simply copy the text into the Chronicle:

"On behalf of the Poetry Center here in Phila. I'd like to invite you to participate in a show of visual poetry called 'Beyond the Page', Oct. 6-24, and to submit one or two works for inclusion. We're planning a festival format, including a reading by Jackson Maclow and a dance concert concurrent with the show. We'd like to have your work by Sept. 5. Please indicate the value for insurance etc."

"Still on August 4" Monica is puzzled by something scribbled in her rough notes: someone (not remembered or noted who) tells her that "Rebecca" is taking "amyl nitrate" and this un-chronicled or unknown collaborator seems to have detailed knowledge of "Rebecca"'s amyl nitrate use: "Rebecca splits the capsule in half" because it's generally used to "rush straight to the heart in case of a heart attack" and that would be much too strong for what Rebecca needs it for. Nothing in Monica's notes documenting what the unknown someone says about "Rebecca" indicates her age and that only adds to the mystery of Rebecca's identity. The only "Rebecca" Monica can think of is Jojo Coffin's friend, the aggressively intelligent, oddly feral and annoying "Rebecca Geiger", who lives around the corner on ABB Street and who often isn't seen on ABC Street for weeks or months because Jojo's way of retaliating for something sneaky Rebecca's done to her or little Rosamond is to ban her from showing her face on ABC Street.

Monica interrogates herself in her sketchy notes: if not Rebecca Geiger, then what other "Rebecca" would her unknown collaborator think would be familiar to her? The barely-legible marginal scribble seems to rule Rebecca Geiger out as the Rebecca taking half-a-capsule of "amyl nitrate": "while Rebecca's taking half an amyl nitrate capsule she's still smoking hash! and smoking hash and taking heart attack medication doesn't stop her from wanting to go to The Bog for some clams!"

What else on August 4?

Monica notes that it seems to her that she hasn't heard Greg Coffin practicing for weeks, more often than not a Bach fugue or toccata in place of scales — an essential sound of summer under skies like drifting blue clouds, clouds like puffs of blue-white sky, and she's missed it. Today the clean, precise notes of Greg's piano are above her and just to her left (south) like a vine or ladder she's invited to climb — but to what? to what exactly? And, more unusual, she hears what's unmistakably Jojo Coffin's voice, a spoon of childish sweetness dissolved in alert intelligence sharp as fresh lemonade, singing the melody of

another century wordlessly climbing the vine of her father's practice notes.

Regans' ancient and enormous elm and (less vividly from Monica's position behind the layered darkness of the Rhinebeck pine) every other tree on ABC Street is lit up with the soft green light of an August morning.

Light breezes in green light.

Space rocks and sways a little in an oceanic way that Monica has loved since childhood.

Monica spots another crowded marginal scribble about "Rebecca"'s sudden desire for "clams and beer" at The Bog, but finds it impossible to make out anything beyond that and gives up.

Squat little Mrs. landlord Minna W. is on her tiny front porch talking on the phone (twisted and curling wire stretching all the way from inside through the propped-open screen door) with her little black and white tv on, as usual, one leg propped up. Voice is loud as if she wants Monica to hear her clearly, telling a tale about the W. family dog (type of dog not remembered or never noted). Dog is in the hospital, she says, laughing, waiting for an operation on a blood clot just like her! Seems to love the idea that she's in the same condition as her dog: "maybe she needs a hysterectomy too!" And then they can spend the rest of the summer outside together, recuperating with the tv on and reading magazines and mystery novels while everyone waits on them for a change! Doesn't keep her from complaining that the dog's operation was too expensive: "more than a hundred dollars!"

Story about the dog gets repeated to Minna W.'s neighbor to the north, Josie (last name once-known-but-forgotten), just settled into a beach chair on her tiny front porch (identical to the W.'s) to sun herself a little. (Monica notes to herself that she knows that Josie and Minna are not good friends, just friendly enough to be a target for Minna W. to be able to repeat her dog story.)

Repeated once and likely repeated again.

This too: Monica notes that while listening to Minna W. and trying to quickly get down exactly what she's overhearing she's also been editing her March '76 Chronicle and sees that by chance she's using an unusually inky red felt-tipped pen to correct what was written in red ink in March. Both facts are odd, or doubly odd, because she rarely writes with a red pen. And this as well: because of apparent attraction of red ink to red ink she finds that she's scribbled notes about both Minna W.'s and Minna W.'s dog's "blood clots and blood vessels" in red ink.

Monica checks her rough notes to see if she's overheard anything else from Minna W.'s outdoor life lounging and recuperating, having little conversations on her porch comfortably padded for her by her children, but sees at once that the day and the Chronicle have turned their backs on August 4.

August 5 begins abruptly with Monica noting that "evidence that August 5 is hotter than August 4" is that unnatural heat has burned off blue: "burning white sky all the way from porch to ocean": notes also that she has to walk "all the way to the water" to feel a cool breeze. Ocean and its breezes stop right there precisely at water's edge and are burned away before they lay a finger on ABC Street.

Monica is in her green front studio (at what hour not noted) and the drilling of cicadas is so loud and universal, loud as jackhammers drilling sidewalks on every street in the neighborhood, that it almost-but-doesn't drown out Nancy Wattle's yelling at little Hank and Willy, sitting on the wide, brown-painted steps of the massive brown-and-ochre hacienda-style multiple dwelling, crying with faces in hands as if desperately trying to stop their lightbulb heads from their perpetual waggling.

It's a simple equation: Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle's familiar unhappy yelling = little Hank-and-Willy's familiar unhappy crying and head-waggling.

Monica hears Nancy's voice through the drilling of the cicadas and is drawn to investigate by going to the broken rods of the green studio's cheap rollup bamboo blinds: can usually see (can't help seeing) through one of the bright, broken-out spaces the Wattles' unhappy drama and she can't help wondering (not for the first time) what little Hank and Willy Wattle will remember 10, 20, 40 years later when they're trying to figure out why they're always secretly miserable no matter how they seem to be doing well.

Monica notes — glancing ahead through her scribbled sheets of scrap paper — that August 5 seems to be a day made up of broken fragments, not something that was once whole then smashed and put back together, but a little cosmos born in fragments that only acquires something like coherence once Monica writes it down and then it's held together forever by a couple of sheets of folded scrap paper.

Chronicle wonders (also not for the first time): which is less or more true?:

Chronicle records a world.

Chronicle makes a world.

1. Margaret Brennan's best friend Wendy and Wendy's older daughter, Karla, pass with quick strides heading North —> "on their way to Wendy's car". Sketched quickly and as if with definite knowledge, but later Monica wonders how — how exactly — she could know where Wendy and Karla were striding. Monica notes further: Wendy (an attractive woman with dark waves of hair around a strong profile, often seen in a form-fitting nurse's uniform, probably approaching middle age but willing herself to look younger) as always passes looking straight ahead toward her goal, while Karla's similarly strong and attractive profile (only more golden) is able to carry its interrogating gaze forward and also stare sideways toward Monica, as if aware that Monica's observing her and inwardly challenging Monica's reasons for doing it. "Why are you looking at me? Why? Why exactly?" in a strikingly alert but swiveling profile.

2. Minna W.'s little black-and-white tv is on (which soap opera Minna's addicted to not noted), but Minna W.'s not on her porch and Monica wonders if her absence has anything to do with the telephone that's been ringing on-and-off all day.

3. Welcome pulses of ocean coolness are trying to shift massive blocks of heat that keep settling down on ABC Street, but are only intermittently successful, like wind that can't quite get around the bulky right angles of an apartment building.

4. Monica sees (and can't remember having seen before) un-named mother and son who live in the diagonally distant L-shaped corner brick house where the father seems to have just died, exiting together through the door on the short ABC-Street-facing leg of the "L": door opens onto the tiny porch where, before the father died, the son could be found just about every day impassively leafing through the oversized sheets of his newspaper as if over-medicated.

Unfamiliar sight of mother and son together.

Also unfamiliar: presence of another man, a little younger than the son, walking side-by-side and in an intimate, comfortable way with the son that (Monica speculates) makes him "an unknown brother" or "an unknown companion".

What else about mother and son? Monica would like to explain but can't, how, from her great distance, she's able to easily see a set of car keys in the son's hand. Glint of light on brass may explain it, but Monica doesn't think so.

Seconds later the father's beautifully washed-and-polished Caddy or Lincoln is easing out of the under-the-house garage and down the gentle grade of the short driveway with a quick swing to the curb.

Mother and unknown brother or companion get in.

Son, now in father's place behind the wheel, now the driver of the family, pulls sharply away toward a fast left turn on Coast Boulevard (west).

Isolated, free-floating scrap-paper note, unattached to even an exploded angle of a mini-story, says that Kitty calls to ask Monica if she's at all worried about "the mysterious illness in Philadelphia": 140 dead at an American Legion Convention and no shred of an explanation! Unless Monica considers this loony-sounding theory (no idea where she heard or read it) an explanation: theory according to "a respected micro-biologist" whose name she can't remember is that there's a potential relationship between "the mysterious Philadelphia disease and the recent Mars landing"! Samples of Martian soil containing "previously unknown microbes" were retrieved and brought back to Earth for study. Why is that idea so much more appealing than any simple, down-to-earth explanation? Does Monica have an opinion? What is it, does Monica think, in human nature that prefers such gooey sundaes of horseshit over a simple vanilla ice cream cone of fact?

Monica and David together try to figure out why there was a block party on ABC Street "last night": sound of celebration the "whole length of the street" from Coast Boulevard and even beyond to Babette-&-Grete's or beyond Babette-&-Grete's all the way across the boardwalk to the beach. Monica says that she isn't sure about this either: music and masses of human voices out-of-doors the sound of the midpoint of summer? or, like the sound of cicadas "the other night", the last exaggerated firing of sun's engines and therefore end-of-summer sound "out of order" in the middle-of-summer. They agree that something about the sound of the block party last night seemed odd and out of place and because of that the atmosphere of ABC Street felt warped.

Monica wonders, once again not for the first time, why kind and sweet-faced Nancy Wattle is so miserably irritable.

For example: she asks herself if this is evidence of something: "last night", during the unexplained block party, Nancy Wattle didn't take little Hank and Willy down to sidewalk and gutter to celebrate with most or all of their neighbors. What she did, while couples and families partied below, was carry her big parrot-type tropical bird in its big cage to the porch and hang it from one of the permanent ceiling hooks for potted plants, as if more concerned that the bird enjoy the block party than little Hank and Willy. And paying attention to Nancy Wattle's tropical bird draws Monica's attention to the skinny, near-dead avocado plant that's been on the porch "all summer" and that Nancy tends to lovingly every day: no or next-to-no leaves lower down on the stem and only a few yellow leaves drooping at the top.

Fat Agnes, in tight royal blue slacks and flowered royal-blue-and-white short sleeved blouse, is hurrying along ABC Street —> north, searching for Lou the rolypoly mailman so she can intercept him and get the mail before he delivers it to the other tenants in the sprawling sway-backed, mustard-colored multiple-dwelling called (bitterly or not) the "Shangri-La", where she and her husband have their doorless custodians' cubbyhole in the basement, next to the boiler.

While Monica is sketching a quick note about Fat Agnes, Lon Gurion materializes at her elbow, demanding her attention as he always does. Also as always, Monica can tell that he's trying to look over her shoulder to see what, what exactly, she's writing. He's holding a little dog in his arms and Monica can tell that he feels the need to tell her again what he's told her before: that the dog is his daughter's. "One of my daughter's famous Papillons!" She's visiting — so this would be a perfect time for them to meet! She came down from Connecticut hoping to swim, but he thinks it's too windy and dangerous. Doesn't Monica agree that the ocean — "the grey Atlantic" — is bound to be whipped up and dangerous when the wind's this strong? Goes on a lot longer, but the Chronicle refuses to record it.

Anything else on the same August day (date uncertain)? Monica notes that though it's true that it's too wildly windy, therefore too dangerous, to swim, she and David decide to bring David's buttery grilled cheese sandwiches, thermoses of iced coffee and pastry from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop (which pastry exactly — perfect cheese, blueberry, cherry or prune Danish, superior jelly donuts — crisp and raspberry-jelly-filled, fried crullers studded with cinnamon sugar, chocolate or cinnamon sticks, black-and-whites, choice between dark chocolate fudge brownies or lighter textured cocoa-flavored brownies with a crisp surface and walnuts etc. etc. — not noted) to the windy and empty beach.

Because they're picnicking on the beach they run into Nora Salerno (Marian Woolsey's sister/Nancy St. Cloud's mother): she has two fragments of stories she thinks would interest Monica:

1. Nora's sister Marian is friendly with Sylvia Greengrass, Monica's directly-across-the-street neighbor, so she (Marian/Nora) can confirm for a fact that Enos Greengrass is dead and Marian thinks, but isn't 100% certain, that Sylvia said "sometime before August 5".

2. Nora Salerno says that she's only on the beach despite "the wild weather" because she wanted to bathe her feet in salt water before her appointment with the foot doctor. And (this is the bit of information she thinks will interest Monica for that thing she's always writing): she wonders if Monica's noticed that there's a man who's started living on the beach and that he's building himself a pretty nice little house or shelter up a few blocks near where the boardwalk ends. She thinks it's put together out of boards he's probably stolen from a construction site and driftwood and other things, but Monica should probably go check it out for herself.

Monica decides to follow Nora Salerno's advice and walks on the boardwalk to the western end of ABF Street, then back one block through soft sand to ABE Street. On a windy but sunny August day (date not noted) a man (no description recorded) is busy cooking a meal at about 3 p.m. outside his makeshift home in the shadow of the lifeguard's chair: not isolated like a hermit, but deliberately with bathers-on-blankets indifferently all around him as if he's a familiar presence not even worth their curiosity.

Monica sees: a lamp (type of lamp not noted)

a "daybed" or cot of some kind (no details noted)

undescribed man "cooking a meal" in

a battered aluminum pot settled down in

wadded piles of yellowed newspaper in a shallow, scooped-out hollow of sand

already-cooked spaghetti (Monica is able to make out "BUITONI" on a torn-open box) being heated in the battered pot with tomato sauce (Monica can't read the brand name on the red-labeled tin or tins).

Wind makes flames shoot out (direction not noted) so far that arrows of fire seem detached from their source and about to jump to neighboring blankets.

Monica watches long enough to see a small table unfolded and set with ceramic dishes and two glasses of red wine (no wine bottle visible), as if he's expecting a guest — a big new tin of CRISCO to spread on bread like butter.

Back on the porch (in a rocker in the southwest corner) Monica waves back to Laurel Lenehan's passing "hello!" and little string of information called out while Laurel walks quickly north —>: says that she really has next-to-nothing to tell Monica but wants to tell her anyway that today's Ambrose Junior's birthday! and hers is this coming Saturday! and, not that it matters, but Finnley's is on September fourth!

Laurel passes quickly, as if weightless and windblown like a leaf and skipping with a child's happiness, possibly (Monica guesses) on her way to surprise Ambrose Junior.

Laurel's replaced almost at once on the sidewalk in front of the spot where Monica's working by Joshua and Johanna Coffin, also passing quickly and also skipping, but headed <— south toward home (next door) or beyond home to Grete-&-Babette's near beach and boardwalk. Both of them are sucking on lollipops and Monica wonders if that alone is enough to explain their skipping happiness.

Jojo is of course the one who notices that Monica is there and calls out, almost laughing, that Monica has to try one of these lollipops!: they have bubble gum in the middle! that you only get to when you lick off all the cherry!

A little later (how much later exactly not noted) Jojo returns alone and sits down next to Monica to fill her in, she says, on a few things she's sure Monica would like to know. For example: does Monica know (how could she?) that her father's middle name is Montgomery? Disappoints her when she finds out that Monica has no middle name. Jojo says that she always thought that everyone has a middle name because there's a rule about it. Her mother and father have middle names and so does she and so do Joshua and Rosamond: even though she has to admit that the story of her middle name is complicated and confusing. She forgets what her middle name was originally. Now it's "Susannah" and this is the weird way it happened: she (Jojo) wasn't in love with her original middle name. Then her friend "Susannah" got sick of that name and for some reason made everyone call her "Kathy". Her family went along with it and she really became "Kathy". That means that she threw the name "Susannah" away. It's a beautiful name and it was going wasted. "Kathy" didn't like it and threw it in the garbage like a dirty napkin, where anyone could rescue it and use it. She always liked the way it sounded — much better than "Kathy"!, so she decided to claim it even though her parents said (and they're not completely wrong!) that "Johanna Susannah" could be "too much of a good thing". What does Monica think? Monica's opinion about words really matters, so she might be willing to re-think it if Monica says it sounds stupid.

What else? She's found out that everyone's mispronouncing "Johanna". "Jojo" is ok and she's never wanted to be called "Jo" because of Little Women, but "Johanna" was her grandmother's idea because of the Swiss woman who wrote Heidi. It's meant to be pronounced in the Swiss way, "Yohanna"!, but no one ever does or ever will, so maybe the whole idea was pretty stupid.

Jojo and Monica both see a package being delivered next door, but Jojo's also spotted Joshua rushing out of the house to intercept Lou, the rolypoly mailman, before he has a chance to climb the short flight of stone front steps under the Coffins' cracked orange plastic awning. She (Jojo) quickly calculates that she can't possibly get to Lou before Joshua, but dashes over anyway to at least get a look at the package before it disappears indoors. Dashes back at once to report excitedly to Monica that the package is addressed to "GREGORY MONTGOMERY COFFIN"! and (she memorized the rest for Monica!) it's from "AROUND THE WORLD COFFEE" — confusing because somewhere else on the package she's sure she also saw "NESCAFE"! So how does that make sense?

One last thing before she has to go:

Monica probably hasn't noticed that she sometimes calls her father "Greg, honey". He doesn't mind. No one seems to mind. In fact, everyone laughs and so does her father. This too and it's something she's really sick of: people are always telling her how "bright" she is. She knows they mean well and that it's a good thing to be "bright", but isn't it also stupid to tell someone that? If you're so bright how would you already not know it yourself? How would your parents and your grandmother not know it and say it so many times that you know it and believe it yourself? She can tell that she's different from her friends, even the ones she loves. That's obvious to her. But so what? Doesn't Monica agree that something can be good and true, but stupid and annoying at the same time? The only one who's never said it to her is her other grandmother, her mother's mother who'd rather get boiled for soup than say anything nice to anyone. She probably thinks it, but if she ever let it get from her brain to her tongue and then jump off her tongue and come out of her mouth her face might not be as sour and ugly as it is! She could pickle all the vegetables in the supermarket just by looking at them! Kisses her (Jojo) on the head once in a while, but she's never-ever seen her kiss or hug her own daughter (her (Jojo's) mother) and she's sure that, in secret, that makes her mother unhappy.

Nothing else to report so Jojo leaves just as Dominick Ianni's red-and-green truck pulls up across the way and Dominick starts mowing Sylvia Greengrass' two little walled-in lawn squares.

Without knowing why — why exactly — Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself: at what point she (or it) realized that there is no story. That is: what's ordinarily meant by the word "story" is itself a fiction. In reality, as soon as a story begins to get told a digression veers off from it. And, while the first digression from the original story is still being chronicled, another digression veers off from that. And so on. It's the natural way of the never-ending horizontal narration that Monica loves. Stories in other stories and other stories in that. Stories crossing uninvited through stories on their way to something else. Magnetic clustering of stories: "the magnetic principle" of chronicling over panoramic duration. Events with at least one thing in common are attracted to one another in a material way, creating little clusters that Monica's always enjoyed cataloguing. What's seen and chronicled out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye. The true way stories exist, open to chance, interrupted by accident, porous, intruded on, distracted, oddly magnetic, attracted to what's ambient around them, the overheard and the-lives-of-others always leaking into what we thought was the story. What others lazily call "realism" just another set of conventions that pays no attention to the impossibly multiple reality occurring around and through the tightly-focused groove it's trekking through. In the same way, it seems to Monica, what's celebrated as "imagination" seems to have its gaze aimed above the infinite surface of the world.

Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself (when? when exactly?) another question:

Did the Chronicle take its present shape because Monica reached these conclusions? Or is the Chronicle simply the inevitable result of Monica's dedication to an impossible task/a surprising pleasure/a task and pleasure that became an addiction: the Chronicle the true narrative of her existence on Earth: what interests her, what she paid attention to in what crossed her path. At first, never without pen and paper and, later, never without her little tape recorders.

On Sunday August 8 Ellen Grace is sitting with Monica on the ABC Street front porch. It's been raining heavily all weekend and by now everything is dripping to the degree that each dripping thing seems like the source of rain: broad, dark green density of the Rhinebeck pine, for example, shakes out like a wet dog with any little wind gust. Wet dog that doesn't like being a wet dog and keeps trying to get rid of itself by violently shaking out its shaggy boughs.

Sparkling drops flying away from violent shaking of Rhinebeck pine boughs seem like fresh rainfall. Dripping of eaves and gutters so continuous drops appear linked into chains, streams and even sheets, giving wide open porch and its vistas a room-like intimacy that's good for solitary reading or for talking.

Ellen Grace, as always, has a lot to share. So many stories that Monica is forced to try to memorize stories and fragments-of-stories (can't take notes the way she likes to) that, later, she has to try to persuade herself add up to something coherent.

Lets' see: Ellen Grace's old friend Linda (one of her reasons for visiting New York) was surprised to hear from Leila X. "Leila X is a very poor communicator" and, in fact, Linda hadn't heard from her "in years". Linda's feeling is that Leila calling "out of the blue and for no apparent reason" is in some roundabout way connected to, maybe even motivated by, Ellen Grace's visit with Monica: Linda thinks (but she (Ellen Grace) finds it screwy) that for Leila X Monica is somehow at the center of everything! Does that make any sense to Monica? Monica can only answer that if there's any truth to it it's too strange for her to figure out, because she never hears from Leila either. What bothers her (Monica) is that Leila may have called for an important reason that Linda never found out because she asked the wrong questions. Or asked no questions at all.

Ellen Grace agrees that Linda was the wrong one to call if Leila X had something urgent to share: Linda learned nothing, but of course felt that she and Leila X "had a really good conversation": learned nothing, but was satisfied because "they made plans to see each other soon" — something she had to know was never going to happen! Monica knows that Leila won't call again and Linda's going to forget about Leila before tomorrow even starts.

What else?

Ellen Grace says that she obviously didn't come to New York to sit alone in a hotel room so, because Linda is so undependable, so always-busy with her own stuff, she's been doing a lot of things with her other old friend, Sylvia, who she's nowhere near as close to, but who always seems to be available. She's in restaurants all the time: with Sylvia and, when she does see Linda, it's always in an expensive restaurant:

expensive French restaurant called "La Biblioteque" (classic French fine dining surrounded by shelves of handsome leather-bound volumes)

"Szechuan Taste" (upscale Chinese restaurant)

"Wonderful Greek restaurant" (name forgotten by Ellen Grace) "on 15th Street"

restaurant Ellen Grace calls "Z's" (not known or not noted if "Z's" is the accurate name or if Ellen Grace can't remember or can't pronounce a long name beginning with "Z": nature of food also not described or not remembered).

Longer list of restaurants Chronicle isn't interested in recording.

Ellen Grace thinks it's relevant for Monica to know (she knows that Monica's memorizing so she can get everything down later!) that Linda works for a major magazine publisher and one of their magazines is a trade magazine called "Restaurant Insider", so she (Linda) can eat (and her friends can eat with her) at just about any restaurant and never pay a cent.

Result of all this insane restaurant-going is that she's having such a good time in New York she's dreading going back to Santa Fe! Just thinking about it puts her to sleep! They're all the sunbaked frozen dead out there waiting for some lab technician to jump start them in the next century. Monica probably doesn't know it because she lives this New York life all the time, but being awake and alive is a fragile, temporary state. Being dead is the normal state, being alive a tiny interruption. She hates to admit it, but James has to be included: this is how she's started thinking of him: one more frozen corpse waiting for her to come home and get plugged back into the pod next to him. Then James called! and she immediately started missing him, so now there's a plan for him to come to New York on the 22nd.

Rain and conversation.

Let's see: even though New York — particularly the coast of New York where ABC Street is — was supposed to be hit directly with the full force of a "Category 3" hurricane and was only hit indirectly, at an angle that sheared off a powerful wedge of the storm, Monica notes that wind sounds exactly like the wind of a blizzard driving snow horizontally at 60-80 miles an hour past her rattling third story ABC Street dormer windows and more secure ground floor Salem Avenue windows.

Projected "Category 3" hurricane tears through Connecticut and leaves shredded trees on Coast Boulevard.

Still windy at 8 a.m. with rain blowing out of trees and drowning everything below with a fresh downpour.

At 8 p.m. Monica's able to go for a long walk and can't inhale the sweet atmosphere of trees and water deeply enough: wet green world atomized inside the long tunnel of the streets. Monica can't get enough of it. Breathes deeply then breathes deeply again. She'd be happy if the tunnel went on forever and she could keep walking and inhaling for the long green length of an atomized boulevard, atomized world: passing through it passing through her.

Monica knows: not many such green tunnels in a lifetime.

Monica notes that Ellen Grace looks better than she looked "the last time she visited": white slacks and a black, scoop-neck top. Ellen Grace says that she made them herself. She'd stopped knitting and sewing, two things she's always liked to do and that she's good at, but now she's started again and that may be one of the reasons she's feeling more alive. This too!: after all these years she's figured out that if you stick to black, white and grey nobody in Manhattan can take one look and know that you're from out-of-town!

Let's see, what else?: Ellen Grace says that she has a long story to tell Monica. Or, not exactly a "story". It's just a question of remembering and then trying to report accurately to Monica a conversation she had with Valerie in Schramm's, a German restaurant in Santa Fe she and Valerie both love and where there are deep, dark booths that make it easy to talk. Reason they met for their long meal together at Schramm's is that she thinks that she (Ellen Grace) had said or done something that made Valerie angry to a degree she felt she had to fix before she left for New York. She has no memory of what — what exactly — she could have said or done to get Valerie that angry, but can only assume it had something to do with Valerie's husband Isaac's beloved older sister, Naomi, because they spent a surprising amount of time talking about her and she (Ellen Grace) learned a lot about Naomi that she never knew.

Just as Ellen Grace is about to try to tell the story of her conversation with Valerie in a dark Schramm's booth, Lou, the rolypoly mailman, arrives in his dripping hooded rain slicker and reaches up from the bottom of the porch steps to hand Monica a fat, rubber-band-bound wad of all the mail for the house and Monica, with a glance, sees that, for the first time, a letter is addressed to "Yvonne Szarka", not "Yvonne Wilding".

Seconds after Lou wheels his cart north —>, Twins pass twinning (also headed north —>):

rumbling basso, rough and profound:

"So far I haven't seen no so-called 'apartment'! Haven't seen nothin'! When I seen something then . . . !"

Seems to Monica that every time the twin who speaks says "seen", it sounds slightly different, but she's not sure she can chronicle the difference:

"I haven't seeeennn"

"seeinnnhhh nothin'"

"when I sheenh"

What else about Twins twinning as they pass slowly, as always?

Deep, hoarse and rumbling: "What's wrong with this!?" While he's pulling a big blue handkerchief out of his pants pocket he seems to be pointing toward the cracked and weedy driveway between the massive cocoa shingle multiple dwelling where Monica has her little house-atop-the-house and Greg-&-Lena's massive cracked white stucco and orange brick.

Twin who seems to make himself understood through silence rattles an old shopping bag as if that's an excited utterance.

Monica hears a deep and amplified man's television voice, clearly audible from somewhere nearby (direction uncertain) delivering still one more update about the "mysterious illness" spreading at an American Legion Convention in Philadelphia. Lily Romero, paler than whipped butter, looking beautiful but ghostly in a long, white dressing gown, calls out to Monica as if she'd been searching the stormy street for someone to talk to:

"Looks like I'll be giving birth in the middle of a fucking hurricane!"

Now that she's drawn Monica's attention, Monica can see that Lily's standing in the open doorway of Lena-&-Greg's first floor front porch ping-pong room and that's where a tv is on, loud enough to be clearly audible.

Monica and Ellen Grace decide to head to Salem Avenue, where Ellen Grace will be able to tell Monica her Schramm's tale and her tale-inside-that-tale about Valerie's sister-in-law Naomi while David makes everyone breakfast.

While David starts to make two large, 10" baked pancakes (his improvement, developed over years, on traditional "German" or "Dutch Baby" pancake recipes) for Monica, Ellen Grace and himself in old cast iron pans he found by chance in the Salem Avenue basement and loves to use in Salem Avenue's big, farmhouse-style kitchen with its full size gas stovetop and oven (a relief from the tiny and ancient range where he has to use all his ingenuity to make meals for Monica and himself in her ABC Street three-room attic house-atop-the-house) Monica is haunted by two (at least two) baked pancake memories.

Let's see: just as Ellen Grace starts talking (telling her tale about a long conversation with her sister in Santa Fe) Monica's time-muddling sensation that they've shared David's re-invented baked pancake with Ellen Grace before is re-enforced by Ellen Grace's voice telling stories, in a similar way to her voice telling stories when they sat at a makeshift table in the Salem Avenue back yard with Ellen Grace earlier in the summer. Monica's mind's writing-before-writing writes this sentence with the certainty of fact: "Ellen Grace loves David's baked pancake so much that, after a few bites, she can't help exclaiming 'this might be the best thing I ever ate!'".

It's always been one of Monica's favorite things (most frequent request for David to make for breakfast!) and Monica and David both know that Bah-Wah also loves it more than anything:

eggy

buttery

crunchy

sweet

lemony

other kind of sweetness added by each pancake-eater with favorite preserves ("Tiptree 'Little Scarlet' Strawberry Preserves" recommended by David; "Tiptree Blueberry" or "Seedless Blackberry" preferred by Monica; no preserves added for Bah-Wah)

coffee (none for Bah-Wah) or tea

and what else?

Bah-Wah can never get enough pancake no matter how generous Monica and David are (as Monica carves out big wedges for herself and David from the confectioners'-sugar-sweetened baked brown unpredictable folded mountain ranges and golden-and-eggy-butter-and-lemony valleys of the serving-platter-sized pancake)

long tongue

black lips

wolf's strong jaws and teeth deliberately chewing and savoring baked egg-flour-milk-and-butter with a little dusting of confectioners' sugar

chewing as if she'd like to get at an essence of flavor that keeps getting swallowed away because she's chewing

happy, smiling, almost-drooling

and Bah-Wah's pleasure in chewing, licking, savoring, chasing flavor only amplifies Monica-&-David's.

Fuzzy face at a level just below the table surface, licking butter and sugar off its muzzle, just about weeping with pleasure.

Fuzzy muzzle Monica loves to kiss and that smells like popcorn after it's licked itself clean of pancake.

Writing-before-writing is taken up with pancake memories that are alive and active in her brain, distracting her from the Santa Fe story Ellen Grace has almost begun telling and Monica notes, as if writing it down with pen and paper, that sharing David's baked pancake with David and Bah-Wah is always one of life's special pleasures-beyond-words, whether Ellen Grace or anyone else is there.

Monica is distracted from Ellen Grace's story by this uncertain memory too: she thinks but isn't 100% sure that "a while ago" (how long ago — how long ago exactly — she has no idea) she asked David to write down, in infinite detail — for her Chronicle — the recipe for his subtle but radical revision of a "Dutch Baby" with all the little techniques he developed over time to make sure the pancake always turned out exactly the way Monica likes it.

David is so utterly absorbed in his careful pancake-making for at least an hour/hour-and-a-half that he won't be listening in any way that actually = hearing and Ellen Grace can tell Monica a long tale about her conversation with her older sister Valerie in Schramm's German Grill in Santa Fe about Valerie's husband Isaac's beloved older sister Naomi and about other things, starting with something Ellen Grace may have said to Valerie about Naomi that Valerie found offensive, but that Ellen Grace doesn't remember saying at all.

Let's see:

1) Isaac is from "a poor, immigrant family", a middle child who worshiped his "brilliant and beautiful" older sister, Naomi.

2) Ellen Grace was "only twelve years old" when Valerie met and married Isaac. She remembers how startlingly beautiful and intelligent Isaac's sister Naomi was and she remembers that it confused her when she was told that Naomi wasn't a professor or something like that, she was a file clerk! Even at that age she was disappointed and asked questions, but no one ever made it make sense.

3) Ellen Grace says that she'd like to tell Monica what she knows of Naomi's story in some sort of chronological or at least logical order without digressing, if that's the right word for what always seem to happen when you try to tell a straightforward story, but she's just started and realizes that it would be wrong — it would be false — to try to tell Naomi's story without Monica knowing at least some of Isaac's story because their stories are, at important points in their lives, tangled together. For example: both Naomi and Isaac were "brilliant" in high school. Naomi was valedictorian and Isaac's brilliance led to a full four year scholarship to MIT.

Isaac never got to MIT because his father (she (Ellen Grace) doesn't know exactly how) blocked it. Insisted that, instead of MIT, Isaac go to work for him in his business (exact nature of father's business not known or not remembered by Ellen Grace or not chronicled by Monica), but Ellen Grace knows that Isaac's father wanted him to start at the very bottom, doing unskilled labor. Exactly at that moment Isaac was drafted. Being drafted during the Viet Nam war was every boy's nightmare, something to escape, but Isaac welcomed it with relief. She remembers what Isaac said clearly: "the best thing that ever happened to me!" and then later, afterward: "the Army saved my life!".

4) Isaac left secretly. His mother didn't know where he was or what happened to him for six months and, even after the war, when he was discharged, he didn't come home. He stayed away for another year (doing what he never told her or Valerie or she (Ellen Grace) and Valerie don't remember or only remember a muddle). Adding it all up, Isaac had to have been away for at least four years!, long enough to come home a different person — someone his father couldn't intimidate.

5) When Isaac left (and his only regret when he slipped away was that he was leaving his brilliant sister behind, a loss he never recovered from) Naomi seemed ok, dazzling in every way, as always. But when he came back he found her "unrecognizable". The change was so horrifying he couldn't stop yelling at his mother for not taking care of her. "What happened to Naomi?! What did you do to my sister!?" and so on. But his mother's answers were bland and uncomprehending. Looked at him as if he was crazy. "What 'happened' to your sister is that nothing happened to your sister! She's the same happy girl she always was! Can't you see that?" Etc. As if there really was nothing wrong.

Isaac asked her (Ellen Grace) this question later and she still can't answer it: was his mother consciously, deliberately lying to his face? Or at some point does lying to yourself become delusion? Can Monica answer that so she can stop obsessing about it?

Ellen Grace says that this is important too. Needs to make it clear — before she says anything else — that she knows nothing from her own direct experience. Whatever she says comes from Valerie and most of what Valerie knows comes from Isaac. And maybe a little of what she (Ellen Grace) knows comes directly from Isaac without Valerie in the middle, but, no matter how you examine it, it's passed through too many minds, too many mouths, to be 100% reliable.

She can, if Monica's interested, give a short list of the things Isaac saw or found out about Naomi that horrified him and made him hate his parents. But — if David's pancake is ready (and the aroma from the oven is driving her crazy!) — she thinks she could use a break.

David's baked pancake (recipe somewhere earlier in the Chronicle), David's strong coffee (black for himself, with milk added for Ellen Grace, with lots of heavy cream warmed and added by David for Monica), strawberry and blueberry or blackberry preserves and a few wedges of lemon Monica likes to squeeze on the baked-on dusting of confectioners' sugar all set out on the table while they continue to talk a little even though their minds are inhaling deeply.

Ellen Grace suddenly stops eating and starts talking again with a burst of energy: needs to know what Monica thinks: is it impossible to get away from your family? She doesn't know of — can't imagine — anyone doing a better job of transcending their horrible family than Isaac! Family did everything it could, as if it was their job — more than their job — their mission — the purpose of their existence — to pull him into the family's garbage and ruin his life. It took Isaac's superhuman willpower, but he did manage to free himself from them. He accomplished things and somehow he even overcame heredity and was a kind and generous person. But still. . . . Still what? What exactly? In some way — and she needs to know if Monica thinks she's wrong — the family doesn't go away. They keep returning, more and more disguised, as if he's haunted by demons who hate him just for getting away.

Does this make any sense to Monica? Knows she's doing a bad job of telling the story of Isaac's family, but is it clear even in her mangled version how his family won't let go? How persistent and demonic they are? How they still want to pull him in somehow. . . ? Of course there's more, but she'd rather shut up and listen to what Monica has to say.

All at once and without warning rain starts beating on the East wall of the big farmhouse kitchen with its two tall windows and David says that the sudden heavy rain reminds him that he heard earlier that another hurricane is headed their way: hit North Carolina "yesterday" and then — "around midnight" — weather started to get wild on Long Island in:

West Hampton

Fire Island

Islip

Jones Beach

Long Island Sound

and also in

Bridgeport, Connecticut.

David adds: "it's not very far away. . . so this is probably it right here" . . . and with the tips of the fingers of one hand reaches out to touch the East wall of the house where rain can be heard and felt.

Ellen Grace says that she's finished eating, refreshed by David's pancake in a way regular, everyday human food doesn't usually refresh her or make her want to drool and lick her own face to get every last bit of flavor like Bah-Wah, who obviously knows what she's doing. She's ready to finish her story about Isaac and Naomi and tell Monica some things she never knew about Jill, if Monica can start listening to it while she's still enjoying the pancake that David's obviously invented just for her.

Ellen Grace, refreshed by David's pancake and strong coffee, is ready to continue her "mangled and muddled" re-telling of her older sister Valerie's husband Isaac's and his older sister Naomi's story:

6. Before Isaac left for the Army, Naomi had a wonderful, unusual talent that he and everyone who knew Naomi marveled at: a talent for sewing that seemed bound to lead to designing. In a different family, Isaac is certain, Naomi — with her innate sense of fashion — would inevitably have become a designer. For example, she liked to rip everyday, boring clothing apart and re-combine the elements into surprising constructions that didn't at all hint at where they came from. Before he left what Naomi was able to do with clothing was brilliant and beautiful and she wasn't even twenty!

By the time Isaac came back four years later Naomi was ripping apart the expensive dresses her mother bought her and sewing the ripped-up scraps together into ugly messes. Seemed to Isaac (and to Valerie) that it had more to do with destroying the expensive clothing her mother chose for her than with creating anything.

Isaac has never recovered from the heartbreak and the unsolved mystery of what happened to Naomi while he was away.

7. Not documented in Monica's notes that she asked Ellen Grace to help her keep the chronology straight, but she has a nagging sense while chronicling that everything's out of order. For example: she sees that she's written as if it's a certainty that Isaac met and fell in love with Ellen Grace's sister Valerie at about the same time as he discovered what had happened to Naomi and was crushed by it. Notes also say that it was "love at first sight" and that the emotion was "overwhelming". Monica's only certain that this much is true (because Ellen Grace has said it repeatedly over many years and with some envy): Isaac's love for Valerie was extraordinary and just as galling to Ellen Grace's/Valerie's mother today as it was then, because she's always been convinced (and said it directly to Valerie forever!) that no worthwhile man would ever be interested in her (Valerie) because of her cerebral palsy and deformed body!

8. This too: a difficult question for Monica to ask Ellen Grace, but once she's thought it she finds it impossible not to say it: does Ellen Grace think there's a link between Isaac's love for his sister (made even more intense by his heartbreak over whatever it is that happened to her while he was away) and his instant love for Valerie. To put it directly: could Valerie's cerebral palsy and her mother's bizarre attitude about it have struck the already heartbroken spot in Isaac left by Naomi's mysterious malady? Has a thought like that ever crossed Ellen Grace's mind?

Ellen Grace's answer is that it hadn't, but probably should have, because only Isaac is capable of that sort of emotion.

Other stories, other events intervene, but Monica makes the difficult decision not to follow the order of what's chronicled (that is, the natural order of the Chronicle's horizontal storytelling of things as they pass and as they occur) in order to simply get on with Ellen Grace's long story about Isaac and Naomi as if she's telling it in the coherent and chronological way stories don't occur in nature. The fundamental question of what = realism in relation to narrative as it actually occurs — interrupted, digressed from, drowned out, disappearing and re-appearing with other narratives demanding to be told and written down — is something Monica's sure she's tried to talk about somewhere else.

Same moment repeated by Monica in a slightly different way or a different moment altogether when Ellen Grace says (or says one more time, but with more emphasis) that she's finally finished eating, "refreshed" by David's pancake in a way that eating doesn't usually affect her — though not quite grinning and drooling and licking her own face like Bah-Wah — and ready to finish her pretzeled and knotted story about Naomi. Says that there's a whole other story — or just a lot of bits of random information — about her old, annoying high school friend Jill (the one who's sex-obsessed to the point she manages to make her pornographic tales so endless and repetitive they're boring!). She's learned since the last time she talked about her (Jill) that Monica might find them worth chronicling, but Jill's story's probably for another time (when they're not still tasting and lost in the aroma of David's baked pancake!).

Let's see:

9. Not noted (or not remembered by Ellen Grace, therefore not possible to be told by Monica) how much time passes in Naomi's life and in the life of Naomi's family before Naomi is finally diagnosed as schizophrenic and reluctantly committed to a hospital (in what state not told or not noted) by Naomi's mother, who's still convinced that everyone else is wrong and Naomi "just has to be left alone".

10. Also no clear sense from Ellen Grace (therefore no sense in Monica's rough notes, sketched quickly by Monica when Ellen Grace leaves) how much time Naomi spent in the hospital, what — what exactly — happens to her there or what her life is like when she's released. Monica would love to have some clue to the truth of Naomi's life after the hospital, but there's nothing — one of the absolute blanks that punch holes in all real storytelling.

11. The next moment in Ellen Grace's Naomi story is the instant when Naomi "shows up in Santa Fe" (not known or not remembered by Ellen Grace — therefore another blank and another hole in her story — what city Naomi was living in before she "arrived" in Santa Fe).

Shows up in Santa Fe "in desperate need of money".

More torment for Isaac, who wants to help, but has no money himself.

Isaac is working hard, of course (doing what not remembered, not said or not noted), but earns "next to nothing". Circumstances force Isaac and Valerie to live in her (Valerie's and Ellen Grace's) parents' house, where they pay "an absurdly high rent" that's using up all their savings. If Monica remembers, they already have a child, two-or-three-year-old Sissy (the niece she (Ellen Grace) is so close to now!). So their own financial situation is desperate when Naomi shows up out of the blue begging for money.

This is the moment — this is the moment exactly — when her (Ellen Grace's) parents decide that it's urgent to raise Valerie and Isaac's rent! Maybe the idea is to drive Valerie crazy and it works. Valerie scuttles around the house — not exactly human, more like an insect — screaming "I can't! I can't! I can't do it! I can't do it any more!" and "Sons of bitches know we can't do it! Can't pay it and can't go anywhere — so we're stuck in this hell hole with these sons of bitches forever!". Maybe not exactly those words, Ellen Grace says, but close enough. Finally, Valerie wears herself out, gets into bed, covers herself and stops talking completely.

Naomi arrives just at that moment, begging everyone for money. Seems to give Valerie new, crazy energy. Flies out of the bedroom like one of those beetles that surprise and scare you by flying, just so she and Naomi can compete to find out who's crazier.

Somehow dance their way into the kitchen: the place where, in her family, everyone goes to kill each other.

While Valerie and Naomi are shrieking at each other and throwing dishes, her mother has the inspiration that this is the right time to cook a nice dinner for everyone and gets busy at the stove, stirring something with her giant ladle in her biggest stainless stockpot.

Father's at the table, reading the paper same as any other night.

What happens next should bring everything to an end, but doesn't. Valerie grabs Naomi by the shoulders (she's not sure it wasn't by the neck!) and wrestles her out the front door. She remembers Valerie screaming "and don't ever come back!", but she can't swear if that's accurate or even true.

What comes next? Probably when her mother loses it completely and tries (unsuccessfully) to push Valerie out the same front door!

Next, her mother and father seem to have secretly decided to show a united front and tell Valerie that "tonight's craziness" is the "last straw" and that they (Valerie and Isaac) have to leave. Father says "I have to think about your mother's health" and so on.

Isaac arrives just in time to get an earful and, without missing a beat, tells Valerie to throw what they need in a bag so they can leave. Scoops up little Sissy and within minutes they're outside in the 120° Santa Fe heat.

Then what? Let's see: take off in their car — where to she (Ellen Grace) can't imagine. Survive until someone reminds Isaac that he's eligible for a no-interest G.I. loan and they're able to buy a house. Doesn't take long to discover that it's actually cheaper to be happy in their own small house than it was to be miserable under her parents' far grander roof. They're still living in the same simple house and so far, over twelve years, total cost has been ten thousand dollars!

One other stupid little story after she asks David for a little more of his unbelievably strong but delicious coffee:

Her old friend Linda's been very good to her since she arrived for a visit, but she still can't forgive her for refusing to meet her at Monica's place on ABC Street. Refused to come because "I never do anything in the rain"! Can Monica imagine being friendly with someone who talks like that? Even worse: she thinks being mad at Linda, and then having to look for Monica's place alone, got her muddled and that's why she managed to get lost — in this neighborhood she knows so well! True, she made the decision to stay on the bus past ABC Street because all of a sudden — after all these years without it, having to settle for what New Mexicans think is pizza — she had to have a slice of New York pizza! So she went all the way to ABF Street, the shopping street where there's always been — always will be — at least two crappy pizza places.

Then she decided to walk back on the boardwalk to be near the ocean and of course turned off on the wrong street!

Sat on the front porch of 176 ABB Street for at least an hour before an old lady came out and tried to convince her that no "Monica" lived there.

Took her forever to shake the nightmare sensation that she really didn't know where she was and to figure out that Monica's house was actually just one block away.

So she holds that nightmare against Linda and she also doesn't like her discovery, now that she's here in New York, that Linda exaggerated and actually seems to have no friends. The only one she's met is one Iranian woman, beautiful but awful, named something Linda pronounces as "Minnow", who's more of a colleague than a friend: works at a fashion magazine called "Gander", if that makes any sense. Of course Minnow is obsessed with clothing like Linda — so they have that in common — but she's much cruder and talks in an ugly way Linda doesn't. When they all met for dinner the first words out of Minnow's mouth were: "Oh! Excuse me, I have to be honest! Your makeup is awful! Let's go to the bathroom and I'll see if I can make you look human!" Criticized Linda for not noticing how terrible she (Ellen Grace) looks. "How could you let your friend walk around Manhattan looking like such an ugly tourist! 'the Ugly American'!" and then directly to her (Ellen Grace): "You look like you just got off the bus! Wake up! You're in New York! Don't you want to have at least one adventure before you go back to Idaho? Don't you want to at least get laid?!"

And Minnow is the only friend of Linda's that she's met.

Not clear in Monica's notes whether Ellen Grace continues her long family story on the same day (date not noted) and in the same place (Salem Avenue house's big farmhouse kitchen still fragrant with David's baked pancake and strong coffee) or if they've walked a slightly zigzag route back to ABC Street.

Let's see: Ellen Grace says that "for years" Valerie wondered "what could have happened to Naomi" from the second she pushed Naomi out her (Valerie's) parents' front door and then, little by little, she started to accept the likelihood that they'd never see Naomi again — until, just a few months ago, the subject came up again one night when she (Ellen Grace) and James were having dinner with Isaac and Valerie. Someone (no memory who) says that he or she's starting to have guilty thoughts about Naomi's "disappearance". "It's a mystery that we're not trying to solve and why we're doing that is also a mystery." And someone else suggested hiring a detective and that triggered James to realize that, because of his de-bugging business, he had a lot of contact with private detectives! Isaac was, surprisingly, the only one against it: argued that they needed to respect Naomi's desire to keep her distance from the family. "If she's started a new life, all we can do is the only thing this family's ever been good at and fuck her up. Let's leave the poor girl alone!"

So the three of them went ahead without him. They gave a few of James' detectives whatever information they had about Naomi with her photograph. Within hours they'd found her!

There Naomi was, right in Santa Fe, working in the heart of the Capitol District with "a very good job" in the New Mexico State Library.

They faced a difficult question: what to do next.

Now that they knew for sure that Naomi was ok — not one of the vanished-and-forgotten — they could (probably should) have done what Isaac wanted and just leave her alone. Wasn't Isaac's point exactly that Naomi'd stayed away for a reason? And that they needed to be as afraid as she was that the slightest contact with this family could send her into a tailspin and right back into the hospital. Valerie seemed to feel something like that and got cold feet. Refused to have any part of anything else they did — so she (Ellen Grace) and her mother decided to meet secretly to make plans. She can't — maybe Monica can — explain their compulsion to go on. Doesn't seem completely rational to her now, but it did then. Detective reported that Naomi was alive and well, but she wasn't convinced. Needed to see it for herself. What, what exactly, does that mean? And how is it possible that she became a conspirator with her mother of all people — not her father, the one she trusted. Even worse: secret meetings behind her father's back! Because her mother said: "If we let him know what we're doing, he'll find a way to ruin everything!"

Just to refresh Monica's memory about her mother and father: her parents are a horrible mismatch: they never see eye-to-eye about anything, as if they belong to different species. Another way to put it: her father's alive in all the ways her mother isn't and vice versa. She's sure (without really knowing why she's sure), for example, that her father is by far more interested in sex. It's obvious to her that even now, at his age, he has an eye for attractive women, still flirts, still perks up, still comes alive and acts like a younger man in their presence. It's charming, pathetic or repulsive, depending on your point of view. And she's always known (without at all knowing how) that there's some skeleton, some story, something no one talks about, that's like a body that's buried in the family's back yard. Everyone knows it's there and everyone avoids it. It has something to do with her father and another woman and she knows that it happened (what "it" is, what it is exactly, she has no idea!) before she was born.

It's just as obvious (but harder to describe) that her mother could take sex or leave it. Eating a good meal — even cooking a good meal — interests her much more. Going to a new restaurant, going to the movies, anything outside the house. That's the way her mother's more alive than her father. Life for him seems to mean going to work, coming home for a meal cooked by her mother, then hiding himself in one of his corners, in one of "his" chairs.

The terrible thing for both of them is that they never-ever get what they want. Never go out together, so they've basically been stuck together at home, each in his/her corner with that thing buried in the yard.

There's this crazy fact too: her father's phobic about eating anyone's food but his wife's! He's always been certain that the way he'll die is by being poisoned in a restaurant.

So, between the two of them, they make life stink.

Let's see: this is how the conspiracy began: she and her mother had to get together just to figure out what to do, because they had no idea. Her first thought was to at least get together in a restaurant, to give her mother that pleasure. So they met in Schramm's German Grill, where there are deep booths good for private conversations. First move was obvious: go to the Capitol District, find a strategic vantage point in the State Library and hang out hoping to catch sight of Naomi.

She (Ellen Grace) was at the information desk in the main lobby asking questions when Naomi walked right past her without any sign of recognition!

Just like that, there Naomi was after fourteen years! And the moment was nothing. Then Naomi seemed to spot her (Ellen Grace's) mother, even though she was standing in the background: recognized her — her of all people — and came toward them both as if she was happy to see them.

The only one she would never forgive, she said, was Valerie.

"I'll never forget the look of hatred on her face when she shoved me out the door!"

And she did have some reproaches for the whole family for making her miss the chance to watch her niece, Sissy, grow up.

And that was about it. You'd think she'd remember more, but she doesn't.

What else, if anything, does Ellen Grace have to say about Naomi?

Months pass and nothing happens. She (Ellen Grace) hoped Naomi would get in touch with one of them, but that hasn't happened, as if Naomi'd decided to just slip back into invisibility.

So: the only result of their (her and her mother's) detective work was going to be a few minutes in the rotunda of the State Library building, until, one day, Valerie and her mother decided to go shopping together and her mother got carried away and stupidly suggested making the day more fun by having lunch in Schramm's Grill because "it's a great place to talk". Valerie was struck by the strangeness of that without being able to put a finger on it.

Mother never went out! That was one of her big complaints! So how could she know anything about Schramm's or anyplace else?!

Gnawed at her all day.

Had to get to the bottom of it and on the way home pulled off onto the shoulder and grilled her mother till she crumbled and spilled the whole Naomi story, including what Naomi said about Valerie's "unforgivable look of hatred".

Result of course is that Valerie hasn't spoken to her mother since that fun lunch-and-shopping-day together. And the result of that is that the whole family's in a state of near-craziness. Surprisingly (to her!) the one she's most worried about is her mother!, who seems to have destroyed herself with her own stupidity. This must be what they mean when they say: "one second of stupidity is all it takes". Can't seem to forgive herself for her stupid sentence that opened the door to confessing everything.

Father told her (Ellen Grace) that "the other night" he found Gerty (Monica's sure it's the first time she's ever heard Ellen Grace's mother's name) sneaking out the front door with a suitcase into the 120° heat as if she was running away from home! Didn't get far, but injured her leg and now she's in bed. And the pathos of it all got to her father and he's depressed. Stopped going to work and he's just moping around the house in his bathrobe.

How many days pass unrecorded? It seems unlikely to Monica (rough notes are uncertain) that they're still on Salem Avenue, talking in the kitchen. Ellen Grace isn't finished telling her long string of tales that may also be one tale that doesn't want to end. Tale could get so long, in fact, that the Chronicle will refuse to listen because it's thirsty for something else.

As likely as anything else: Ellen Grace continues to tell her Santa Fe tale, in the same place and time, in the big Salem Avenue kitchen with Bah-Wah still plaintively asking for more scraps of the sweet and eggy, browned and puffed-up parts of David's baked pancake. Or she continues, but somewhere else (Salem Avenue back yard or ABC Street front porch) on another day.

Chronicle insists that Monica sketch in, no matter how quickly, something about "August 10" — if nothing else, that its warm breezes are thick, sluggish and heavy in air that smells inky. A little later quickly sketched notes say "inky breezes". And: there's "the smell of ink on paper" in the air.

Notes speculate that it's only children who know this odd, inky smell, as much a feeling on the skin as an aroma. Monica wonders if the children of ABC Street (none of them visible "now") are experiencing it and it's through them that she's anticipating everything that signals end-of-summer: playing in the street and the mind already able to smell the old ink-stained wood of a school desk.

End of summer aroma-memory lingers all through life.

First notes written on ruled lines of new notebook with freshly inky pen.

Out-of-doors playtime of summer will always be heavenly for Monica and what follows it nothing but the ghostly absence of the beautiful surface of the world.

Rough sound of an electric saw having trouble eating its way through resistant wood seems to end the moment.

Sky is slate blue, clouds a few eraser strokes swept across it.

"Last night", while Monica was typing (editing), in red bedroom, blue kitchen or front (west-facing) green studio not noted, wild ocean wind kept forcing her ancient dormer windows open, making them scream a little with the tortured-wood noises Monica hates. David tries to solve the problem for her, but can't. Chronicle notes that "today" Monica has the windows cranked all the way open to let the aroma of inky breezes in.

Ellen Grace continues her endless tale: one segmented tale or each segment its own tale that begins again, "now" with an incident from her long marriage to Elliot.

Ellen Grace says that she's thought a lot — questioned herself a lot — about why her awful marriage to Elliot was allowed to go on so long. Another way: she keeps asking herself what made her tolerate Elliot's abuse.

For example: it's no exaggeration to say that she's the reason Elliot has his MBA. Here are some of the things she did for him and she trusts Monica to decide if what she thinks about it is fair:

She did all Elliot's research. That's right! His job as an accountant required tons of boring research! And, because she was the one who did the boring research, she was the one who knew everything. So he was able to argue that it was logical — it was necessary — for her to write his endless stupid reports also!

So: she did all his research and wrote all his reports and that's how Elliot got his MBA.

Let's see: there's more.

Elliot hated "wasting money". Having to spend money buying lunch at work every day, for example, was a big issue. So she (Ellen Grace) had to make and pack his lunch. And lunch had to be "interesting"! There were rules: no simple tuna salad sandwich and nothing "sloppy" or "smelly".

Making his lunch became expected. Another of her "jobs" — even though her days were as long and tiring as his. And then she was expected to make a hot and "interesting" dinner when she got home from work.

What was Elliot's job? To go to work and then lift his butt out of his favorite chair and sit down at the table and eat. And to yell at her if he found something "wrong" with what she'd set in front of him.

What else?

She was more or less Elliot's employee. He controlled everything. She didn't have her own bank account and she turned over every paycheck to him so he could dole out to her whatever amount he calculated she could get by on.

She gives herself this much credit: she made noises. It wasn't 100% total acquiescence. But she wants to be honest with Monica and, in the end, she always gave in.

The whole time of her fourteen year marriage to Elliot she never signed a check! She never learned how to sign a check. Check-signing was Elliot's province.

She never even set foot in a bank.

What she was allowed to do was type Elliot's tax returns. And, if she was slow — if her typing didn't seem fast enough to him — he blew up. Had trouble keeping his head from exploding!

"You had all night, and that's all you did?!" etc. etc.

So the question remains: what led her to marry a man like that? And, once she saw who he was, what made her stay? And, maybe more important — even though she did eventually get out of it — how much of that horrible ability — the ability to adapt to that — is still in her? Can Monica answer that crucial question?

Monica agrees that the ability to adapt to even the worst conditions — said to be a human virtue — explains the persistence of evil.

Ellen Grace contemplates for a minute before she says that there's more of course, if Monica's sure she wants her to go on.

For example: has she ever told Monica the story of their (herself (Ellen Grace), her mother! and Elliot's) trip to Boston? She thinks that Monica knows — because it was true even then, when she and Monica were in high school together — that she was in love with the idea of "New England" without ever really knowing why. If anything, her love affair with New England became more intense after Elliot decided that they were moving to New Mexico. As soon as she got there she started having fantasies about "the Berkshires" and Cape Cod and the Green Mountains and the coast of Maine, trying to get Elliot (who was interested in nothing!) interested.

Right now, if Monica asked her, she couldn't say what made him give in. Maybe he needed a vacation himself and one place was as good as another. Of course she had to agree to his terms. Flying was "too expensive", so they'd drive. And the long car trip itself would count as part of the vacation: therefore time in New England would be short. He'd decide the "itinerary" and no arguing or complaining about where they went or how much time they spent wherever he decided to go. For example: she'd dreamed of exploring historic Boston, but had to agree to "get through it" quickly! because Elliot's plan for the whole vacation was to get through it as fast as possible and get back to work.

Her job: to read the map and act as Elliot's guide to Boston while he drove: an impossible job because Boston isn't laid out as a numbered grid. Nothing to guide you. No simple sequences of numbers to rely on as if there's a logical structure. Many streets not numbered at all, just named, so, to find your way around easily, you already have to know the city. And, in case you haven't figured out that you're a tourist and you're lost, there are dozens — hundreds — of dead ends to remind you.

Naturally her directions kept getting them lost. Every wrong turn got Elliot madder. No convincing him it wasn't her fault. He looked ready to kill.

"You're an idiot!"

"All you have to do is look at the map, stupid, and tell me where to turn!"

Tried to get him to pull into a gas station for directions or to just pull over and ask someone, but no fun in that: he might find out the truth and have to stop calling her stupid. Instead of asking for directions, he just kept getting angrier.

Finally, when she was completely turned around and had no idea which way to go, she just guessed and said "Turn here!". And of course it was the wrong turn and Elliot lost his mind. Didn't say anything. Just reached over and socked her in the mouth.

She tasted blood.

Thought he'd knocked some teeth out.

She couldn't talk and went numb and paralyzed.

"Maybe now you'll pay attention!"

Nose was bleeding and so was her mouth.

What surprised her most was her mother.

Her mother jumped forward from the back seat and punched Elliot in the face as hard as she could.

"If you ever lay a hand on my daughter again . . . !"

She'd never seen her mother act like a mother before and it moved her. Or, more than "moved", it shocked her. Shocked by what she'd allowed herself to become: so much of a victim that it made her mother protect her for the first time in her life and that shocked her even more than the fact that the man she'd been married to for fourteen years, who she worried about making interesting sandwiches for, had just socked her in the face.

Elliot tried to keep driving, as if they were still tourists sightseeing, searching for hard-to-find landmarks, but her mother wouldn't let him. She made him pull over and she (Ellen Grace) and her mother took a taxi back to the hotel.

Her mother pressed a bag of ice on her jaw, which was already turning an ugly blackish purple and swelling up. The shock of all that was what finally started to end the marriage. Her mother mothering her made her feel her own nauseating pathos. Now, of course, it's easy for her to say that the punch was in some way liberating. The anger that was hidden and lurking in him, the violence she could always sense but that never happened, was at least some of what made her knuckle under. And now the animal had finally stopped snarling and jumped out of its cave and attacked her! No going back from the reality of that, even for her.

At that moment, her mother was 10,000% on her side.

Now, of course, how many years later, it's a different story. Elliot is her mother's son, her baby boy and the "incident" in Boston never happened. If anything did happen, it was no big deal. She (Ellen Grace) exaggerates everything. It was frustrating getting lost all the time. She (Ellen Grace) for some reason couldn't read the Boston street map! Elliot just got irritated the way men do. And now her (Ellen Grace's) memory's embroidered a little meaningless nothing into a tragic opera.

For her mother the divorce was more of a sin than anything Elliot ever did.

She has to assume that her mother didn't experience what she did: she can't erase from her cells the knowledge that she saw in Elliot's face that he really could hate her enough to kill her: that it's actually possible for a man to kill a woman — or just for Elliot to kill her — because she told him to make a few wrong turns. And, because of that, she can't stop remembering all the times she was so afraid of Elliot that she stopped herself from doing something she was dying to do. For example: Monica might remember the time she cancelled her plans to come back to New York for their high school reunion. But Monica may not know that she cancelled because Elliot got mad and called it "a stupid waste of time!". "Reunions are stupid and your high school reunion is even more stupid!" Kept using the word "stupid" as if it had a pleasant taste.

"You're stupid!"

"Your plan is stupid!"

"How'd I ever get stuck with such a stupid fool?!"

Etc., etc.

And she was scared and intimidated and didn't go.

What she needs to know is: "How did I get this way: what happened to me? Is it all my parents' fault? Or is it just something missing in my nature?" If Monica could answer that — if Monica could solve that basic riddle — maybe that would somehow feel like a resolution.

Pink-faced Finnley Lenehan calls out with real anguish: "I didn't get there in time! I'm too slow! I couldn't stop it! A cat is killing a bird! I know that beautiful bird! I heard it screaming! And the feathers are all bloody!"

Finnley calms down a little and says that Monica probably knows the bird too and she probably knows the horrible cat who's always lurking around here: ran off down the driveway and he's probably trying to swallow the bird in private, in the high weeds behind the garage.

Two unfamiliar dogs pass, one after the other:

Beautiful charcoal-shading-to-slate-grey hound (rough notes say "bloodhound", but "later", while editing, Monica realizes that she actually has no idea what breed of hound the dark and silky grey dog is) trots by with open blood red mouth.

Irish Setter ambles by: wonderful shaggy coat of what seems to Monica an unusual dark "burnt orange", more than one shade darker than the darkest orange peel and, even harder to name than darkest "burnt orange" in sunlight, the shift when the unhurried strolling of the Irish Setter passes through shadow toward an odd red not quite "brick" and not exactly "cayenne" either — the red of a mineral that makes beautiful streaks in a rock with silica in it that Monica will someday kick, walking in late afternoon on hilly little Rock City Road near a pond she loves because of all the turtles in it.

Monica stays alert to see which human figure from her local image world follows the strolling dogs, but no one appears.

It puzzles Monica a little that Ellen Grace hasn't left. She (Ellen Grace) has to get back to Manhattan and Monica wonders why she seems to be lingering, as if there's still something urgent to tell. Starts by saying that she wants to know if Monica feels like trying to solve a puzzle: "Why am I a completely different person here in New York than I am at home in Santa Fe?" Knows that she's dreading turning back into that other lifeless person. But why? why would that happen? Why should setting foot in Santa Fe automatically turn her into a seedpod? She's examined it from every angle and can't solve it so (hoping it helps) here's the shorthand version of what she's come up with:

To begin with: she wasn't divorced from Elliot and married to James long before James confessed that he knew that some of his assumptions were wrong: he'd assumed that the bizarre lethargy she (Ellen Grace) is famous for would disappear as soon as she got out from under Elliot's thumb. That her life with Elliot explained everything. And that as soon as she wasn't living like a prisoner — as soon as she was free and happy — she'd be as full of life as he saw her at work. But the truth is that she's just as tired now as she was then!

She thinks that this is what James saw: one night, after dinner, she got dizzy and had to lie down to keep from falling. That made her tell James about all the times, when she was still married to Elliot, that she had something like "fainting spells" at work. Once she fell and they had to call the company nurse. For Elliot it was just another excuse to yell and insult her.

He has to deal with lazy employees like her every day, he said. Anything to get out of work! Laziness and stupidity make the world go round, but not here! Not here it won't! Over his dead body! On and on like that, as if she wasn't actually lying there on the couch in front of him and couldn't even sit up!

"Why can't people like you just learn to do their jobs!" etc. etc.

James' reaction to her story surprised her and she loves and respects James for that. He said — speaking for himself — "it's time to stop thinking about that bastard". Just take it as a given that anything that comes out of Elliot's mouth is crap and look for a logical, medical explanation for what's been a problem all her life.

He took her to the hospital, where they made her think seriously for the first time about her family history and about her own lifelong habits, all the invisible stuff she'd never examined.

For example: what's called "a sweet tooth" is really — in her case — more like a lust for sugar. Next time they have coffee together Monica (if she pays attention) will be shocked by how many lumps she puts in! Lump after lump, as if nothing can satisfy her!

After a few simple blood tests they were able to warn her that, for her, sugar, coffee and chocolate are poison!

This too: does Monica have any memory of her mother's Barricini obsession? Her Ebinger's Bakery obsession? House never-never without its Deluxe Barricini Assortment and two or three Ebinger's cakes (always-always a dark-chocolate-iced layer cake with either white or chocolate cake and chocolate or mocha buttercream filling). And usually a giant box of Ebinger's dark-chocolate-covered donuts also!

Does Monica remember any of that?

Probably her warmest memory (not fair to say her only warm memory) of times she was alone and sort of cuddly with her mother is this: her mother would compulsively go through the giant Barricini assortment watching a movie on tv late at night and she (Ellen Grace) would curl up next to her on the carpet and help her finish it! She's not sure if she's making it up, but in her memory her mother sometimes even put her hand on her head in an affectionate way, like you'd do with a pet spaniel. And they sometimes went through an Ebinger's chocolate layer cake like that too! The tests James made them give her in the hospital showed that the end result of all those warm, cuddly memories is "low blood sugar"!

No one knows for sure whether that explains everything: why she's been the way she's been all her life (her famous lethargy, a sort of spiritual laziness) or even why — right now! — she has all the energy in the world here in New York to stand in line at the Museum of Natural History for "Laserium" at the Hayden Planetarium, but when she's home in Santa Fe she always has to lie down until dinner at her mother's is served. Then has to lie down again when dinner's over.

Never stands if she can sit.

Never sits if she can stretch out.

And not just at her mother's: same thing happens at Valerie's.

Everybody's used to it: it's just considered "the way Ellen Grace is", the way she's always been.

This too: even after lying down before and after dinner she sleeps the sleep of the dead and can't get up in the morning.

So — doesn't Monica agree? — there has to be more to it than "low blood sugar"!

Finnley Lenehan returns to talk to Monica, still in agony about the bird he saw in the cat's mouth. What if the bird's still alive? Shouldn't they be looking for it? But does Monica think that's just wishful thinking? What's realistic is that the cat probably ran off with the bird so it could chew it slowly, without being bothered, then swallowed the rest of it: bones, feathers and all — the way a snake swallows all kinds of fat little animals. . . .

Let's see: Chronicle notes that Ellen Grace still hasn't left. She continues to linger to tell Monica more tales. For example: Monica records (scribbling quickly some of what Ellen Grace says and also noting that she's memorizing as she's listening) a long tale about Ellen Grace's sex-obsessed high school friend, Jill. One tale or a string of loosely connected mini-tales.

Chronicle admits to itself that, even though Monica's interested enough to try to record or memorize the Jill-tale Ellen Grace is hurrying to unburden herself of before she has to leave for Manhattan and then "not long from now" fly back to Santa Fe, the Chronicle doesn't want it.

Not in the mood for a tale about Jill?

Tired of listening to Ellen Grace's voice?

Sense that Ellen Grace's tale is over?

Or, for more purely Chronicle reasons, because, with Monica having to pay close attention to every word of Ellen Grace's so her (Monica's) memory can do the unique task it's trained itself for, she's had to make herself blind and deaf to all the events and not-quite-events on ABC Street walking, rolling and whizzing by.

Now the Chronicle has to admit to itself that it feels a hunger for ABC Street's passing-and-floating but real physical reality (Monica's chosen way to give her instant-by-instant life on earth another life) and an equal desire not to have to pay attention to another long tale whose only existence is in the mind.

Monica wonders why — writing in her familiar spot behind the not-quite-opaque screen of the Rhinebeck pine (wide in an irregular way, a ragged pyramid that climbs almost up to Monica's green studio windows, dark in its layered density but with little, unpredictable windows scattered among its shaggy boughs) — she's thinking about Margaret and Daisy Brennan when there's nothing sketched on her folded sheets of scrap paper about either Daisy or Margaret having passed. For no apparent reason Monica finds herself thinking about little Daisy Brennan (beautiful, delicate to the point of near-transparency as the tiny, winged beings Victorian children seem to have casually found living on and in forest flowers) and wondering about the rheumatic fever and life-threatening heart disease that have colored Daisy and Margaret Brennan's lives since Daisy was (exact age unknown or not remembered) until now, when Daisy is (according to Margaret) "cured". Course of little Daisy's illness seems to Monica (thinking about it for no reason) to oddly mimic the course of Margaret's difficult, sometimes violent marriage to Daisy's father, Ernie. Margaret left Ernie a long time ago (less, if Monica remembers accurately, for his violence than his drinking), but had trouble keeping him from showing up without warning. Now Ernie's apparently been sober for a long time and Margaret's found a way to keep him from showing up. And solving the Ernie problem coincides with Daisy's cure.

Let's see: Monica, continuing to think all the way onto another sheet of scrap paper, feels the need to add, as a kind of footnote, that she's aware while she's writing quickly — in a superficial way — about Margaret and Ernie that telling "the Margaret and Ernie story" simply as a story of an abusive marriage is bound to leave out all sorts of nuances and contradictions. For example, even at his worst, Ernie seems to always have been kind and protective toward Daisy, adding another mysterious layer of emotion to all the others Daisy keeps folded in her near-transparent little being.

Not noted when, when exactly, Wanda Baer stops by Monica's writing/observation-post spot on the porch to share a few broken fragments of stories that were likely fragments to begin with.

She (Wanda Baer) and Sabine are having a struggle — a really profound struggle — in bed, because — she's sure Monica agrees — you can't and shouldn't go against your true and fundamental nature. You can't be that false and live any kind of real life, can you? Even worse: if you go against your real nature just to please someone else. And even worse than that if you bend and twist yourself like some sort of mushy dough to fit what you only think (you never really know) fits the other person's nature!

And that's what Sabine has always been trying to get her to do! The most horrible part is (she hates to admit it, but has to if she's going to be even 50% honest!) that the deepest part of her self is tempted to do it. Tempted, but can't do it without splitting into two different people who hate each other!

In a nutshell: Sabine is used to being what she calls "the active sexual partner". But what does that actually mean? No one is allowed to touch Sabine in a sexual way. In her whole long (she doesn't remember how many years exactly) relationship with Valentina she (Sabine) "did everything" to Valentina. And that's the way (according to Sabine) they both liked it.

The problem of course is that she (Wanda) isn't Valentina. She's more like Sabine. She wants — needs — to make love to Sabine and Sabine won't allow it! She's forbidden to be herself and she can't tolerate that. Even conversation about it is forbidden. When she tries to get Sabine to see that she (Sabine), of all people, should understand, because what gives each of them pleasure is very similar, she tells her to shut up. Or she gives the same stupid, pig-headed answer: "I've already let you do a lot more than anyone else!" It's the "let you do" that drives her crazy! Like everything's up to Sabine! And she should just be grateful for anything Sabine gives her permission to do!

Doesn't Monica agree that that's intolerable? She knows that she can't do it. Just can't do it. If she allows herself to be that pliant everything (little as it is!) that she's gained would be lost. Might as well never have left home. Might as well have stayed under Oscar Kurtz's well-manicured thumb, like poor, crushed little Cindy!

Wants Monica to explain to her why everything always has to be so complicated!

"Can't there ever be anything like simple happiness?"

Practically in tears.

There's this stupid fact too (not that it matters!): something's wrong — has always been wrong, since her weird childhood? — with Sabine's back. Slipped disc or something worse. She (Sabine) is always in a lot of pain. That's true — and everyone knows about it — it's not exactly a secret — let's say Sabine makes the fact of her constant pain known — so everyone, including herself of course, is always twisting their own mushy dough to accommodate Sabine and her back pain!

Red berries have begun to pop up on shrubs here and there along ABC Street and on other streets — avenues and cross-streets — but Monica has no idea how to identify them. She'd love to call them by their right name, but can't. They resemble Holly berries, but Monica finds that unlikely in the early days of August and she'd love it if someone — no matter how long from "now" — could supply an accurate answer.

Let's see: Monica notes that the aftermath of last week's hurricane is: mild breezes and unpredictable thunderstorms and therefore: wet streets that never seem able to dry out.

Mind goes back to thinking about red berries and wonders if it would be accurate to call them a sign of autumn-before-autumn or even winter-before-winter.

Quickly-sketched notes don't explain why Monica decides to make a list or two (or more) of strings of related events that are already beginning to slip away un-chronicled.

PARTIAL LIST OF THOSE WHO'VE VISITED ABC STREET IN

THE SPRING/SUMMER OF '76 WHO'D NEVER VISITED ABC

STREET BEFORE

Margo (brought by Mikki or attached

herself to Mikki to get to Monica)

Ellen Grace

Edgar Zacharias

Sid Van (brought in tow by Edgar Zacharias)

Linda (old friend of Ellen Grace's)

Someone or more than one forgotten by

Monica, but who? who exactly?

THOSE MONICA DOESN'T THINK SHE'S CHRONICLED BEFORE, BUT

WHO'VE BEEN DESCRIBED AT LENGTH BY ELLEN GRACE,

WANDA BAER AND OTHERS

Jill (Ellen Grace's sex-obsessed high school friend

who followed Ellen Grace to Santa Fe and now

lives in Ellen Grace's neighborhood, persistently

telling Ellen Grace tales she'd rather not hear)

Valerie (Ellen Grace's older sister)

Isaac (Valerie's husband)

Naomi (Isaac's beloved older sister)

Ellen Grace's mother (name forgotten, not chronicled

or never known)

Sissy (Ellen Grace's niece and good friend,

Valerie & Isaac's daughter)

Elliot (Ellen Grace's first husband)

James (Ellen Grace's husband "now")

How many other chronicled and later forgotten?

NAMES ("CHARACTERS") THAT USED TO APPEAR REGULARLY IN

THE CHRONICLE THAT HAVE DISAPPEARED (THAT IS, HAVE

SELDOM POPPED UP IN THE SPRING/SUMMER OF '76)

Kitty (Monica's sister)

Hap ("Happy") Huntington Blank (Kitty's husband)

Bill Kropotkin

Nelly X (married to Bill Kropotkin but never-ever

called "Nelly Kropotkin" by Nelly herself,

Bill, Monica or anyone else)

Tina (Martina) Lima

Nancy St. Cloud

Others (remembered only in the sense that Monica

knows she's forgotten them)

NAMES ("CHARACTERS" ) THAT CONTINUE TO APPEAR

REGULARLY IN THE SPRING/SUMMER OF '76

Grete Forest

Andy Forest

Nicole Renard

Greg Coffin

Lena Coffin

Johanna (Jojo) Coffin

Joshua Coffin

Rosamond Coffin

Laurel Lenehan

Finnley Lenehan

Riley Liman

Yvonne Wilding

Al Szarka

Squat landlord W., Minna W. and W. family

Others (many others) that can be added by

scanning the "Cast of Characters" to see

who Monica's overlooked

Let's see: Monica notes (trying to avoid making another list) "dozens of loose ends" — particles of particles of fragments of fragmentary events — that pass quickly along the horizontal plane of ABC Street, a straight path from ocean to bay, or sift down glistening or barely visible through space and then through the Regans' enormous Elm, shaggy, moss-green pyramid of the Rhinebeck pine and through all the other trees and shrubs along the length of ABC Street.

Particles of particles of fragmentary events that happen and that are real, but that aren't remembered even by those creating them. (Life in general disappears while it's happening.)

Why, why exactly, Monica chooses to chronicle this disappearing particle and not that particle is a question almost as fundamental as Monica's reasons for chronicling at all and seems to her similar to questions about the internal logic of brushstrokes and sequences of notes, instant when a gesture is beginning to know its place in the pattern that doesn't want to show its face.

For example: another particle of what Wanda Baer said about Sabine drifts back and lands on Monica's folded sheets of lavender scrap paper: one more thing that's getting in the way of "a real relationship" with Sabine, Wanda says, is that it's obvious (or should be obvious) to her that Sabine's still in love with — obsessed with — Valentina and probably always will be! She (Wanda) reminds Monica that Sabine and Valentina were together "for at least twelve years" and wonders if Monica agrees that twelve years together is too long for anyone to just shake off, no matter how convincing their bullshit about it is.

There's this also: Sabine's one miscalculation, Wanda thinks, is probably her assumption that she (Wanda) cares enough to try to hold on! She thinks she knows herself well enough (if Monica disagrees she should tell her!) to be able to say honestly that in the end, if Sabine keeps being a pain in the ass, she (Wanda) will walk away.

2. Riley Liman stops by Monica's half-hidden writing spot behind the Rhinebeck pine for only a few seconds to share his ecstasy about the cicadas. Has Monica ever heard them make this much noise?! They try to figure out together whether the volume and intensity of the cicadas drilling in the leaves signals the "apex of summer", the point of summer's pyramid, and that "from now on" it goes over the edge and starts to slide into some other, ambiguous between-season season.

3. Greg Coffin is making his existence felt by trying out what new, not-exactly-piano-like sounds are possible with his synthesizer and the musical sounds drift across the short width of the cracked and weedy driveway, from the side-and-front-facing windows of Greg-&-Lena's second floor kitchen/living room/practice studio/dining room to Monica's immediate south. Monica knows (how, how exactly, she has no idea) that moments like this — experimenting in private with no attempt to please an audience, without even trying to make familiar sounds or even to be coherent — are the only times when Greg Coffin finds anything like happiness in his music.

4. Kitty calls for the first time "in a long time" (how long, how long exactly, not noted or not known) to tell Monica that "Hap is ill" and that she resents it! To be honest, she can't quite figure out why she feels the way she does. It's a weird emotion, right? How? how can you resent someone for being ill? Can't possibly be Happy's fault can it? She's hoping that Monica can see it a little more objectively than she can. Here's a strange wrinkle that Monica may want to factor in: it's not only Hap, but Hap's father who's ill. Father has (Monica's uncertain if Kitty says "has" or "has for a long time") "only 30% of normal kidney function" (nature of kidney disease not told or not noted).

Let's see: Monica searches her hastily sketched scrap paper notes for more about Kitty and Hap and finds only this: Kitty calls again "later" (same day or next day not clear in Monica's hard-to-read scrawl) to say that "Happy's still sick" and that it's still a mystery and still a pain in the ass. Fever is certainly real: 100 in the morning, 102 by evening. But what else, aside from the fever, does Happy's illness consist of? Can you call it an "illness" if it's nothing but a fever? Does Monica think it's possible — and this is a serious question — knowing all the crazy shit humans are capable of — that Happy's fever could be self-induced? Knows all Happy's crap inside and out and upside down. And Monica has no idea how much crap there is, because Happy's an expert at concealing it, especially from someone like Monica who, for whatever reason, he wants to impress. . . . In her opinion Hap's illness is just one more manifestation of his lifelong lowgrade depression. Somehow he's able to hide it while at the same time letting you know it's there! It's been there forever, way before she (Kitty) ever met him, longer than the longest monster Anaconda they're always trying to photograph in the Amazon, showing only little lengths of itself so no one's ever been able to be sure of what — what exactly — they're looking at. A zillion weird ailments no one can figure out. That's just Happy, love it or leave it.

She (Kitty) thinks that Monica already knows that Happy is a performer. He prefers to be someone else, to the degree that she's not sure there's a center or a "real" Hap. It's not just that he likes to act and to pretend to be other people, it's that he needs to be something he's not. Hasn't Monica already had flashes of Happy's fantasy-self? his megalomania and narcissism? Didn't Hap once tell Monica about his Messiah fantasy and didn't she run to write it down as soon as they left? She'll refresh her (Monica's) memory. It's some sort of Crusade (against what and for what she has no idea). All she knows for sure about the Crusade is that there's something religious about it and that it happens in Africa: thousands of African followers marching and cheering and Hap "Happy" Huntington Blank, very tall and very white, is the charismatic Messiah, inspiring crowds with his profound moral philosophy, a sermon he sings from the top of a beautiful green hill, like a heart-breaking aria from an Italian opera that the whole world will be humming with tears in its eyes for thousands of years.

Monica may find that fantasy hard to believe, but she's been hearing some version of it since she married Hap and she's sure that it's not at all nutty to him. Or — slightly more complicated — he knows it's nuts, but also, at the same time in some other way, believes it.

Kitty says that it's only fair to say this too: in some sense she has to thank Happy. Without him (and she's sure that it's one of the reasons they're still together) she'd have a much shallower, narrower understanding of human nature. Because of Happy she's aware of the amazing amount of craziness people can walk around with and still do their jobs and seem normal. You could even say: walking-around-craziness is what we call "normal". So, in that way, Hap's been very helpful to her professionally, in ways her healthier colleagues could never be. But it's also probably why she resents this phony illness he's milking to get everyone to baby him for the two thousandth nauseating time!

She (Kitty) needs to know: has Monica heard enough to have an opinion? Does she agree that it's just one more way Hap's lifelong lowgrade depression is slithering out of his jungle? And that now, for a change, he actually has good reason to be depressed: instead of inspiring faithful followers all over the universe because of his Messianic aria on top of one little hill in Africa, he looks around from his desk in his cubicle and has the shock of discovering over and over that he has a mid-level hospital job that he's not even very good at and that he puts people to sleep on the rare occasions when he's honest and talks about what he does for a living.

5. Lou, the rolypoly mailman, delivers a letter from Thea in Denmark (beautiful, precocious girl Monica once tutored in what, what exactly, English or French, Monica is no longer sure), but — Monica wonders why "later" — nothing in Thea's letter gets recorded: only the bare fact of the letter with no content.

6. Monica comes across a few more names that should have been included in the little lists she made earlier, but here they are now, when it's too late to do anything but make note of them "out of order". Or, another way, in the true out-of-order order of things as they occur "there" and then again here in the Chronicle, without wrestling them against their will out of their natural, unstable location and trajectory.

a. Should have included in any list of new faces seen with some regularity on ABC Street Pat Coffin's nieces Amy and Iris (Sheridan), who seem to have figured out that their Aunt Pat is happy to welcome them for summer weekends at the beach with no known limit.

b. The sisters Nora Salerno and Marian Woolsey still show up on ABC Street, but rarely.

c. Pam & Ted Leary have pretty much vanished.

d. Notes say that Nancy St. Cloud has "visited a few times with Little Tristan", but Monica has no memory of it.

e. Someone else, illegible in Monica's hastily scrawled notes even to Monica and even minutes after hurrying to get them down.

Let's see: what other particles does Monica allow to settle on the paper in her lap before they dissolve like sparks that stream across the eye and blind it for a few semi-quavers of a second:

7. Many-many tiny activities next door at Lena-&-Greg's. For example: Monica can see (can't help seeing) Lena Coffin scurrying around the first floor ping pong room like a bug that's just been sprayed with something that can't quite kill it. At the same time Monica can see her scurrying she hears Lena's brooming with harsh strokes as if she's trying to pry loose ancient caked-on dirt.

Monica wonders if it's the harsh sound of Lena's brooming and/or the violence of her quick ping-ponging around the room that's making planetarium-dome-headed little Rosamond cry. Or could it just be the common irritable discomfort and cranky crying of a child in August heat? Short seconds later Monica hears the same harsh broomstrokes above her and to her left (South) on Greg-&-Lena's raft-like second floor front porch that extends out almost to the ABC Street sidewalk and sees Lena, head down, brooming as if someone's life depends on getting every speck of toweled-off beach sand and leaf-remnant off it. Suddenly something — something electric like the charged instant that jolts you out of a dream — seems to dawn on Lena and she stops what she's doing mid-broomstroke, hurries to the front porch railing and throws her broom and miserable old mop (still sodden and dripping dirty water, but drying slowly in the porch's ocean breezes) down all the way to the sidewalk, startling someone who'd just passed, heading north —>.

7. continues like this: Greg Coffin (not noted whether a little later or earlier or simultaneous with Lena's brooming and sudden, violent action) repairing a broken railing or floorboard with an electric saw that cuts easily through 1/3 the mid-air length of ABC Street and through whatever sentence Monica's writing, forcing her to pause and do nothing but take in fully with her own skin the South —> North breezes rippling across every one of ABC Street's porches.

Joshua Coffin is sitting on the short ground floor flight of stone front steps under the cracked orange plastic awning, reading a comic book with serious concentration. Monica would love to read the title — strains to read the title — but can't.

Now it's not just little Rosamond who's crying, it's Jojo too and Monica still can't say for sure if it's just the "overripe August heat" or if it has something to do with Lena's harsh brooming or the violent mood that made her suddenly stop as if compelled to throw down broom and mop, hoping to kill a passing stranger.

Let's see: not for the first time Monica's forced by the Chronicle to decide: what needs to be recorded/what needs to be left out. Two events may get her attention and may seem equally worth paying attention to, but the Chronicle says "yes" to one and rejects the other. Welcomes one and spits the other out as soon as Monica scribbles it down. For example: it seems to her there are more names (are always going to be more names?) to add to her hastily sketched lists of additions to and subtractions from the stable yet shifting ABC Street population, its "Cast of Characters", and she can't decide whether or not to add the name of a not-very-important someone she's known for a long time and whose name she finds on a folded sheet of scrap paper.

Chronicle doesn't stop Monica from writing that she's pretty-sure-but-not-absolutely that she tutored Fern Lillienthal (whether in English or in French also uncertain) and that Fern was recommended to her by Thea, the precocious pupil who became a friend and then a dancer and choreographer who moved to Denmark before she was twenty. A permanent stockingmask of plaintive unhappiness flattens the sallow oval of Fern's face a little, though it's still possible to tell that Fern might have been pretty without it. Monica's always wondered if Fern Lillienthal was born that way or when it was pulled down over her, flattening her nose and giving mouth-and-eyes their weepy expression, always on the verge of real sorrow.

Monica saw quickly that Fern becomes easily attached — over-attached — to anyone giving her even a teaspoon of warmth or interest and, because of that, goes out of her way not to encourage Fern in any way. Monica tries to think with her pen: who is it — who is it exactly — that Fern's over-attached to? Has to be someone Monica knows, otherwise how could she know anything about Fern's over-attachment? May be Thea, who's a little younger than Fern, but seems older and who's beautiful and talented. May also be someone else in Fern-&-Thea's circle, but Monica can't think of anyone's name and the Chronicle would likely spit it out in any case.

Monica knows this: Fern's parents are rich and upper-middle-class in style and in every other way and Fern is acutely aware that her many problems are like a cockroach crawling across the dinner table and give her a permanent way to torment them and spoil what she sees as their perfect comfort and self-satisfaction. Mother and grandmother in particular: both always wonderfully poised and well-put-together with such similar taste they dress and act like well-behaved twin sisters.

Seems to Monica that making her mother-and-grandmother unhappy and uncomfortable is likely Fern Lillienthal's only pleasure in living. And the urgency of that pleasure for Fern probably makes it impossible for her to ever get "cured".

For all these reasons Monica has always kept Fern Lillienthal at a long arm's length, but for all the same reasons finds her interesting and sometimes even feels some cautious sympathy for whatever's genuine in her unhappiness.

Here Fern is today, without having been in Monica's consciousness for months or more, popping up on Monica's porch just to warn her about "the hurricane that's going to hit ABC Street any second". They may not be 1000% certain, she says, but she is. Can feel it in the atmosphere — knows that it's about to happen — and wonders if Monica can feel it too.

Greg Coffin is in the driveway with what looks to Monica like his portable keyboard balanced on one shoulder and Monica notes that it seems to her that whenever she sees Greg leave his house he's carrying synthesizer or keyboard as if he might want to do some practicing in the car, something like the steno pad and folded sheets of scrap paper Monica and David make sure to have with them wherever they go.

Wanda Baer stops by again because, she says, there's another fragment or fragment-of-a-fragment of a fragmentary story she has to get out — or, more accurately — has to tell Monica — or it's going to stay stuck and irritating her brain like a piece of gravel from the stupid driveway that hops into your shoe. Maybe Monica can help her figure out why — why exactly — she suddenly keeps thinking about Imbi Kulla (if Monica remembers her friend from Estonia)'s lover, Dominique. It's as if Dominique came back to remind her of some facts about Dominique's life that she's sure she (Wanda) never told Monica:

Needs to clear up one thing (not about Dominique) first: she's sure Monica's been paying attention to the crazy house-cleaning that's been going on in her house over the last few days. Always crazy, always frantic, but — doesn't Monica think so? — even more frantic, even crazier than usual! So Monica needs to know from the inside, because from where Monica's sitting — from Monica's odd close-up distance — she could easily see what's not true for anyone living here. Truth is that, in spite of Lena's manic cleaning — because of Lena's manic cleaning?! — the house seems to be getting filthier and filthier. As if the dirt wants to be left alone and is trying to get its revenge on Lena for disturbing it! Baked on, welded into every corner and crack, dirt's been in the house much longer than Lena has, probably close to a century.

Ok. Enough about the dirty house and why, in her opinion, house-cleaning is nuts in general. Let the dirt be happy is what she thinks. Live and let live is always the best philosophy. This is what for some reason she suddenly remembers about Dominique: before Dominique met and fell in love with Imbi Kulla her lover was a supposedly "half-Tunisian/half-French" woman named (though her own lousy memory has probably screwed it up) "Hatima" or "Salimah", she can't be sure. She's always had doubts about Hatima/Salimah's story. A few things have always bothered her. For example: she (Wanda) knows for a fact (from Dominique or maybe from Imbi) that Hatima/Salimah straightens her naturally very curly hair and has to work hard to keep it from curling right back up the way it wants to. So that's repulsive to her (Wanda) to begin with. Her guess is that Hatima/Salimah (who says she grew up in Tunis) is really purely Tunisian. Speaks fluent French, but so do a lot of Tunisians. Maybe she lived and worked in Paris for a while. That's logical. And it could be true — but who knows? — that her mother might have been French or "half-French". It's unknowable.

Hatima/Salimah certainly tries to seem French (Parisian, more accurately) and that's the only definite fact about her. For the rest of it, there's probably some other story that no one will ever know.

This too or more of the same: Hatima/Salimah works at the U.N. with Dominique — not as "Hatima" or "Salimah", but as a lawyer named "Jean-Claude"! What she (Wanda) doesn't know, because nothing is ever definite in this story: does the U.N. think that the lawyer they know as "Jean-Claude" is a man or a woman or something in-between? What is Hatima/Salimah/Jean-Claude in her own mind and being actually? Does the word "actually" mean anything? Can it be that fluid? And can this fluid being really be a lawyer? or just brilliant enough to fool everyone? And other questions she can't put into words.

Needs Monica to answer one question so she'll do the right thing next time: was she wrong to interrupt Monica's work just because she was uncomfortable carrying this untold story around? And did she mis-interpret what interests Monica for her Chronicle?

Let's see, what else on August 10?

Andy Forest joins Greg Coffin in the driveway: each, as always, taller than the other and both taller than anyone standing near them or simply passing. This time Greg & Andy are dressed as if they're on their way to a gig (Monica notes again the synthesizer on Greg's shoulder): white jeans and colorful Hawaiian-style shirts.

Andy spots Al Szarka and calls out something in a loud unfriendly voice about Al Szarka's "pile of crap blocking the driveway again!" Monica of course can't catch everything. Mind makes coherent sentences out of scraps. "Get the fuck out of our way!" for sure. Thinks she hears "fuckn cretin" under Andy's breath.

Al Szarka gets out of his car and quickly gets abnormally up-close to Andy Forest, as if Andy, looking down at the jagged points of Al's broken teeth and feeling Al's over-heated breath on his (Andy's) muscular forearm or chest, will be intimidated (fear of being bitten?).

Stand almost body-to-body for what must only be seconds, but seem to Monica like distended minutes.

Only Andy is audible.

Looks to Monica like a little foaming drool on Al's lips. Al turns sharply and, as quickly as he arrived up-close, he's back in his car, which manages to make an impossible amount of noise as it jumps from driveway to Coast Boulevard.

Later ("tomorrow"?) Monica passes Al-&-Yvonne's car (still on ABC Street, but on the "middle" block between Coast Boulevard and Salem Avenue), parked in the entrance to someone's driveway.

At what hour of the same August day does Lou the roly-poly mailman hand Monica an envelope marked "GEGENSCHEIN VAUDEVILLE PLACENTER 291-293 Seventh Ave. 10 Floor New York 10001"? Monica unfolds a letter-and-announcement typed together on one sheet with a sentence and signature in what color ink at the end.

"Dear Monica/David

"This letter is to announce and invite you to participate in the first annual GEGENSCHEIN INVITATIONAL PERFORMANCE SERIES (GIPS): 'MONTH OF SUNDAYS' to be held on Sundays at 4 p.m. at the Placenter beginning on Sunday Sept 19, 1976. There will be a 2:00 contribution at the door which will be shared evenly with the performers of the day and so on.

"P.S. Sorry I haven't gotten to you sooner and thanks for your novel etc. — hope you can do something here.

"Love/Demise" (in ink (color not noted)).

Old Rae Ryan in royal blue as always (Monica notes to herself, without stopping her note-taking to explore it, that she's never taken the time to try to figure out the difference — if there is one — between Rae Ryan's royal blue and Fat Agnes'), in her rocker on the front porch of the Regans' purest-of-pure-white shingle house across the way from Monica at a slight W/SW diagonal (next house south from the Greengrass' tight little brick-and-iron fortress) says to someone not identified or not noted:

"He had a red car.

"I know he had a red car because I saw him get out of it!

"And that was only a week before he died!

"There's a brother. No, not that brother. Another brother. That brother was here too.

"I think — I'm pretty sure — that someone once told me that there's a brother who lives in Hawaii of all places."

Twins pass twinning.

"AH!

"___________

"EH!

"________

"RIGHT! YOU'RE RIGHT! I LIKE THEIR STYLE!!"

Seems to Monica that both Twins, always-rumbling basso and silently vocal, in rough black coats or raincoats too heavy for this August day, are trying to disguise their curiosity about her (Monica) and David in their usual rockers, writing at the far (southernmost) end of the porch.

Streets have dark streaks and reflective pools (reflecting what? what exactly?) left by "last night's" heavy rain (remnant of the glancing blow of a hurricane whose central force hit a little north of ABC Street and the narrow peninsula it crosses).

Monica interrupts her note-taking to say that she's always loved the sour fragrance of wet pavement — from her childhood in a far more densely urban New York neighborhood than this one right up to "midnight last night", when cooler air swept into the red room's side windows (across the grey Atlantic —> over red or orange tile and grey-green shingle rooftop-after-rooftop of ABC Street's massive old mansions-turned-into-multiple-dwellings —> and , finally, over the orange tiles of Lena-&-Greg's) as a breeze that had even picked up a little unidentifiable floral aroma along the way.

No rain by morning: only clouds in the same ancient dormer red room windows, now cranked wide open: two bright rectangles filled with a combed-and-fluffed-out white almost from edge to edge. And these white rectangles seem to Monica the early signal we always miss when the cube of one season begins to invade and alter the cube of another season.

Beginning of the end of the large and deep cube of August '76?

Let's see:

Fionnuala Regan is visiting her parents. Notes say: "Fionnuala is visible on porch and sidewalk only 'in quick flashes' because she spends most of her time with her parents, Joan and Al". Monica assumes that Fionnuala's husband is with her, then notes that she has to ask herself why she assumes that Fionnuala has a husband: not only doesn't see him today, but she's sure-but-not-100%-sure she's never seen anyone with Fionnuala who might be a "husband".

Little Matthew Regan is bicycling or tricycling (not noted which) back and forth in front of the Regans' three-story spotless white shingle, as usual, within the N <—> S boundaries of the wide shadow of the Regans' beautiful old Elm (limit of what he's permitted whenever his mother's inside and can't watch over him).

Because Fionnuala is visiting her parents, Monica finds herself remembering that Leslie Greengrass used to visit her parents next door (one house —> N) "almost every day" to take a swim (it seems to Monica from across the way) with her wiry and sunbaked father Enos (small man made of brown leather, in a baggy blue bathing suit and no shirt, always hosing). It seems to Monica these daily swims with her father in the nearby grey and heaving Atlantic must have been Leslie Greengrass' only reason for visiting, because, now that Enos is dead, she's stopped coming.

A few little events and not-quite-events happen within a span too small to contain them, no more than the fast fluorescent pulse of an insect on the lawn.

1. Riley Liman, excited, rushes up Monica's front porch steps to show her all the cicadas he's just collected — all in the same place, in a few minutes! — in a big plastic bowl his mother let him use, even though she usually uses it for leftover potato salad.

2. Andy Forest's sprawled out on Greg-&-Lena's short flight of front steps for almost his full, long, muscular length — with the loose air of someone who's free for the moment of all responsibility — with little Joshua Coffin and Joshua's friend (unfamiliar to Monica) Timothy. All have the long, bamboo rods of punks smoking in their hands and the fragrant smoke appears to be making them all relaxed and dreamy. Seems to Monica that Joshua goes out of his way to speak directly to her in a loud voice to get her attention (unusual for Joshua, Monica notes, unlike Jojo who calls out to Monica and visits her on the porch all the time): Andy took them to the Penny Arcade in Playland today to play "SKILBALL" and he (Andy) scored 265! He thinks that's some kind of record! And Andy won a hundred and fifty punks 'cause that's the top prize!

Joshua also wants Monica to know that he's "good at SKILBALL too!" She can ask Andy or Timothy! He didn't actually win anything, but winning is not what matters, no matter what anyone says. Andy says that what matters is "hand-eye" coordination and he (Joshua) showed that he has that!

3. Greg Coffin's on his and Lena's raft-like second floor front porch that projects far out over the two dry, lumpen sections of lawn toward the sidewalk and the on-again-off-again burrr of his electric saw has been cutting the day up into neat sections and sawdust as he's making slow progress piecing together planks to construct a protective case for his fifty pound synthesizer. Andy Forest isn't helping Greg, he's just hanging out, having a good time laughing and offering commentary. Monica's almost sure she hears Andy say that he's really looking forward to watching Greg balance all hundred, hundred-and-fifty pounds of that beautiful case— ok to call it a coffin? — on his shoulder when they're crawling out the door, scrambling their sorry asses off rushing to get to a gig!

4. Lily Romero seeks out Monica's eyes so she can talk to her without having to shout from Lena-&-Greg's small orange stone groundfloor porch. Wants to know if Monica's as cold as she is and, in fact, Monica notes that Lily is shivering and hugging herself, trying to get warm. The sound of wind blowing through the big pine on Monica's lawn bothers her (Lily) and she wonders if Monica ever feels that way too. She's never liked being cold and, honestly, she's never liked the sound of wind in trees. Sounds like an unhappy voice that's almost human. Today, the tortured way Monica's pine is moving is really horrible! And — does Monica agree? — everything today sounds wintry. So she's feeling even colder than she probably actually is. Just so Monica won't think she's nuts: she knows that she's hyper-sensitive to everything right now because she's two days overdue and getting nervous and, naturally, Leo's family's making him go to Brooklyn to help in their stupid carpet-cleaning business that Leo's spent his whole life trying to get away from! So she's alone and on edge with this wintry cold and wind that really does sound like an unhappy human spirit.

5. Not noted who says (voice not recognized) "my little Fiat!" and "keep picturing my little red Fiat on the open road!" Voice also says it's "very disappointed" because the "whole idea" was to be driving it "on my twenty-fifth birthday". No red Fiat in sight and exact timbre and direction of voice impossible for Monica to make out with sound of wind-in-trees all along ABC Street, particularly loud in Regans' enormous old Elm directly across the way and trapped, circling and struggling inside the Rhinebeck pine's heavy boughs and shadows, wide as wings and deep as caves.

On what August day not noted (what day exactly) Kitty calls to keep Monica up-to-date about Hap's hepatitis. It's fair to say, she says, that it's changing the way they live. For example: Monica has no reason to remember, but there are two bathrooms in their two bedroom apartment. She never used to give a thought to which bathroom she used, but now she's had to clearly designate one bathroom for Happy and one for herself and she's compulsively careful about which one she uses! They've given her a shot of gamma globulin because she can't — absolutely cannot — afford to get sick. They can't survive without her income. Doctors also warned her not to assume anything: just because she's feeling ok now means nothing: hepatitis takes six weeks to incubate! So the only thing Monica can count on is more phone calls like this and things gradually getting worse.

On the same day or another Monica's in her usual spot behind the Rhinebeck pine taking pleasure in proofreading The Menaced Assassin and, from time to time, pausing in her proofreading to try to make an accurate list of what manuscripts she and David have sent to which literary magazines and independent publishers.

Let's see: first item on Monica's list (being re-read when?) says only "ms out [at] Coach House", but fails to say what ms that is. And Monica is left trying to figure out ("now") what it could be. Choices seem limited to her: the only book-length ms that might be ready for submission in August '76, in fact, is The Menaced Assassin, but another scribbled marginal note in her hard-to-read list reminds her that proofreading The Menaced Assassin is exactly the reason she's behind the Rhinebeck pine with a chance to make a list of recent mailings! And therefore, logically and obviously, The Menaced Assassin can't be at Coach House. Another scribbled marginal note says exactly that: "The Menaced Assassin is first at 'the proofreading stage'".

Monica can't continue her pleasurable summer day's proofreading and list-making without trying to solve the mystery of what book-length ms is at Coach House. "Later" (how much later exactly not noted) Monica spots a tiny marginal note — just the initials "G.I." — at an odd angle, not-next-to-but-not-too-far-from the scribbled name "Coach House" and that leads to the conclusion that the ms at Coach House has to be Green Inventory — a radical narrative drawn entirely from Monica's Chronicle and meant to dance typographically across the page in short units, each unit with its own playful formal strategy — perfectly wrong for Coach House.

"Nightmare" (short for Woman's Nightmare "A", a novella-length, formally complex tale that embeds an encrypted narrative inside another, more traditional narrative) at Partisan Review.

"Nightmare" again (apparently a simultaneous submission) at Viper's Tongue.

"A Breeze from Zurich" (excerpt from The Menaced Assassin) absurdly to The New Yorker!

Monica goes back to proofreading The Menaced Assassin and taking pleasure in the rhythm of its sentences and also purely in the act (something she and David share and have talked about) of writing in private again, on the front porch together or separately, instead of working on another SPACE NOVEL, which brings with it a consciousness every instant both of its inevitable public dimension and its impermanence by definition as an event. Both of them are happy, in ways Monica finds it hard to explain, to be writing a novel in private, similar to (but not exactly the same as) the special pleasure (the childhood pleasure?) of reading alone, even more so out-of-doors, interior of the book existing only for you.

Back to proofreading in her corner of the porch, this time trying at the same time to figure out how to explain why a day in August feels like a day in autumn. What qualities she asks herself — what qualities exactly? — are "autumnal"?

Let's see: wind picks up and autumn-in-August day grows colder. Unseasonably cold breezes seem to suddenly amplify from within, to "blow up", and with them the sound of old Rae Ryan's voice carrying forcibly from just across the street. Monica cranes her neck (not noted clearly, but seems to her "later" (now?)) that she gets up out of her rocker, despite the papers in her lap, to peer around the wide, ragged screen of the Rhinebeck pine, but can't see who Ray Ryan's calling out to. ABC Street in fact appears empty both S <— to the boardwalk and —> N to Coast Boulevard. Therefore (Monica wonders, not for the first time) how conscious Rae Ryan is of her (Monica's) concealed presence — in some way a mirror presence — at only a slight diagonal just across ABC Street and, if she knows Monica's there, could it be her she's calling out to?

Squat Edgar W. (one son out of the three children of the squat landlord W. family), who rarely talks to Monica (though he lives immediately next door and they see each other often) or to anyone else on ABC Street, at least when Monica sees him walking across the space of the Chronicle, comes partway up the porch steps to tell Monica — because he's noticed that what he's growing in the back yard interests her, even if he's not sure why — he'd like to show her what's happening back there. There are a few developments he finds worth paying attention to. Adds parenthetically (and it strikes Monica that it's suddenly obvious that Edgar's noticed others collaborating with her — or with her Chronicle — and wanted to be part of whatever he's seen her writing for years in her porch rocker behind the giant pine) that that's "really why" he's growing things in the soil behind the house. He's not what he'd call "a gardener" like his mother. All the beautiful hydrangeas and other flowers are hers! Nothing to do with him. He really just wants to learn something about how possible it is or isn't to grow vegetables in their peculiar micro-climate: ocean air, sandy soil. That kind of scientific detective work attracts him and he has the feeling that Monica's mind works that way too. So, if he's right and Monica's interested. . . .

Back on the porch ("afterward") Monica tries — driven by the same impulse that makes her write every day — to keep what she just saw growing in the soil behind the house from passing into the blurred netherworld of memory:

Eggplants (many-many, how many exactly not counted because Monica's paying attention, but already not there, looking at things as if writing later, to too many things at once), a unique purple whose mysterious illumination of color along the lip of its black skin recedes into a still darker black. Same heavy and mysterious bells of nightshade purple repeated again and again against the fence. Monica just has time to register that these hanging eggplant rows are far larger and heavier than they were last time she looked (how many days ago not noted): eggplant vines never could support eggplants' weight, but what barely touched the ground "then" as if trying not to, now rests heavily in the soil, comfortably dozing.

Cucumbers (darkest crocodile green), also unusually large and heavy, but with vines attached higher up (on fence or free-standing trellis not observed or not noted) and their weight apparently supported solely by stem and vine.

Tomatoes, unripe, small and hard last time Monica looked, green of stems extending deep into thin red of flesh, now large with red flesh ready to burst through red skin, somehow persuading their vines not to drop them before Edgar W. remembers to pick them.

Let's see: long, skinny stringbeans —different from any variety Monica's familiar with — clearly trained by Edgar W. to use the fence as support and, Edgar explains, "an un-interesting vegetable" grown by him only because his mother asked him to: "they give more flavor to her stews" than any other variety, according to her.

Not noted whether Edgar W. thinks to give Monica as much as one tomato, one cucumber or one eggplant. Not even a stringbean.

Nothing else he can think of on the fence. In the ground right below the fence there's corn and in the narrow strip of earth between the two houses there are all sorts of herbs he thinks of as part of his mother's flower garden: more or less hidden by the bank of hydrangeas. Corn is planted "later" and "unlikely to make it" because (according to Edgar W. and written down "afterward" by Monica) "corn takes a long time to mature" and he's afraid "frost will kill it before it's ready".

Monica has a nagging feeling there's more, but even a few minutes later she can't remember it. Only this: as they're walking back to the front of the house, where she'll be able to unburden herself of all the language keeping her suspended in the back yard above the dizzying spice of wet earth and the green rind of everything until she can transfer it all to paper, Edgar says that he supposes he should be grateful that so much survived when everything could have been drowned "in the last hurricane".

Anything else about Edgar W.'s backyard vegetable garden? Only this: Monica forgets and then remembers (when? when exactly?) that Edgar also said that he grows so many cucumbers — a ridiculous number — too many for any sane human to eat — because his mother makes delicious pickles with them and they enjoy them all year.

No conversation about Minna W.'s beautiful cloudbank of hydrangeas planted all along the fence on the North side of the house, but Monica can't stop thinking about them later. So dense and plentiful that David is able to clip magnificent vasefuls of hydrangeas for Monica without disturbing the overflowing beauty of the soft skyblue/green/white/hyacinth purple cumulous cloudbank to any extent near enough for Minna W. to notice and complain. David knows that Monica loves finding clouds of them in all three of the studios — green front studio, blue back (west-facing) kitchen and south-facing red bedroom — and he keeps them fresh and foaming-over all through their season.

On August 16 Monica writes, thinking still one more time about the visit to Edgar W.'s vegetable garden, "August is the ripening of summer into fall" and adds a little later "and that's why so many August days have autumn in them". Always, days in other days and seasons in other seasons, if only we get in the habit of paying a certain kind of attention.

Monica sits back in her porch rocker and out of the moment — out of the day — and writes as if she's been thinking about the events of the day without having been thinking at all:

"Does it keep passing, even though I'm doing everything I can to keep it from passing?"

She thinks that she may even recognize some moments of slippage (moment observed, moment already documented, yet keeps walking horizontally by on the way to Coast Boulevard and beyond or to boardwalk, beach and ocean).

Pen or pencil can't understand what's happening: point presses into paper like a pin that's meant to stop a word from moving, but can't.

An entire lifetime can be spent in this contradiction and no other path (no desire to find another path?) than the one Monica's addicted to. The ephemeral, accidental world slips away every instant, out of memory, and the weird plasma of patterns in what seems to and may really be our universe of chaos only shows its face when it dawns on us that life is being lived for us "out there". Write it down every day. There are surprising magnetic clusters of events in the flux and slippage, but only if we've been sitting in the mossy shadows for a long time.

Monica's in the grip of writing that resembles thinking, but feels like nothing but writing to her.

Let's see: the astronomer staring into the same deep section of Space for 20-30 years is not-quite-exactly the same as the angler who's perpetually learning to read the ripples in the same solitary corner of a stream that's been eternally pooling and slipping away.

On an undated August day when leaves are drier and space is golden, a woman who Monica's certain was once named "Cecilia" and may once have been married to Margaret & Daisy Brennan's landlord, Alexis Ilinopoulos, passes with the same springy, athletic step Monica remembers from how many years ago. It doesn't surprise Monica that "Cecelia", now "Nicki", is walking with Kate Crosley, who's been living in Alexis's house (same house that Margaret and Daisy live in, two houses from the intersection with Coast Boulevard, on Monica's (east) side of ABC Street). But Cecelia/Nicki's also walking with Nora Lenehan, and that forces Monica to adjust her idea of who-knows-who on ABC Street.

Let's see: "on August 16" only five snowballs are alive. The rest of the pastel blue/pink cloudbank between landlord W.'s two houses has dried up. And, for reasons that are likely biochemical and easy to discover, drying up = loss of color. Color evaporates with life as if each were the other's vapor.

Ellen Grace calls from Santa Fe "around midnight" wanting to share her excitement about James' new invention. She's the one who handles the phone calls for their little business, so she knows that it's not a fantasy when James says that "several big companies" are interested in it. Monica can decide for herself if they're crazy for being excited: James and his partner have built a real, working prototype of an entirely new kind of engine the size of a room: they call it a "utility center" that can generate power for just about everything in the house! James has drawn up plans for a miniature version (no physical model yet) designed to power a car and he says it's a logical extension of the house-size engine and easy to do. Obviously he'll need financial backing to build the prototype for the ultimate goal (also "easy to do"). An engine or series of linked engines that can power a city! James is always rational and reserved, as Monica knows, and when he says he's "optimistic" that's pretty much his version of wild enthusiasm. Does Monica think she's wrong for having lost her life-long skepticism about everything, especially the feeling that enthusiasm is always a warning to look a little closer?

Distracted by Ellen Grace's phone call Monica finds herself writing a sentence she has a sense she's written before: still behind the house on August 16 she's suspended over the spicy, dizzying mash of moist earth and green skin of ripening vegetables.

And also: "the green rind of everything".

Sentences already transferred to paper or dissolved and waiting for this instant to crystalize.

Let's see: also suspended and waiting for this moment to materialize, a series of phone calls or fragments of phone calls — barely a complete sentence among them — from Kitty about Happy (that is, Happy's hepatitis) over "the last few days". Monica looks back, trying to make sense of the dots and dashes of her quick telephone notes (always has pen/pencil and pad in her lap when she's on the phone), aware that she may be repeating something already written.

1. Kitty says that she and Happy "hardly ever eat at home". She's too busy and can't be bothered, can't really cook anyway and doesn't care, so she generally lets Hap decide where they eat and — nine times out of ten — it seems that he ends up choosing seafood: addicted to shellfish in particular. And one of his doctors thinks his shellfish addiction might explain everything.

2. In the same vein: not only do they not eat at home, but, Kitty says, even though they've "only been married about three months", they don't seem to like to stay at home alone together. "Why is that? Why would that be?!" Monica has a hard time reading Kitty's tone: seems like a real question, voice seems to show real distress, but it's a little too ambiguous for her to say that anything's "real". And Monica's not sure if this helps: Kitty adds that, when Happy does decide to take food out and "have an evening in" she (Kitty) — for all sorts of random, unpredictable reasons — suddenly gets hit with all the usual urgent hospital stuff and doesn't get home till ten, eleven or even later!

3. According to Happy's brother-in-law, Malcolm, who may or may not be a doctor (notes aren't clear or Kitty's not clear), whose opinion Kitty seems to bow to as if he's the doctor and she's what? What exactly?, "Hap must — absolutely must — be hospitalized at once!" and: "Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance right now!" as if he's in charge. Kitty mocks the way he barks out orders, but seems to acquiesce in everything. Says he "knows someone in charge" at St. Vincent's and so on.

Kitty sums it up like this: "Hap's not eating

he has a high fever

and he can't keep food down" so,

all in all, Malcolm's got a point, but . . . the end of her sentence sounds to Monica like a shrug. With her schedule, she doesn't see how she'll get to the hospital during visiting hours and "Happy may not be able to handle that".

4. When he gets home before her — and then she comes in late — he feels abandoned — "the abandoned child" — and gets depressed.

Exactly that happened "the other night": when she got home it was late and he'd been alone in the apartment all night. Curled up on the couch like an enormous, miserable child, sick and no one to take care of him. Got it together enough to make himself a peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwich on toasted white bread: but then threw it up. No one to comfort him. No one to stroke his hair. Couldn't cradle his big, weeping head in her (Kitty's) lap so he called Betty! Betty, of all people! Is Monica as nauseated by that as she is?! "Call your own mother for god's sake!" was her immediate reaction and, of course, Betty called her to criticize her for not taking care of her husband — and Hap (poor baby) made her have her billionth stupid argument with Betty (not really Betty's fault for once!).

5. What else from Kitty about Hap? Looking through her notes Monica can see that there's more: can tell, for example, that Kitty's more disturbed by Betty's criticism than by anything else and that she (Monica) or the Chronicle quickly got sick of hearing about the brother-in-law, Malcolm, so there's not another word about him. This too: Monica of course will tell her if she's wrong, Kitty says, but she's sure Monica would have even less patience than she does with Happy's sad, abandoned child routine! Big dummy picked the wrong person if what he was dreaming of — what so many of them dream of?! — was the loving, nursemaid mommy they never had! Doesn't Monica agree that he had to be an idiot (or the need has to be so strong it makes them all stupid!) to see her — her of all the women in the world — that way?

Fionnuala Regan arrives suddenly and quickly (seems "out of the blue" to Monica because she'd been preoccupied by the folded sheets of scrap paper in her lap) on her bicycle (color not noticed or not noted) with baby daughter Becky contentedly in her basket. Becky's blonde hair is vivid, even from across the street and at a slight diagonal, but not so bright and vivid as little Matthew's, on the front lawn helping granpa Al do his yardwork. Little Matthew's task: sweeping up into his green tin pail some of the grass granpa's cutting: and, when small green pail fills up, carry the pail to the big metal garbage can in the driveway.

"A little later" in the bright and shining day Fionnuala's setting up daughter Becky's highchair on the front porch in a spot where Becky can be entertained by everything that's happening on the lawn and everyone on the lawn has a clear view of her. Al Regan glances up from the yardwork he loves doing and does with relaxed concentration, sees Fionnuala getting Becky settled in her special chair and calls out "Hello, my sweetheart! Hello!" in a voicetone that says that this second in this August day is the second he'd be happy living in forever.

"A little later still" Fionnuala's sixteen-year-old brother, Findlay, is the one helping Al with his yardwork. His task: Al's given him a rake with a shorter handle than his (Al's) and together they're raking up Al's happy day of work, sweeping it into mounds and transferring the mounds of just-cut grass — leaving behind only the wild green musk, as wild as if it's the fur of green animals, that bypasses everything and goes straight to a spot in the brain where the brain can chew on it just the way Bah-Wah tears up some weeds and chews on them with a crazy expression — to the metal trash can that's been rolled close to the lawn.

Rest of the day passes in this way: each (little Becky, granpa Al, Fionnuala and who else?) helping it pass for the other.

The absolute yellow of an August day.

Another Agnes.

Or: "still one more Agnes on ABC Street".

"Agnes Lavin" or "Agnes Washburn" (names are interchangeable in Monica's quickly sketched notes).

Not "Fat Agnes" who, for a long time, was just another image in ABC Street's image world of figures who pass and then pass again because of unknowable schedules and routines, observed by Monica from her vantage point behind the Rhinebeck pine.

"One day" (date recorded "earlier" in the Chronicle and later recounted (reader can look for herself/himself in ABC Street or Hank Forest's Party)) Monica, driving her father Alyosha's old Chevy, spots Fat Agnes' unmistakable figure — wide and muscular, with short arms and powerful shoulders, an out-of-shape middleweight, in royal blue, weirdly just like Old Rae Ryan — and decides to break a rule — a rule-that-isn't-a-rule-but-is-a-rule by pulling over and offering her a lift "because it's raining".

Long, bitter story about Fat Agnes' life with her injured and perpetually out-of-work husband (name not recorded or never-known) in the basement of the vast, swaybacked mustard yellow "Shangri-la" rooming house at the far ocean end of ABC Street.

Being with Fat Agnes, up close and listening to her tale in the close atmosphere of Alyosha's car, of course turns Fat Agnes from "an image in ABC Street's image world" into something else, a category of existence Monica can't quite name.

The second Agnes (sometimes called "Gloria") is also a woman who passes so regularly S <—> N, according to an unknown (unknowable) necessity, on the other (west) side of ABC Street, that it seems to Monica that she's been chronicling her path in an abstract way "forever". Neither young nor old and still shapely in an oddly angular and exaggerated, somewhat cartoonish way. Always in extraordinarily high heels, yet walking fast, sometimes wobbly but able to steady herself and continue on.

Monica's never spoken (or given a lift) to this "second Agnes" so, even now, she remains an image in ABC Street's image world, absolutely real yet abstract.

Now "another Agnes" (a third Agnes) appears in Monica's raw notes for August '76. Chronicle notes that "third Agnes" (Lavin or Washburn) has been passing "for a long time" and wrestles, not for the first time, with the important and difficult question: what makes someone important enough to be chronicled? What — what exactly — is Monica's (the Chronicle's) principle of inclusion?

Another, simpler way: why this one and not that one?

Resident of ABC Street enough of a reason?

Degree of familiarity the deciding factor? Does Monica need to know a "resident of ABC Street" as well as she knows the Coffins

Forests

Greengrasses

Limans

Lenehans

Regans

Brennans

Sloths

W.'s

X's

Wattles

and who else Monica's forgetting?

Monica's certain that that can't be the standard for inclusion and the Chronicle seems to confirm it. For example: that standard would exclude (and it doesn't!) the random person who, for this reason or that, Monica runs into on ABC Street or who stops to tell her a fragment of her/his tale. Fragment of a tale told randomly while standing in the street sometimes continues into a thread, however broken, interrupted, scattered or fragmentary. Becomes something like a relationship.

Therefore: not quite random any longer.

And, if not random, then what? What exactly?

One possibility: random person returns on purpose out of a need to continue telling Monica his/her tale now that she/he has figured out that Monica has an odd commitment to a project of writing that has something to do with the horizontal flow of life on ABC Street. As if the horizontal flow of life on ABC Street = her (Monica's) life.

This too: Monica wonders if it's true to say that in general people need to tell their tales and maybe even more so if someone — in a friendly, disinterested way — wants (needs) to document even a little part of it, adding a few steps in the horizontal, scrolling narrative of ABC Street from Grey Atlantic to Jamaica Bay.

Now "another Agnes" seems to have a tale she wants to tell and Monica again has a difficult decision to make.

Chronicle may take the decision out of her hands, as it often does. Chronicle rejects out of hand the idea that Monica's obligated, because she's chronicling ABC Street, to accept someone/anyone else's vision of what's necessary to record: what belongs next to the stories Monica's already chronicled, the magnetic clusters that end up creating its accidental structure. Monica (or the Chronicle) can't bow to the fact that everyone (almost everyone?) is convinced that his/her story deserves to be recorded and read by others.

Monica wonders: could she compromise in the way the Chronicle did "a long time ago", when Wanda Baer was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Ghana, and sent Monica long Airmail letters, handwritten in crowded but legible script on the cleverly folded interior flaps of lightweight skyblue Airmail envelopes. Letters were, for the most part, deeply personal, confessional and/or well-observed accounts of her (Wanda's) experiences, but sometimes digressed into conventional and vacant travelogues or into boring tales told to her by others. Therefore: in order to include Wanda Baer's Ghana letters in her Chronicle, as Monica decided that she needed to do, she had to find a way of allowing them to live in the Chronicle, but with the boring, stupid, undigested and conventional erased by adding blanks, no matter how odd the result looked on the page, something like listening to the in-&-out reception of a shortwave radio transmission.

In short: Chronicle insists on the right to spit out what it knows instantly doesn't belong. Another way: Monica rejects absolutely the stupid obligation to record all of reality as life presents it: the wire fence, like the contents of any local newspaper, where, every day, history deposits its junk.

Let's see: A SHORTHAND LIFE:

Agnes Lavin or Washburn has lived on ABC Street since 1965. Monica notes that she first noticed her — no less or more than she notices many passersby on ABC Street — waiting on the busstop at the intersection of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard, on the Coast Boulevard side of the L-shaped corner house-and-property where a mother lives alone with a son who's seemed depressed both before and after his father's sudden death, often visible to Monica even from a long diagonal NW distance reading the broad sheets of the NY Times or Wall Street Journal on a tiny, elevated porch on the ABC Street side of the impressive brick-and-glass no-longer-modern.

Monica notes also that ABC Street's third Agnes is waiting on the busstop under a densely-woven umbrella of leafy tree branches, "pregnant and holding the hand of a little girl".

Monica has no idea when — when exactly — she first spoke to Agnes Lavin or Washburn after what must be years of seeing her pass. Monica pauses to think again and correct herself: years of seeing third Agnes pass and finding the simple S <—> N fact of her repeated passing worth chronicling.

Had to have talked to third Agnes "at some point" face-to-face, because there are facts about third Agnes' life Monica could only have learned from Agnes herself.

Third Agnes lives "in the third floor front" apartment just below the spacious apartment with the always-heaving Grey Atlantic directly in view through tremendous sets of small, mullioned windows with rotting frames Ma X has been living in far longer than David or Monica have been friendly with Leila X, in the ancient yellow brick apartment building that's like a towering, weathered wall at the boardwalk-&-ocean end of ABC Street.

Something else it seems to Monica she could only have learned directly from third Agnes: for a long time she (third Agnes) "never had to think about anything". She was utterly dominated by her mother. She was (she thinks this is the best word for it) "docile". For example: mother often said "the Telephone Company is a good place to work" so she ended up working for the Telephone Company "most of her life". Started as soon as she graduated from high school and fell in love and got married "around the same time". Her husband pretty much took over from her mother. Might be a cliché, but it's accurate. Reason she gave herself for thinking everything he said and did was right and for never questioning anything was that she "loved him so much". Fair to say: she never really had a thought of her own — until recently. And even that's no achievement: husband had a heart attack two years ago and of course was in the hospital for a while so she was forced to have some thoughts of her own. No choice. So fog cleared a little. Had to admit to herself that she didn't miss him. Worse, she was relieved to be without him. A step further: once a little honesty crept in she allowed herself to know that she hadn't liked him for a long time. There were (third Agnes would only go this far) "things he was doing — without going into detail" — that she found "intolerable" and that he refused to (couldn't) stop, so, before the heart attack (which everyone blamed on the stress of the his job on Wall Street), she'd told him she wanted to separate. She never thought he'd actually leave, but he did and not too long after that had his heart attack.

Third Agnes says that she's not sure, or if it only seems logical to her now while she's talking to Monica (because she's talking to Monica?), but it seems to her that it was because she'd admitted to herself that she didn't like her husband that she was able, for the first time in her life, to say out loud that her mother was wrong! — that she hated the Telephone Company —and because of that brainless advice from her mother — based on what? — she'd lived a miserable life. It's probably not fair to compare her life to being in prison, but she does: "twenty-five years of work and marriage and not enjoying one day of either!". Even worse? She never once in all that time gave it a thought!

Does Monica find that hard to believe?

"Or have you heard my story a hundred times before?"

Selected Works

Fiction

Headless World

Ascher/Straus' ultimate novel, completed just before Sheila Ascher's death in December, 2020. A uniquely daring speculative novel that takes an unprecedented leap forward into a cosmos ordered by principles closer to "loop quantum gravity" theory in its approach to space and time than to any more traditional theory while tracking the life of an abandoned child navigating multiple channels of possible identities, family plots and destinies.

Stephen Beachy, author of Glory Hole and boneyard, has already written: ". . . as if an alien species that had devoured our memories was now using them to shift the syntax of our thoughts." And: "A strange object, unlike any other book you'll ever read, relentless, hilarious, a ferocious trance, a secret key." And Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall, writes: ". . . the hope of transcendence arrives in the form of a novel that escapes the spoor of endless mechanical reproduction, in a narrative-channel that defies any viral popular culture logic — it's a 'twirling spindle of infinity' . . . I'm so in love with this book."

The Other Planet (30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition)

"…one of the indispensible novels of the twentieth century, a complex and unsentimental examination of the tensions created by rapid social and technological change….This is fiction driven by ideas, ideas about the future, and the relentlessness of the everyday." --From Stephen Beachy's Foreword to the 30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition of The Other Planet.

Hank Forest's Party

Companion volume to ABC Street, chronicling the events and characters of ABC Street as they amble by, circling around and through Hank Forest’s party, while finding ways to suggest the warp of time.

ABC Street

The boundary between novel and journal: the passing world chronicled as fiction.

"ABC Street sends out ripples that change our reading of the other Ascher/Straus books, blurring lines of memory and realism and imagination. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Menaced Assassin

". . . characters – Celeste, the Dane or the Swede, the taxi driver, one or several men named Antonio – are . . . obsessed with the future and with the unlimited sense of possibility that only gets horribly reduced anytime a decision is made, meaning created."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"...the best kind of experimental fiction--innovative and entertaining."
--Caryn James, The Village Voice

Red Moon/Red Lake

". . . dialogue at once so real and so unreal that it seems like the way people might talk in dreams. The way people would talk if they were possessed by a rare intelligence. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

A mysterious "novel-in-stories": "Some of the most stylish ‘post-modern fiction’ there is."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

The Other Planet

". . . Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet. . . . She journeys. . . through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“. . . [an] absorbing, sexy and troubling reflection of these weird times. . . it should be read."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

QUICK LINKS

Authors Guild

Green Integer

McPherson & Company