they pulled my hair at charm school.

they stole my guestbook during rolecall.

also named sara with no h + October 23. 2005 = 7:11 p.m.

"it's a new york autumn." she says. we're on 75th st. and lexington. it's sunday, near the end of october. shallow grey light. pale skin. lights on in shops in the afternoon. she's in her 80s and worries that I am not wearing enough; that I will be too cold to walk very far. assure her this is not the case. at le pain quotidien. pots of coffee. tea. tarts. brie & jam. later, the whitney.

details: a childhood in the bronx. subway rides to moma from age 15 on. hundreds of sundays in a row spent "getting right to it, making love to the paintings." the bank of telephones at the conde nast building. "i had 2 blouses and 2 pairs of shoes." she calls her mother after she gets the job and, still in shock, announces her salary. "we cannot tell your father, it's more than he makes!" later, a husband who couldn't love her. who was too preoccupied with his writing. fiction and screenplays and then the women at the television studios. we talk didion, mccarthyism ("the fbi came to our apartment and searched our books. and then they went to my husband's brother's apartment and searched his books."), dia:beacon, jasper johns, "i like more contained things now. small paintings as opposed to large installations. chamber music as opposed to the symphony. funny, isn't it?"

play>she smiled sweetly>rolling stones
play>holland, 1945>neutral milk hotel
play>modern drummer>american analog set
play>carolina>m.ward
play>constants are changing>boards of canada

n o t e s.
< "used to feel like california, with baby eyes so blue, now i feel like carolina, i spilt myself in two."but now we must pack up every piece of the life we used to love, just to keep ourselves at least enough to carry on. and here is where your mother used to sleep. and here is the room where your brothers were born. indentions in the sheets. where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore. and it's so sad to see the world agree that they would rather see their faces filled with flies. we've both been very brave, walk around with both legs, wait for the scary day when we both pull the tricks out of our sleeves. your bones. your voice. your ghost. I understood for once in my life,

�weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.�

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ghosts!