The following is a short synopsis and a few pages from my manuscript, A SERIALIZED LIFE RENDERED IN SPORADIC SPURTS previously known as POLLY BRILLIANT’S WILD DANCE

 

A SERIALIZED LIFE RENDERED IN SPORADIC SPRURTS is a semi-fictional novel about a middle-aged Jewish woman—a female fusion of Zorba the Greek and Odysseus. From birth until age fifty-five, when she moves to Greece, her traveling companions have been disenchantment, restlessness, and internal conflict.

 

Polly’s journey propels us through Boston, Berkeley, Barcelona, Las Vegas, Athens, Mykonos, and Kythera.

 

The story begins in a small city north of Boston where she irreverently survives her lower-middle class family, turns into a precocious five-year-old vamp and approaches her teenage years frustrated at not being able to dump her virginity because of an over-protective father. Polly fails to become a beatnik, trashes two unsuccessful marriages, and adds an illegal abortion to her sketchy history.

 

Polly spends a year on Mykonos and falls in love with Greece. When she returns to the States she promises herself to retire at an early age and live forever on a Greek island. Five years after getting her AARP card, Polly decides to pursue her dream:  to live on a Greek island. She sells her possessions, and buys a one-way ticket to the island of Kythera. It’s time to forget her poor choices in men and redirect her creative juices into her passion for painting and writing.

 

While living on the island, ex-husbands and ex-lovers spontaneously appear through a series of flashbacks, disrupting Polly’s idyllic existence:  one apparition emerges from a Byzantine church, another from behind an ancient olive tree, while a skinny naked Jewish man arises from oncoming waves with a huge crucifix in his mouth on the day of the Epiphany. Polly discovers one man pierced through with a spit, roasting over hot coals on Easter Sunday. These resurrections remind her of their zany relationships, thus the flashbacks.

 

After ten years of Greek madness, Polly learns how to dance through life with wit and renewed determination. Reinvented, she returns to the States, her home within, and the circle complete.

 

 

Thanks for visiting, your comments are welcome.

 

 

LEAVING HOME

 

“Mrs. Mendelbaum can’t sleep,” my mother announced during one of my rare appearances in the kitchen.

“And?”

“You’re coming home too late, Polly. She calls me after the ten o’clock news and wants to know what time you’ll be home. Then I can’t go back to sleep. She says she stays awake until three or four in the morning waiting for you to come home. Come home earlier. We need to get some sleep.”

Mrs. Mendelbaum, the eighty-year-old widow living next door, became the catalyst I’d been waiting for. My mother wanted me to change my lifestyle for a woman I’d seen only once in twelve years and whose first name I’d never known.

                 Three months prior to my mother’s request, Shaynee and I rented an apartment on the first floor of a gray stone apartment building in Boston on Commonwealth Avenue. Out of fear of, and consideration for, my parents, I hadn’t spent one night in my new apartment. My mother’s overt request pushed me over the line. I decided to help Mrs. Mendelbaum and my mother get some sleep.

                 I told my brother, Marty, about my plan.

“When are you telling them?” Panic spread over his face like a psoriasis flare-up.

“Saturday. I’ll tell her in the morning. Dad, when he gets home from work.”

Early Saturday morning I heard Marty leave the house. I crawled out of bed a few hours later and found my mother in the kitchen cooking borscht. My father would arrive home at noon, shave, bathe, and at 12:45 top off his borscht with a large dollop of sour cream. The rest of the day he’d spend relaxing, maybe wash the car he loved, or spend extra time reading the newspaper. But, not today.

I poured a glass of milk and sat at the table. Rose stood at the stove.

I folded and unfolded the edge of the table cloth and stared into Mrs. Kendall’s  kitchen window on the second floor in the next building. “I’m moving. Shaynee and I rented an apartment on Commonwealth Ave.”

 “When?” She stirred faster.

“Today. I’m going to start putting my things into my car. As soon as I finish my milk.”

“What time?” Her shoulders dropped. I wondered: Is she relieved or concerned?

My future was tenuous. She’d tried to help me build a secure future, but I’d failed her.

After high school graduation, a small teacher’s college in New Haven, Connecticut accepted me. I still wanted to be a painter, but after the college newspaper published some of my poems, anonymously, I decided to incorporate poetry into my creative repertoire.

“You, Miss Anonymous, are an enigma and a narcissist,“ the editor of the paper wrote in a note he left in my inbox. I was impressed even though I didn’t know what the hell he meant.

I read about the Beatniks in Time Magazine and the controversy over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. I called the bookstore downtown to order a copy. The fellow who answered the phone told me the books would be in on Saturday and he couldn’t reserve them. I remembered the book burning party in Harvard Square two years earlier, in 1957, when my reserved copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was nearly lost in a flicker of a flame. I had arrived before the Cambridge police, and ran like a thief with my copy before they torched all copies of Miller’s book outside the bookstore on Mass. Ave. It was illegal to buy or loan a copy of Tropic of Cancer in Boston in the ‘50s.) At 6 o’clock Saturday morning, I rode my bicycle downtown New Haven in the rain. I was the first one there. With treasured purchase in hand, I stopped off at a coffee shop and read my thin, new book. I now owned both books; Miller I understood, Ginsberg was a complete mystery. Reading Howl again, fifty years later, I still don’t get it.

On weekends I used the meager salary I received from working in the school library three days a week and the allowance my parents sent me to pay for a round trip train ticket into New York City and a hotel room in Greenwich Village. There was just enough money left over to buy a couple of cans of anchovies, several packages of bread sticks and an occasional cup of coffee. My class schedule went from Tuesday through Friday, enabling me to have three glorious days in Beatnik Land each week.

I’d schlep between the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street and the Bitter End Café on Bleecker Street with my copy of Howl clutched to my bosom. Nursing a cup of coffee encrusted around the edges with god-only-knows-what, I sat in a trance and listened to Gregory Corso mumble through his tormented wordy visions. I stopped worrying about being a virgin and fantasized about being part of the “beat generation.” This obsession shift was a relief because between 1952 and the present, 1959, dumping my virginity was all I  had thought about.

No one noticed me. I was, again, invisible as in Harvard Square, where I wanted more than anything to make an impression.

I reverted to my old philosophy, image is everything, an ideology born when I decided to become an artist: If I look like an artist, I am artist; if I look like a beatnik, I am beatnik. In large, black letters I wrote abstract statements haphazardly on the front and back of an old gray sweatshirt and wore jeans a bit torn, but not ragged. Two medium-sized safety pins held the heels and soles of my dirty sneakers together. Periodically, one of the safety pins snapped and unpinned, stabbing me painfully in the heel of my foot causing me to limp. A physical defect might make me more interesting and might attract the attention of someone important.

Everything went along fine for about six months. Then my parents called with bad news, “We’re coming to get you. You’re coming home. We’ll be there in two weeks. On Saturday. Make sure your things are packed and you’re ready to go.” I assumed they received a copy of my grades. The same report showed up in my mailbox and it wasn’t good.

My interest in teaching elementary school dissipated after I watched a suffering student teacher stand in front of twenty-five second graders. Three students picked their noses, two ate their lunches behind lifted desktops, two rubbed their bottoms on the edge of their seats, while another stuck his hand down the front of his pants and left it there until the teacher announced lunchtime. Several read comic books hidden under their papers.

I took one last trip to the big city, stocked up on breadsticks and anchovies at the corner market and went straight to my usual hotel, usual room on Bleecker Street. I ate my entire stash knowing this would be the last time I’d be dining here and then threw up for five hours. (Forty-five years later, I still can’t look at an anchovy or hear the crack of a breadstick without experiencing waves of nausea.)

So, there I was, back living with Rose and Hymie, my independence temporarily suspended.

“I told your mother it was a waste of money sending you to college,” Dad reiterated. “Get a job.”

Which, I promptly did. I wanted my own money, a car, and my freedom back. And, I still wanted to lose my virginity.

My father invited eligible young Jewish men home for dinner on Friday nights—“eligible“ meant ugly, dull, and non-poetic. In shul he sat next to So-and-So’s father. He knew the family; he was a good boy and worked in the family business. I humored him to avoid dissension.

His vision for my future incorporated marriage, babies, a station wagon, and the mink coat my mother would inherit after my wealthy husband presented me with a new one. Not part of his vision—Rose accepting the mink hand-me-down while dropping disparaging asides referring to my father’s inability to buy her a mink coat.

“Did you hear me? What time?” She still hadn’t looked at me. I tried interpreting her behavior as sorrow; sorrow at losing me, sorrow at not trying harder to connect with me.

“As soon as I finish packing.”

“You tell him.” She placed the pot of soup in the sink to cool, and wiped her hands on her apron, then looked at me. “I’m sure you’ll be happier on your own.” Without another word she removed her apron, went into their bedroom and closed the door.

I spent the next hour packing my car with clothes, books and sundries. Then I stood in my bedroom window and watched the street for another hour. My father drove up to the house, circled and parked the car. He crossed the street, stood next to my car, and checked my tires. This will be the last time I’ll ever watch him do this. On the day I received my license he armed me with proper automobile maintenance. “Check oil every week, look at your tires in the morning and at night, make sure they’re full.” I almost changed my mind. Stay home, Daddy loves me, Daddy takes care of me, the world is a safe place as long as I’m holding his hand.

I heard his key turn in the lock and the door open. He stood in the living room outside my bedroom. I sat on the side of my bed like a stranger. Unwanted tears trickled down my cheeks. I dried my face with my hands and checked in the mirror to make sure my eyes wouldn’t betray me. I wanted him to understand my determination to become independent. He didn’t knock. He shouted, “So? And, where do you think you’re going?”

I walked out of my bedroom and closed the door on my childhood haven with its pink walls, twin beds, and schoolgirl dreams. My hand stayed on the doorknob. I pulled hard just to make sure it was closed. I wanted to shield my father from the vacuum I’d left behind. With my back pressed against the wall in the living room, I made my announcement, “I’m moving into an apartment in Boston with Shaynee.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” My left eye twitched, my saliva evaporated. I slurred, “Better for everyone.” I lied. I knew my unorthodox behavior wasn’t better for him. But, I’d been waiting for this moment for nine years. I wanted to be free from my parents and the Mrs. Mendelbaums of the world.

My father grabbed the oversized brandy snifter from the coffee table and threw it at me. I ducked; it hit the wall. Shards of glass flew in all directions. Glass crunched under my feet as I inched toward the door. Then, with clenched fists he beat me. It took several months before the black and purple bruises disappeared. Tears of love, fear and frustration streamed down his face. I didn’t lift my hands to protect myself. I didn’t cry. Except for an occasional slap on my tiny tuchus, my father had never hit me. At that moment, I understood how much he loved me. I understood how much he feared for my future.

 “Hymie, let her go,” my mother shouted from behind the closed door.

Did I hear a sigh of relief? Or, had I imagined it?Guess I’d interpreted wrong as I’d always done with my mother’s glances and innuendoes. My interpretations indicated what I wanted, not what was.

I left my father sobbing, his soul shattered like the crushed glass he stood on. I loved him more than anyone else in the world, but I had to move on.

There were times, while growing up, a terrible feeling of dread would envelop me. My future looked as bleak as my parents’— an unhappy marriage, two people struggling for survival, and a growing hatred for whoever I might eventually marry—someone readily available to blame for my miserable life. I envisioned marriage as a trap like being stuck in an invisible pond of glue. More than the brandy glass shattered that day. Nineteen years of my life broke apart and now it was up to me, and me alone, to pick up the pieces, reconstruct, and work toward a better existence. My survival skills were sparse, fear crept up when least expected, but I felt free to make my mistakes, find my solutions, and evolve into whomever that being was waiting in the theater wings of my life.

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