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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Cool. Dark. Moist.
At the height of a drought, when even spiders beg for a drink, thoughts drift to the basement visits of childhood.
By Beth Kephart
[09/09/99]

Iron daddy
This stay-at-home dad found that waiting for a call back from La Leche League is tougher than hanging out in an office all day.
By Kevin Trotter
[09/08/99]

Infested!
What are these tiny black bugs doing in my hair and why can't I get rid of them?
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[09/07/99]

Slam it, baby!
The women of the WNBA still don't dunk. But do male sportswriters really want to see women dunk so badly, or just dunk badly?
By Julian Rubinstein
[09/02/99]

Ice, ice, baby
Here I am: Cold to the bone, face smeared with mud, herding horses near the Arctic Circle. Call me "Incredulous in Iceland."
By Pippa Gordon
[09/01/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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The Russian and I attended a prom together. We felt superior and bored, and ducked out to engage in various protosexual activities in his father's gargantuan car as well as, later (since his parents were, as usual, out), his house. These were my very earliest sexual experiences and you would think that I'd remember them. I don't. All I have is the cologne, an image of a crushed corsage and my father wagging his finger at me, intoning: "Later in your life, men are going to sit you down in a room and show you a film of you kissing that boy and doing whatever else you did with that boy. You will be up for a job and suddenly that film will appear."

My career plans were to be a poet. I sincerely doubted that a home movie of heavy petting would prove much of a hindrance.

The Russian and I saw each other for a while until I started dating Gary (not his real name), with whom I went further and about whom I have more detailed memories. The mildewed basement of Gary's parents' split-level, where I first smoked hash and first performed fellatio, was done up in a nautical theme: plastic marlins, fake starfish hanging from the walls in nets. Gary would later turn very devout and study, unsuccessfully, to be a rabbi. He wrote me two decades later, to catch up about his wife's fertility problems and his career in computer programming. The Russian was not someone I thought about until recently, when my doorbell rang and a near-retirement-age man with dentures held up an FBI identification card.

He told me his name. He was conducting a background check on a woman who had applied for a job with the bureau and had lived across the street in 1989. Did I know her? Did I know anything about her character?

"We just moved in," I said. "We don't know anyone."

"And where did you live before?"

I told him. "And can I ask you to spell your name?" I spelled. My 5-year-old son, who was in the other room watching "Spy Hard," came out to spell his name as well. With a flourish, the FBI agent wrote down my son's name.

The next day, while I was on the phone with a distraught, divorce-bound girlfriend, my phone began to emit some bizarre-sounding clicks.

"Are you bugged?" she asked.

"Funny you should ask," I said. "The FBI was here yesterday. In fact, I think they're here right now."

Walking with the cordless phone toward the window, I saw a man idling in a sky-blue K-car right across from my house.

I ransacked my past for un-American activities other than the Russian. Later in high school I had helped establish an underground student organization called Merlin, but our most political act was to get the lunch break extended from a half-hour to 45 minutes.

I forgot about the car until my husband, John, called to me from another room about a week later: "Some guy's outside taking pictures of our house." He was in another square car of no character, at a discreet distance. When we saw us looking, he drove off.

I am not paranoid. There are many reasons why someone might take pictures of our house. We live in Haddonfield, N.J., in a historic district of stately Victorians; our house was built by a dentist who treated Abraham Lincoln at Colorado Springs and did a stint as the personal dentist to the dictator of Peru before returning to become a pillar of the community: a Quaker banker. People around here make life works of restoring their exteriors and often stop to compare paint colors or local real estate tax assessments.

But the phone kept clicking. And I'd been thinking about the Russian. So I called the FBI to see if there was, indeed, a file on me.

I expected a runaround. Instead a cheerful lady at the Philadelphia branch put me right through to Special Agent John R. Thomas, who pretty much dictated the letter I should send to his attention, and reminded me to get it notarized.

"He was so friendly!" I reported to my husband.

Whereas everywhere but Los Angeles I still have to stifle the urge to smile and wave at policemen -- when I was a girl, they gave me such delightful princess treatment -- John, who is eight years older and almost had to move to Canada to avoid the draft, still harbors all sorts of fear and loathing about authority figures.

"Yeah, right," he almost spat. "'Friendly.' It figures. The FBI," he said, "is like the Catholic Church. Thirty years ago they were still executioners, terrorists. Now they just sing folk songs."

He's right. Pretty soon the FBI will have its own Web site. "Airport Security & You." "Desert Storm Support Groups."

I walked the two blocks to downtown Haddonfield, quaint as a set from a movie about small-town life (the Rotary Club, a banner gushed, would soon host its annual oyster supper), and had my letter notarized. How adorably antiquated: I present a driver's license to a Rotarian's wife with a beehive, and she attests that I am me. Like she'd know if the driver's license was a fake, any more than I'd be able to spot a forged FBI identification card.

"Can't I fax it?" I had asked Special Agent Thomas, but he said the notary's seal had to be an original. So I mailed the letter certified (another charmingly quaint custom, given UPS and FedEx tracking software) and waited.

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