Mystery, Menace, and Early Sorrow
2018 Notable Essay, The Best American Essays, 2019 edition
They stayed wide eyed and unblinking on their shelf in my small, overheated room, watching me watch the man and woman in the apartment across the →
My Brother’s Guns
My cousin’s eyes are blazing as he turns to me and Bill. “Those two guys are going to kill us in our tents tonight,” he says.My first camping experience. We’re in Vermont over a Columbus Day weekend on the land of our absent friend Vinny. I’m keeping →
Searching for George, Dan, and Fergus
George is in China now, buried there. Or maybe not. Maybe he was cremated, his ashes flung into Beijing smog—I’ll never know. But one thing is certain: this son of New England is not in America. →
Beauty, Truth, and Gloves
The lights have dimmed, strings and horns swell ominously, and a gloved hand looms: murder is in the air. And because of those gloves, the hapless forensic scientists will come up empty after dusting for fingerprints at the crime scene. →
A Southern Education: Charlottesville to Richmond, VA
When a city’s downtown is deserted on a Saturday afternoon, I want to go AWOL, too. That was my reaction after leaving our Richmond, Virginia, hotel →
Unfit for Execution
Can you dream your own death? Once, while sleeping, my life was spared because I had a cold. One by one, people in single file were being flung off the subway platform onto the tracks. It was winter, a season no less →
On lunch breaks, escaping my gray government desk, I’d wander the aisles of a kingdom floating a few steps above street level in a 19th-century building. It was a domain of great calm and beauty filled not with gold and jewels, but shoes the →
The Cloak Room
The very sound of it was foreign to our ears. Who wore cloaks? Vampires. Stealthy spies with hidden daggers. And men in top hats who appeared in movies and old-fashioned story books. Certainly no one we knew as first-graders at St. Joan of Arc →
The Chemical Company
Even if the day was sunny, the air would seem to darken the longer we drove and the farther we bore into the industrial zone. The red brick factories built early in the 20th century were still holding on then, producing staples, electrical circuits, distributor caps →
What We Found in Them Thar Hills
Driving on the Peak to Peak Highway through Colorado’s Rockies with my husband, Bill, and his mountain-climbing friend, Bob, I glimpsed in the valley beyond a cluster of low buildings painted blue, pink, →
Bannerman Island
There is something in me that loves an island. I live on one (Queens, New York, on Long Island, across the East River from the isle of Manhattan). I’m attracted to all kinds—those buried by volcanic eruptions; adrift in a blue void endless as the cosmos; locus of →
A Pilgrimage to 5 Pointz
From the elevated train in Queens, I’d glimpse the phantasmagoria that was 5 Pointz. A riot of color and occasional faces covering every inch of the old, block-long factory, it felt hallucinatory. In a minute—not enough time for the eye or brain to take it →
Desire in New Mumbai
Oh to drape my flesh with the rippling silk of a turquoise sari, gold-flecked above a peek of bare midriff, my eyes kohl-rimmed, hair hennaed, feet sandaled now but also in winter because I carry the subcontinent within me, I shimmer its heat as I →
My Spanish Shawl
I haven’t looked at it for many years, but I see it clearly in my mind’s eye: gold silk, deeply fringed, and embroidered with multicolored flowers, bought in Granada on my honeymoon. In Europe for the first time, living on $20 a day, we →