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By Root 381 0

God, and Zora Neale Hurston, really terrific. But at some point the black experience is just one experience, while majoring in, let’s say, European literature, opens up so many other experiences, the big ones, ones you can tackle right now, with the benefit of good professors and your peers. You may never get that chance again. That’s all I’m saying. Think it over. Give it a day or two and we’ll talk.” His reaction to my wanting to write could turn into a real box set. It would start with what books I should read on writing (“Gardner’s terrific, of course, but no one can top Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice on the short story, now let’s see, I assume you’ve read Cather’s book on writing already? Updike’s essays are in themselves lessons in writing, have you ever tried John Middleton Murry on style? You can’t forget F. R. Leavis on the novel. I’m going to photocopy some Keats for ya, because you just can’t get better lessons than from just reading Keats. You’ll learn more from the poets simply because there’s more critical writing on poetry. Prose has only been taken seriously since about 1850 . . .”) and go on and on and on from there.

A LITERATURE PROFESSOR at SUNY Purchase named Bell Chevigny was the advisor on our senior project, the two-woman show that Carmen and I wrote and performed. Bell had just written a novel and she invited us to her apartment around Riverside and 110th for a book party. She gave us an inscribed copy of her new novel. Was there anything cooler? I was friends with someone whose book was published, a woman, someone who was happily married and had two daughters. Carmen liked Bell quite a bit, we both did, but Bell was an important symbol for me, a happy, successful writer with a family and many friends who was not living in poverty. Bell wasn’t a drunk, either. A mother. A writer. A normal person.

Our two-woman show, This Side of Virginity, a play on the title of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a big hit, got a great review in that journalistic knockout of a student newspaper, The Load. We were on our way, like the acting students, the dancers everybody wanted to fuck, the painters who rode around on vintage bikes in jeans splattered in multicolored oils, the ultra-focused film majors, to artistic superiority. I thought we’d hit Saturday Night Live to start off with and then I would bust out a humor piece in The New Yorker, establishing me as an incredibly hilarious serious writer. The movies and plays I would do would insure I could travel as much as I wanted and not have to work jobs to support the precarious writing life. Unlike my father, I had a backup plan, a plan B as they say. Acting. I’d like to reiterate in case you missed that: Acting was my backup career, my safety net so that I wouldn’t have to be broke.

Dad came to our show and loved it and called every other day with ideas for Carmen and me and our next show. He thought it’d be great if we did a parody of William F. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line. Carmen didn’t even know what that was, and I tried to explain to Dad the utter lunacy of a twentyyear-old Dominican woman playing William F. Buckley while I took on the role of John Kenneth Galbraith. Meet the Press was another show he thought we’d be terrific at parodying.

He’d leave messages on our answering machine. “Jean, it’s Dad. I got an idea for you. I got an idea for you, I got an idea for Carmen . . .”

A FAILED DIVORCE

AT FIRST THEY ACTED like normal divorced people. They were angry and they spoke badly of one another and dated other people and not each other. Mom could actually smell our father on us when we came in the door on Sunday night after a weekend at his place.

“Have you been at your father’s? You reek of franks and beans.” He was renting his friend Quig’s house in Springs, Long Island, and the wood-burning stove there, the “black cat” as his neighbor the artist Saul Steinberg called it, did leave you smelling as if you had been camping. That first Thanksgiving they were divorced she forbade him to enter her apartment, so Dad