Parasite Pimps Rats to Cats for Sex

Most species reproduce on their own, but Toxoplasma gondii requires two species besides itself to engage in successful procreation.

 Is this single-celled organism able to infect rats and force them to act against instinctual self-preservation?  Can T. gondii over-ride host rodent brains to recognize the acrid warning stink of cat urine as sexually attractive instead of as a hazard indicator?  Does this parasite achieve its carnal desires by making rats suicidal participants in the protozoan mating process so they can be more easily be eaten by infected cats?   Researchers Patrick House, Ajai Vyas and Robert Sapolsky say the answer to all the questions is yes.  Their recent study in PLoS ONE suggests Toxoplasma gondii effectively manipulates the behavior of mule hosts in order to ensure and increase its own reproductive success.

 The sexual phase of the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma’s life cycle takes place exclusively in the dark warmth of a cat’s intestines, where hardy oocytes -immature female egg cells- are created and then excreted in feces.  Once dumped, the oocytes are unable to get where they need on their own and must use others for transport to complete their reproductive cycles.  In an astounding example of behavioral manipulation, the bacteria infects rats causing them to register the odor of cat urine as a sexual turn-on rather than a fear-inducing imminent death warning.  Rats whose brains are infested with Toxoplasma gondii cysts are cognitively impaired by the parasite which seems to re-channel olfactory recognition of cat urine from ‘defensive’ to ‘reproductive’ innate behavior.  The rats process the odor as sexual attractor rather than preservation warning and offer themselves in tasty sacrifice to hungry cats. 

Toxoplasma gondii doesn’t discriminate against carriers.  Just about any mammal, including humans, can potentially be infected with the bacteria and unwittingly coerced into carrying out the parasite’s fiendish reproductive schemes.  But the most effective sex-workers Toxoplasma recruits and pimps out are rodents.  Mice and rats are cats’ naturally preferred treats and thus the perfect delivery system for getting the oocytes back into the animal’s gut.  It is a striking evolutionary adaptation made all the more amazing because a unicellular organism is calling the shots, enslaving far more complex organisms in the pursuit of its only goal, reproduction.

Toxoplasma gondii lets nothing stand in the way of its species’ success.  It is estimated that a third of Earth’s human population is seropositive for Toxoplasma.  Why would such a large percentage of  humans, who do not make up a significant quantity of cat food, be carriers of a parasite that can only reproduce in the digestive system of Felis catus?  Adaptation is an economical strategy that uses the least change necessary to maintain survival.  Although few humans these days are eaten by cats, there was a significant period of time in the joint of evolutionary history of the cat genus Felidae and of the great ape Hominidae when some cats weighed over 100 kilos and hominids made up some part of their diet.

Research into Toxoplasma gondii is illuminating aspects of animal-animal and human-animal relations in unforeseen ways.  Elements of domestication, which is a fundamental building block of human society, may have to be reexamined to see if we are confusing human agency with microbial imperative.

My Met

     I’d been fantasizing about getting locked at the Met after closing for more than a dozen years by the time E.L. Konigsberg won the Newbery Medal in 1968 for her book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Then everybody wanted to do it.  Even now, decades later, you can hardly mention a field trip to the Met without having droves of students get misty-eyed recounting tales of their spiritual kinship with the Kincaid children.  Fine and dandy, I’m always happy to hear that people are reading books, but, honestly, it was my idea.
    I grew up three blocks from the Metropolitan, and a walk across Central Park from the Museum of Natural History.  Whenever bad weather obliged, prohibiting park time after school, Micheline, my vicious French governess, took me to one museum or the other.  It was almost always the Met, not because I favored mummies over dinosaurs, which although I did, I was not permitted the agency to convert into choice, but rather due to its proximity to home.  Micheline could easily yank me to or back from the Met by the arm, or sometimes by the ear, in under five minutes.  The inclemency of New York weather assured plenty of time at the museum, which solidified my belief that the Met was my playground.  And if playground didn’t fully encompass what the Met meant to me, the use of the possessive did.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially the Egyptian gallery, was mine.
    Being Egyptian by birth, and a political refugee from that country my parents never stopped considering home, made my visits to the Egyptian gallery all the more poignant.  I felt particular empathy with the multitude of grave goods that underscored the quotidian,  the very number of which -without even considering their artistry- attest to how much ancient Egyptians loved their lives and their culture.  I spent hours examining the model ships and all the dioramas of house interiors, workshops, granaries and so forth that accompanied Meketre on his journey to the afterlife, a place that these people clearly hoped would be exactly like the beloved land they’d left behind. Life in Egypt was so full and rich that their idea of heaven was a recreation of the life they’d already lived and loved; nothing could be better.
    Over time the museum has changed.  Most of exhibit space has been redesigned to the highest state of the art of curating.  The Egyptian galleries have been redone with great success, offering visitors a far better view.  The Temple of Dendur arrived and the playground I went to when it wasn’t raining was torn down to accommodate it.  A parking garage was installed at the north end on 5th, and the sledding hill lost the straightaway at the foot of the piste.  It is impossible for me to cross the 86th street transverse or travel down 5th Avenue and see the museum revealed without being accosted by memories that well from deeper than just my past .
    At night, the less than significant Temple of Dendur, graced with flawless lighting and ideal architecture, transcends to the extraordinary.  It is an apt trope for Egyptian art, whose makers were consumed with cataloguing the infinite variety and beauty that defined the gorgeous profusion everyday life offered the ruling classes in everything they made.  Egyptian art, after all this time, is suffused with extraordinary life and afterlife.  And it’s all in my museum.
   

Snow Job

Isabel sat cross-legged on the huge bed, chopping blow on a mirror with a single edged blade. She stretched it out in long lines with the razor’s corner, then pushed it back together in a heap and chopped it some more. There was something very satisfying in chopping up rock. How you started with a small blue white chunk and processed it until it became a little white mountain of glittering powder. Like grinding corn, or making butter: a process with a beginning, middle and end. And a far better yield. Pierce walked in and tossed a handful of rubber–banded stacks of hundreds onto the bed, disturbing the cat, whose tail swept across the mirror. The pile of coke scattered, catching the light and glistening the same way as the snowflakes, falling diagonally outside, sparkled as they crossed the beam of the streetlamp on 90^th street.

“Oh, shit. That was a lot of blow, babe. Here, you snort the stuff off Bogey,” she shoved the cat at him, “and I’ll get what’s here.” She laughed and buried her nose in the Indian bedspread. He dove onto the bed and tackled her, and for a few minutes they rolled around, grinding coke diamonds into oblivion.

“Let’s get high.” She sat up.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Isabel reached for the mirror that lay at the far corner of the bed reflecting prisms on the ceiling. Antique boxes with hidden compartments concealing stashes were scattered all around. She chose a heavy silver one and fiddled till she found the spot that popped the secret drawer. She withdrew a small foil rectangle, selected a rock from inside, then tucked the packet back in the box and made it disappear. She started to chop again. The cat came back. Pierce fished the biggest roach out of the ashtray, lit it, and passed it to her. It was the last of those crazy Thai sticks with each bud meticulously wrapped onto its bamboo twig like a little reefer shish kabob. She took a deep hit and kept it in as long as she could. Spicy sweet resinous smoke filled her lungs and spread to the ends of her hair before she allowed what little remained to slowly escape through her nose.

In a few minutes she had broken the new rock into a sparkling little mound of snow. She centered the pile on the mirror and cut it this way then that, extending each quarter into a long thin furrow and ending with four white parallel lines. “Pass me some money,” she said.

Pierce reached down without looking and extracted a wad of bills from under the cat. She chose a crisp hundred and rolled it tightly into a tube. Balancing the mirror on her knee, she bent over and put the straw to her nostril, pressing the opposite shut with the tip of her finger. She carefully moved the rolled bill from one end of the line to the other, then switched nostrils and did the same with the second, hoovering them both cleanly.

The drug hit the inside of her nose high up between the eyes first; then the sharpness smashed into her throat. It dripped down the back, spreading chemical numbness behind. Eyes closed, she let her head fall back and inhaled deeply, drawing in each last speck. In the moments it took for Pierce to remove the straw from her hand and the mirror from her knee, the thrilling familiar surge of pure white energy thrummed throughout Isabel’s body, but especially in her head. The back of her skull lifted off and burst like the evening’s best and final firework; straight up into the stars, hesitating for a moment way high up, before exploding outward in blooming, unfurling, chrysanthemum petals of light. Every synapse in her brain was perfectly timed and firing correctly. Crystalline thoughts fizzed like champagne. Blow made you bloody brilliant.

Somewhere on the bed the phone rang.

“Don’t think for a second I’ll get it, Pierce.”

“You should. You know it’s going to be for you. It always is.”

“Do you honestly expect me to screen my own calls?”

Pierce shook his head and picked up. “Lady Isabel’s residence,” he said in British butler. “Certainly, Sir, may I tell her who’s calling? Yeah, who the fuck else do you think it is, dickhead?” He threw the receiver at her feet. “It’s your boyfriend.”

“Which one?” She reached out, laughing, trying to hook his belt loop with her finger, but he evaded her grasp and pirouetted off the bed.

“Well, let me see, Madam… I believe it’s the one you screwed in the swimming pool in Sand’s Point last year while the whole party watched.”

“Jesus, Pierce, I can’t understand how you put up with that shit. I would never take that crap.” She blew him a kiss from the tips of her fingers, then picked up the phone.

“Long time,” she purred.

Pierce went into the living room, kicking off his boots to opposite corners as he wandered through. He picked up the large Tiffany box that sat on the floor near the coffee table and looked it over. Not long ago it held six Waterford double old-fashioned glasses his father had sent as a wedding gift. Now it had a slot in its top and a label that read “What Shall I Do About Isabel?” affixed to its front. He shook it a couple of times, hoping that perhaps this time some suggestions might have found their way inside. Then he moved to the stereo and dropped the needle precisely onto a track in the middle of the record. The Stones leapt into the room and Jagger howled “…And there will alwaaaaaays be a spaaaa-aaaace in my parking lot/ When you need a little coke and sympa-theeeeeeee." He twisted his Marlboro into a half eaten slice of pizza congealing on the kitchen counter and vanished into the bathroom.

“I’d really like that,” Isabel said into the phone crunched between cheek and shoulder, hands busy rolling one of her famous joints. She licked the gummed edge of the paper, glued it down and twirled the ends, then held it up to examine the faultless white cylinder.

“Yeah, Thursday works well. I have to set up a job at Chanterelle in the afternoon, but it’ll only take a few minutes to get to Prince Street afterwards. Will your friend lend you the loft again?” He answered. She smiled.

She groped around on the bed for her dad’s old Dunhill lighter. Her fingers wrapped around it and its cool gold heft warmed into her palm. The impossibly smooth roll of the cylinder yielding to her thumb pleased her, and she flicked it a number of times. So few things are perfect. Beautiful objects embody the possibility that things can be as we’d like. They offer hope. Isabel had more than once confused the confident closing thud of a European car door and the car’s primal leather pheromones with the guy whose hand had shut it behind her.

She’d smoked half the joint and was getting mellow when the bedroom door flew open and crashed into the wall behind it. A huge erection hovered momentarily in the doorway before sailing into the room, followed, in due course, by the naked and just-showered Pierce. The thing was breathtaking --a star from the East—and it drew him towards her like a magnet to true north. Isabel had never met another dick with such gravitas and presence. It caused her penis envy beyond the standard female yen for the convenience of being able to pee standing up – she yearned to know how it felt to wield such a protean appendage. He called it a gift across time from his Cherokee ancestors; a legacy from a brave named something like Dick Doubles as Tent-Post. It glided to a halt inches from her face, and she watched it bob and weave until its mission was revealed. Along the length of the rosy shaft, in blue eye pencil, she read the words Get off the phone. Now.

“Hey, listen, I’ve got to run. Something’s come up. Yes, tomorrow, 4:30-5ish.”

She hung up and kicked the cat off the bed.

Mantis Thoughts

New York. Summer 2001

No matter where Isabel’s thoughts began, they ended with her husband meeting sudden death. Sometimes it was she who killed him. This surprised her, because she had a visceral certainty of both the sanctity of life and the actuality of reincarnation. She never killed spiders, and would always save and relocate them. After she read a biography of Albert Schweitzer in 5^th grade, she stopped killing ants as best she could, although she continued to dislike them, especially at picnics. And although she had long loved the British murder classics, Tey, Christie, Conan-Doyle, she had never suspected that contemplating her own husband’s death could be almost as exhilarating as a good read. Her thoughts were drawn to his demise again and again, as irresistibly as a child’s tongue to a loose tooth. At breakfast time, as she dashed about getting herself and the kids ready for work and school, she imagined him drowning in his bowl of fiber cereal and 1% milk. In her corner office cubicle overlooking Grand Central where she talked to clients all day, she watched from the corner of her eye as Alex repeatedly tumbled slow-mo through the air against the backdrop of the Chrysler Building.

A smidgin of peanut butter stirred into one of the fabulous dinners she tossed together every night was all it would take. By the time she’d return from reading the children to sleep, he would have croaked from anaphylactic shock. Isabel would find him face down in his penne al’ Amatriciana, beard flecked with basil and a bit of pecorino, and she would be a widow. So much simpler and cheaper than divorce. What’s more, if he died that way, the children would be given the chance to remember him, in time, in a more sympathetic, if mythical, light. There would be an autopsy, because healthy men in their forties, even nationally-ranked alcoholics, are not expected to die in their dinners. The results would confirm death by peanut butter. Their son Jack’s favorite food, and poison to Alex. A tragic accident. But although killing him wasn’t a possibility, it was an enticing option, and such an easy one, that her mind kept leading her back to it and her hand kept reaching for the Jif. Only the conviction that she’d get away with it stopped her from doing it.

Isabel was in the kitchen in Southampton cleaning up the kitchen according to Daisy’s framed “Rules of the Inn” checklist on the wall, before the Sunday evening drive with the sun in her eyes back to town. The children were frolicing in the pool, swimming underwater in the deep end. She had taught them both to swim at six months, and they were as comfortable in the water as the penguins at the Central Park Zoo.

“The parakeets died again,” Alex said as soon as she picked up the phone

“It wasn’t my fault. Ex-birds, you know, like the dead parrot on Monte Python.” Through the phone, she could see his big yellow teeth talking in his beard.

“You killed the children’s pets two weeks in a row and you bring up Monte Python? Don’t you see anything wrong with that?” She concentrated on remembering to breathe. It frequently happened that she caught herself forgetting to altogether, or doing it wrong, and not getting enough oxygen to her brain. She inhaled til her lungs were fully expanded, then exhaled through her mouth. Good in, bad out. And again. The breathing exercise soothed her overbeating heart, allowed her to think, kept her from screaming. She was shocked by the intensity of her revulsion, how it contrasted with how she had once loved him.

“I was reading on the couch. I went in to check if the water was boiling for the pasta. They were lying in the bottom of the cage, with their little bird feet up in the air. Dead. They’re so Jurassic when you look at them closely, have you noticed that?”

Isabel could hear the ice cubes in his glass clinking before he continued. “It must have been the exhaust from the buses idling. I left the window open.”

She had read a quote once from David Frost, the British television journalist, who said something about how Kissinger lied because it was in his interest, but Nixon lied because it was in his nature. Her husband, Alex, was a Nixon to the core. He was both pathologically incapable of recognizing fact from fiction and free of any moral compunction to do so.

“Jesus, Alex, you lousy son of a bitch, you got drunk and fell asleep and the pasta water boiled away. The fumes from the overheated non-stick lining poisoned the birds. Like canaries in a coal mine, you stinking bastard.”

“What a load of crap! It was the fumes from the crosstown bus.”

“For crissake, we live on the 11^th floor. The same thing happened last weekend, Alex. Surely you have some memory of it. Can’t you just admit it’s your fault?”

He laughed. “That’s my Isabel, so quick to judge. I don’t care what you think, but you have to tell the kids. I don’t want them to walk in and be traumatized.”

“You might have thought of that earlier. I’m not covering for you anymore.”

“This is no time to let your feelings for me prevent you from doing what’s best for the kids, Isabel. You tell them the fumes killed them, and Daddy made a mistake by leaving the window open, and that it was an accident.”

“Drop dead, Alex.” She hung up, pushed open the screen door, and dove into the sparkling pool.

Leaving Egypt

Family legend has it that our ancestors didn't leave Egypt with Moses and all the other Jews because great-to-the-nth-grandfather was playing cards with Pharoah at the time. Instead, we waited until 1953; one year after the abdication and exile of King Farouk, a year after the last hand of gin rummy had been played at the Montazah Palace in Alexandria. My father always remembered the card game at the palace when Farouk’s four kings trumped his four aces. ”I have five kings,” said King Farouk as he fanned four of them onto the card table, “these four,” and placing his hand on his heart, fixed my father in the eye, “and I am the fifth!” Not for long, thought my Dad.

I am standing on the deck of a large ship under the strong Egyptian sun, surrounded by odors of hot deck paint, salt, wet ropes and fuel. My shoes and socks look very white, and I feel very small next to Yasme, my Turkish nanny. She is round and a little shifty. My mother is crying and hugging Uncle Mohammed. He bends down to kiss me and gives me a pink and gold bag full of chocolates. “Have a good vacation, I will see you soon. Don’t eat the chocolates until the boat is far away from the shore. Do you understand?” I nod, and kiss him goodbye. The steam horns blow, the ship shakes off its ropes, we pull away from the crescent harbor into the sapphire sea. I can no longer distinguish Uncle Mohammed waving on the dock. Dolphins dance round the boat. It is time to eat the chocolates. I pass the bag to greedy Yasme. When she finally gives it back, I peer into the bag to see what's left, and feel a stab of disappointment to find the chocolates gone and, instead, my mother's jewelry glinting at me through the empty bits of gold foil.

I had been told that we were going on vacation, but we weren't. It was 1953 and we were fleeing Nasser's Egypt. I was two. We had no papers and no home. Just a chocolate bag of jewelry.

For the next two years we lived in many places. Istanbul, where it was so cold that the Bosporus froze, and where a lobster Yasme was cooking lunged from its pot and grabbed my sweater. Paris, where we stayed with Aunt Vicky, Uncle Edouard and my three older cousins in a building with a triangular front, like the Flatiron. You could see the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen where Uncle Edouard sang 'It ain't gonna rain no more, no more' in a Scots accent while making us fried eggs for breakfast. I can smell the butter, hear it sizzle, taste that intensely yellow yolk on my baguette. So many years later, it is still the ultimate egg.

We lived in Lebanon in the mountains above Beirut where the air was fragrant with cedar and the forest was peopled with porcupines and gypsies with dancing bears. There were scorpions under rocks and fields fat with grasshoppers. We ate ice cream flavored with the resin of the cedars. In Switzerland, we lived in Vevey, at the Beau Sejour, where Henry James wrote Daisy Miller, and you could pick your trout from a tank in the dining room. At the Palace in Gstaad, I tortured the slugs in the elegant gardens with my salt shaker, and drank the world's best hot chocolate. I'm sure they made it with cream.

Hotels, usually rather grand ones, were home. My father loved luxurious hotels, but we stayed in them without him. He was off working, trading rice, mostly in India, which was much farther away then and not a place you brought your wife and child. My mother, Yasme and I lived the strange half-life of refugees. Reasonably well-off political refugees, yes, but none the less people without passports or permanent address.

We have an album full of photos of me smiling and my mother looking brave, surrounded by people whose names we never really knew. I ate meringue swans at birthday parties for children I'd met the day before and never saw again. I honed my table manners at dinners in hotel dining rooms where expatriate American jazz musicians played wondrous music while the haute bourgeoisie of countries that no longer existed ate their meals in silence. There was an antique Russian couple in ancient evening clothes, (I may be imagining her tiara), who each night sadly raised their glasses to the Czar and his poor family in lugubriously accented French. These were my companions, now memories, their legacy a sense of intimate kinship with deposed nobility. Believing what I was told that children should be seen and not heard, I sat silently and ate up my surroundings.

My mother pined for my father and for Egypt, became ill with hepatitis that was treated with spoonfuls of olive oil. She was sick and unhappy. I was blissfully unaware; completely oblivious in that totally self-absorbed way that only very young children can get away with. Eventually our visas came through, and we were notified that we would be allowed to enter the US under the Swiss quota, my mother having by chance been born there, since the Egyptian quota was filled. We left for Genoa and set sail for New York on the Cristoforo Colombo after a hotel Christmas. We celebrated New Year's of 1955 with champagne, caviar and gorgeous balloons while an Italian band played Old Lang Syne in the snowy North Atlantic.

We settled in New York after I complained to my mother that I didn’t think much of our hotel, and when were we moving. Instead of going to Rio as planned, my complaint to my mother backfired and we stayed in New York for good.

I was enrolled at the Spence School, where I spent the next dozen years. Spence taught me to love to learn simply for the love of learning, and remains the source of my endless love for the written word. It was a very rarified atmosphere, to say the least, where my classmates had museums named after them on Fifth Avenue, slept in Abraham Lincoln’s camp bed, had their great grandfather’s statue gracing Grand Central station.

My grandfather wore a fez, was a scholar of Arabic literature and either knew TE Lawrence or simply loved The Seven Pillars of Wisdom above all other books. On Father’s Day at school when I was a child, I wanted desperately to have a father like my classmates who wore big ugly shoes with holes punched in them called wing tips, that looked suitable for the gamekeeper, who lunched at their clubs, and worked, or seemingly did nothing at something mysterious called “being in bonds.” My father, with his European accent and fine Italian shoes spent his time on the phone doing business in six languages, and pacing the hall at night hoping his deals would go through. He was very foreign, Italian my friends said, and a terrible embarrassment to me. I dreamed of waking up named Penelope Appleby, having straight hair, and with any luck, a grandmother with a house in Bermuda.

In 1965 I fell love with a long haired Australian boy who went to Collegiate at a Lester Lanin subscription dance at the Women’s Republican Club. We hung out at the Night Owl, the Five Spot, Gerde’s Folk City, the Café Wha? Our days were spent in Washington Square. We played the guitar and listened to Dylan; Peter, Paul & Mary; Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel. When he went back to Australia, the bottom of my world came unscrewed. To cheer me up, my parents sent me to summer school.

And cheer me up they did. They sent me to study at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1967, the summer of Carnaby Street, Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…The Summer of Love, for goodness’ sake, and a wonderful place and time to be sixteen with a broken hear and a thirst to sample everything. I have no idea what my parents were thinking.

Amazingly, I went to class, and fell in love with the Romantics, and when I wasn’t riding my bike through miraculously, heartrbreakingly beautiful Oxford, or punting with English boys, I threw myself headlong into the bad boys, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Byron, and the even worse boys, the degenerate Restoration guys, De Quincey, Wilde….Not to mention the very worst boys, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, Cream, and the Who.

By the time I returned to junior year at Spence, I had expanded way beyond the confines of Spence. We cut school and hung out at the Modern in front of Picasso’s Guernica, the best place in town to meet smart guys. On another day, my friends and I cut school and went to a peace rally at Columbia, where everybody was smoking pot. A Spence teacher busted us and we were hauled in to see the Head of School, a Victorian lady who had barely adjusted to the 50s, and didn’t even want to hear anything about tuning in, turning on and dropping out. I opted out of Spence and went off to boarding school in Switzerland where a rigorous academic schedule and lots of skiing kept me on a self imposed straight and narrow. It was an extraordinary year.

That year at Montesano I completed either two or three British A Levels, a Diplome Superieure de Langue et de Civilization Francaise through the Unviversity of Nancy, France and a couple of AP tests. The one thing Montesano lacked was a college advisor, which instead of seeming like a drawback really appealed to me at the time. Although I had wanted for years to study archaeology at Yale, and they were accepting women for the first time that year, I didn’t even apply. My parents, who subscribed to the out-of-sight-out-of-mind school of parenting had never once in the entirety of my eighteen years and academic career never asked me what I would like to do with my life, or where I would like to go to school.

No member of my immediate family had ever gone to college, and women, after all, were going to marry anyway. As I grew older, my father’s deeply middle eastern views clashed more and more with my life. I moved in with a guy I knew, and got a job selling poetry at Brentano’s. My father did not speak to me for over a year, he told me I was dead to him. Not long thereafter, a situation arose where my roommate suggested we marry. Woodstock had come and gone, the world hadn’t changed. He was a sweet guy, and an excellent poet but the Irish in him made him write his verses on cocktail napkins which dissolved before last call. I married him, only to find out years later on my father’s death that he had entered into a financial agreement with him and had paid him to make an honest woman out of me. My father had secretly orchestrated my marriage to a man I didn’t love in order to save face.

Breakfast: New York: October 23rd, 1967

Isabel was already dressed when the clock radio clicked on and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell burst into Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. She checked the mirror and rolled the waistband of her plaid uniform skirt up several times, shortening it a good six inches. Throwing on her blazer, she dashed to the bathroom, where, ablutions made, she examined the collection of diet and sleep aids in her parents’ medicine cabinet and popped a pill. She tossed a couple of Valiums in her pocket as an afterthought. Courage thus screwed to the sticking place, she entered the kitchen, where the family breakfast was underway and the wall clock announced that 17 minutes remained until the start of school.

Raf Hakim, her father, the Grand Master of Rice, sat at the far end of the breakfast table hidden behind the Times opened to its fullest extent. Elegant fingers and crisp French cuff glided out to retrieve coffee and retreat with it to the sanctuary of the financial pages. The lavender of his cologne mingled with coffee, toast, and maple syrup. Her mother, Daisy, chatted on the phone with either her sister in Paris or the one in Geneva, exchanging overnight gossip in French sprinkled with Italian, Arabic, Spanish and English depending on the degree of privacy certain bits required. Only the curly telephone cord tethered her to morning in New York.

Isabel took in the front page that faced out at her: 680 protesters arrested at weekend’s 100,000 strong Washington peace march; attempted levitation of the Pentagon by Allen Ginsberg unsuccessful; 83 American soldiers killed yesterday in Vietnam; Dow Jones Industrial Average to open at 700 something; a photograph of hippie chicks offering flowers to MPs pointing bayonets at them.

Isabel’s parents had refused to even discuss letting her go to the weekend peace march on Washington. Forced to act, she’d told a convincing lie about a Saturday school newspaper meeting, and went to the one in New York instead, despite being grounded. She’d gotten busted when a couple of sycophantic childless friends of her parents –Raf and Daisy preferred them that way-- came for cocktails the previous evening waving the Sunday Daily News with anticipatory relish. The picture on page one of a girl passing what looked like a joint to a long-haired guy in Central Park couldn’t possibly be anyone but their friends’ impetuous daughter, they declared. Raf and Daisy instantly agreed.

In point of fact, it wasn’t Isabel, just an inconvenient doppelganger, but the resemblance was so uncanny that it wasn’t worth arguing. She was screwed either way. The violation added another three months --not to be served concurrently-- to the grounding sentence that now stretched sixteen months ahead to winter of 1969 and what by then would be the second half of senior year and the start of Bobby Kennedy’s first term as President. Free at last. She yearned for that better time to come.

“Maman!” Edward grabbed his mother’s chin and used it as a rudder to steer Daisy’s attention to Isabel. It was his regular MO and his preferred target. He pointed to his sister’s hiked up skirt. “Regarde, Maman.” Exposure to the Babel of home had left Edward unable to speak English properly, and his classmates at PS 6 made fun of him. Fearing permanent psychic trauma, since he was already a crybaby and a liar, or what Daisy called sensitive, it was decided that Edward would focus on learning one language only and that it would be French. So Daisy --with Raf in agreement, of course-- yanked him out of public school and sent him to the Lycée Français where the teachers smoked Gitanes and so did a lot of the kids, although not that many in lower school.

Edward had ended Isabel’s run as an only child nine years earlier when she was seven. He was an avid nasal spelunker and trailed a faint whiff of canned peas. Since school had started the month before, he’d been decorating the wall shelf where the toaster sat with little snot balls he rolled between his thumb and forefinger. He glowered and flicked the work in progress at her, but it landed in the syrup pooled round their younger brother’s waffle.

Charles was four and profoundly deaf. He wore hearing aids the size of Penguin Classics fore and aft in a leather harness buckled over his shirt. Thick wires connected them to large beige knobs twisted into his ears. Daisy wouldn’t hear of his going to a school for the deaf or talking with his hands. If Helen Keller had learned to speak, then so would Charles. He just needed his own Annie Sullivan. For this purpose, Ivy Sparrow, a tiny British Montessori governess who dressed only in royal blue and bore a striking resemblance to her avian namesake, was hired and charged with civilizing the wild child, from breakfast to bedtime, day in and day out.

Isabel soon discovered that Miss Sparrow read the Christian Science Monitor naked in the kitchen late at night, and that she was, at that time, always eager to discuss the writings of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Isabel was nonplussed by these sightings. All she wanted at 2 a.m. was a soothing glass of milk and an uneventful trip to the kitchen. She had a pre-ulcer condition, which was not helped by this new concern about running into the bare, forked nanny. She already worried about everything, and the thought of developing satellite anxieties distressed her further.

Charles beamed at Isabel and held her eye as he ripped an ear knob out of his head and dropped it into his mother’s cup of the chicory blend that was sent up each month from New Orleans.

“Bad boy,” he enunciated, much more clearly than Helen ever could have.

Miss Sparrow’s relentless cheerfulness, combined with her unshakeable belief that anything could be a learning opportunity, exhausted Isabel. The woman never passed up a chance to educate. With alacrity, she snatched the earpiece by its cord from Daisy’s coffee. It arced brown drops across the marble kitchen table.

“Well, Charles, tell me, which one of your hearing aids is wet?”

He pointed to the one dripping in her hand.

“Yes, that’s right, but we want to speak, not point, don’t we?”

The boy nodded.

“Say ‘wet’, let me hear you. And let’s speak up, shall we?” She favored the forward momentum and implied threat of the hortatory subjunctive.

“Weh,” said the boy in his peculiar disembodied tone.

“Wet. With a T.” She exaggerated, articulating the words so he could lip-read better. Everybody was supposed to do it, but most of the time they didn’t bother and just bellowed at him.

“Wed.” He smiled and showed the gap between his front teeth that people used to say meant he was born lucky. Since he had started wearing hearing aids nobody said it anymore.

“Wed,” he offered again.

Daisy was oblivious to her deaf son’s act of defiance, and Isabel wanted to escape while she still was. Signing a conspiratorial I love you to Charles, and receiving the kiss he blew back, Isabel emerged from the shadow of the pantry into the kitchen. The fluorescent overhead fixture buzzed the high pitched whine of a distant dentist’s drill – a sound that agonized Isabel, but which no one else in the household admitted to even being able to hear -- and the too yellow wallpaper accosted her with bogus morning cheer.

“Good morning, everybody. Hope you all have a good day. Sorry, must run. Goodbye.” She flashed a peace sign at her assembled family, intending to convey a breezy teenage insouciance very foreign to what she felt, then zipped out the back door to wait for the elevator. Daisy came after her moments later, gold mules clacking on the granite landing. The phone cord stretched all the way to the elevator –twenty feet at least. Isabel concentrated on willing the doors open before her mother reached her.

“Good morning, Nelson,” she greeted the elevator man and slid in before it was fully open. Daisy was getting near, speaking Arabic, whatever she was saying top secret. Isabel checked her watch.

“Please hurry, Nelson, I can’t be late for school today.”

“You know I gotta open the gate all the way before I can shut it again, Izzy. I taught you how to operate this cab when you were ten. Hold your horses.”

“Buenos días, Nelson. Momentito, por favor.” Once Daisy ascertained your mother tongue, she addressed you in it forever. She stuck her Love That Red fingertips in the door to prevent him from shutting it. Isabel made herself small behind the elevator man.

“Get out of there right now, young lady. You do not leave this house that way. What do you think this is, a hotel?” The phone cord uncoiled as far as it would and seemed intent on pulling her back. Isabel’s little terrier, Hippie, flew out the kitchen door and ran into the elevator. He sat up and begged to be taken away; anxiety danced in his round brown eyes.

“Poor little beastie,” Isabel murmured, rubbing his strawberry blond head. Daisy yelled at the dog to come here now. Her voice echoed down the shaft.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hakim, people are waiting for the elevator.”

“This is not over, Isabel,” her mother hissed. “Come home straight after school. I needn’t remind you that you are grounded for the foreseeable future. And roll your skirt down immediately.”

Hippie’s nails scrabbled on the polished stone landing as he tore out of the elevator into the house. Daisy withdrew her hand and Nelson slid the brass gate closed.

Good Hair Day

I laughed at Candy, my beloved hairdresser of 25 years, when she said to me on July 22nd that letting her straighten my hair would change my life. Brazilian Blowout, she told me, would result in the swingy, frizz-free, carefree tresses I've longed for my whole life. Or at least since I first ironed my hair in 7th grade.

"And," she said again,"I swear it will change your life."

I snorted or chortled here, my Diet Peach Snapple threatening to exit through my nose. Changing my life is something I've been working hard at, and it has nothing to do with anything as trite as straightening my hair.

"You know I've given up on trips to Lourdes. I've come to terms, in a mature, Zen kind of way, with the fact that my hair, rather than be chemically forced to be something that by nature it isn't, is to be cherished for what it is. It must be embraced."

My hair is ridiculously fine, but I have a lot of it. Left to itself, it corkscrews in the underlayers and the top ones pouf into electrocuted poodle fuzz. I've been wearing my darkish blonde hair shoulder length in its natural state of curl/frizz since returning to New York aeons ago from boarding school. That was in Switzerland, a wonderful country, not only for the obvious alps, watches and chocolates, but for its crisp, dry air and very high annual percentage of good hair days.

New York weather is ideally suited to a penal colony. A hybrid of Siberia and Devil’s Island, it is either frigid or broiling and always too damp. Manhattan is the worst place on earth for my hair, except for Indonesia in August. My hair was so bad in Sumatra, that I became convinced I'd done something awful in a previous lifetime. My move from NYC to Boulder many years ago, was prompted as much by the lure of being able to ski at A-Basin every day, as by the enticement of how great my hair looked whenever I went out to Colorado to visit The Skier.

At the very best of atmospherically benevolent conditions --usually three or four days in the dead of winter here in the city, when even the humidity is too cold to go out-- my hair, I've been told, has a certain Botticelli angel look, although I think it is more pre-Raphaelite myself. But why quibble? Hair is evanescent, and of no importance in the greater scheme of things. Actually, that's not even remotely true: hair is hugely important in terms of evolutionary biology, but we can discuss that another time.

I know that having frizzy hair is not important; that looks are not what matters. People don't commit suicide because they can no longer deal with the lifelong curse of untameable frizz; they find ways to deal with it. Death by frizz may exist, and, come to think of it, probably does on reality TV,Obese, Pregnant, Underage & Frizzy,but my experience with it has been more along the lines of deep seasonal depression, terminal avoidance of mirrors, and buying endless miracle hair products. I have justified spending so much money on hair stuff that uses the words hair, frizz, humidity and control in one sentence, that it merits its own 12 step program.

My hair makes me very unhappy. That's the bottom line.

So when Candy told me that this new Brqazilian hair straightening would change my life, and that it would cost 500 times the average daily wage in Central Africa, I rejected it out of hand because I just don't do things like that. You should know that I am a long (twice) divorced mother of two. My daughter is 21 and was born when I was 37. Old. My son is 15 and was born when I was 43. Really old. I was finally brave enough to take them and leave their alcoholic father, the Sperm Donor, 8 years ago this month. I've been a headhunter for the past 15 years, but the business of getting people jobs is dead right now. I'm a junior at Columbia, starting my second year at General Studies, the most fabulous school in the world. I will get my BA in Writing in 2011, when I turn 60. It's frightening to write that down.

I know that nothing worthwhile involves instant gratification. The notion of being able to buy something that would immediately --three hours from now-- change my life was enticing but not believable. Candy kept swearing it was true. She kept pushing. Sometimes you need to do something risky and out of character. Just to shake things out of a rut. Unmeployed student, divorced mother of two, responsible for staggering amounts of tuition, care of a handicapped sibling and an 85 year old mother with dementia, I did the only thing I could think of. I pulled out the credit card I hadn't used in almost in a year, and said the magic words, charge it.

My life has changed.

I love my hair. I don't really believe it will stay this way, although apparently it really will, for 6-12 months. It is shiny and swingy and straight. My hair is so fine that it has no weight at all. This gravity defying aspect is completely gone: my hair is now heavy and falls like hair in the Pantene ads on TV. I have found the Holy Grail, the Pouf-B-Gone I've hankered for since I first ironed my hair in 1963.

My hair and I went out to East Hampton on the Jitney to visit Thelma & Louise. We sat on the sand at Georgica beach, where my hair always looks like a Chia-Pet. It remained smooth, lustrous, completely free of frizz. Fog rolled in and enveloped us; I sat in my sand chair casually flipping my hair and running my fingers through its silkiness. We were caught in two different rain storms. My hair got wet and didn't frizz! I can't believe it. I shake my hair and it moves. My hair is in better condition than it's ever been.

I walked in to writing workshop and the women, not prone to warmth, stopped in mid sentence and told me I looked great, really put together, and how was I was managing to look so cool in this weather. They couldn't hide their astonishment. It is, of course, the hair. Having Jennifer Aniston/Network anchor hair goes a long way to helping me project that confident wasp chic I've always secretly longed for.