She took a quick puff on her cigarette. “There are roles,” she clarified. “One woman in the couple is more like the man than the other. She’ll dress like a man, do things around the house that a husband would normally do. Like taking out the trash, fixing things, stuff like that. They live together like they’re married. But obviously, they’re not.”

I don’t remember what prompted the 12-year-old me to ask my mother about gay women right there in the middle of our suburban kitchen, in a cloud of her menthol tobacco smoke and the dust particles from a million decorative paper towels. I suppose I’d heard something on a sitcom. I know there was at least one episode of “The Facts of Life” in which Blair accused a girl of being a lesbian because she excelled at sports.

When I was growing up, homosexuals weren’t exactly a popular topic in our house. They seemed to make my father intensely angry. He reacted to certain kinds of men on television by flinging the word “faggot” like a circular blade from between his front teeth and lower lip.

But long before words like “gay,” “lesbian,” “faggot” and “dyke” made their way into our household — before my mother, books or after-school specials helped refine the concept for me — I had an innate sense of what homosexuality was. It was played out among my dolls.

Malibu Ken and Kissing Barbie were the best of friends. They’d met in college, long before she was a movie star and he, her agent. They agreed to raise children together, from two separate but neighboring addresses, but it was understood that Ken would never marry Barbie. That was impossible, you see, because Malibu Ken was gay.

Of course, my 9-year-old brain didn’t yet know that word, “gay,” and certainly didn’t understand the machinations of gay male sex. But here’s what I did know: Ken liked to spend most of his time at the beach engaged in horseplay with bronzed male surfers. Furthermore, I had watched every episode of “Too Close for Comfort” and digested the fact that “Monroe,” the third-floor tenant played by Jim J. Bullock, was a different kind of man. Much different from, say, my Budweiser-guzzling, fawn-shooting father who liked to spend weekends biting his fingernails and spitting them at Howard Cosell. I understood, instinctively, that Malibu Ken was like Monroe.

I also knew that Barbie’s loyal housekeeper, Olga, secretly had the hots for Barbie. Olga was one of those hollow, blown-plastic fashion dolls who came cheap at Woolworth’s, sold in a cellophane bag stapled to a small folded slab of cardboard. Olga had crayon-yellow hair and wore a look of perpetual surprise. I kept her in a polyester double-knit jumpsuit in an orange-and-green psychedelic print. She was hip for a housekeeper. She was from Europe.

I was clear on the fact that Barbie could never return Olga’s affections. Barbie was solidly asexual (unlike her eldest daughter, a 1950s hand-me-down Barbie who was most definitely heterosexual and a raging slut). Kissing Barbie had deep, unspoken issues that kept her trapped in near-frigidity.

Yes, even at 9, I understood all these things about Barbie, and about Olga, and Ken, but without the benefit of the appropriate vocabulary nor any concrete knowledge of sex.

As for me, well, I had good reasons for sticking with boys, thank you very much. Mom made it clear that being a woman choosing to be with another woman suggested a personal failure; a tragic “settling” to avoid a lifetime of sleeping single in a double bed, masturbating on sweltering summer nights, and in harsh winters, stroking the wiry hairs springing from one’s facial warts in a repetitive self-soothing motion. What woman in her right mind wanted that? Being a fat, frizzy-haired, gap-toothed, socially anxious misfit child and teen had been quite enough. I was determined not to carry this freakdom, this substandardness into adulthood. I planned to blossom in adulthood, to amaze everyone with my transformation. “My, didn’t you grow up pretty,” they might say. “You slimmed down real nice,” “You filled out in all the right places,” “You went from an ugly duckling to a swan!”

——–

It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was a young 20-something with an office job and two adjoining rooms in my parents’ lopsided 1880s house. A group of us were gathered around the dining room table playing Pictionary: me, my then-boyfriend Rob, my mother, my aunt, my sister, my brother, and a friend of my brother. My dad was sitting in a recliner in the next room, watching TV.

Someone brought up Madonna, and opinions began to flit back and forth across the table — she was a trendsetter, she was a skank. And purely as a joke (because while I dig Madonna, I don’t really diiiig Madonna), I said: “Well I’d do ‘er.”

That was all. I’d do ‘er.

Really, I was just kidding.

I think my mother, aunt and boyfriend all groaned. My sister, then in her teens, went stiff in her chair, palms flattened to the air as though pressing it away from her, and bleated: “I. Did NOT. Just. Hear that.”

The next thing I saw was my dad’s face, arms and torso flying toward me across the table, like an evil, angry, mustachioed Superman sans cape. His hands went for my neck, and as he groped for it, one of them pressed my windpipe and produced a weird sensation in my throat, like the bonging of a bell. My boyfriend immediately shot out of his chair and I remember his voice shouting, “Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” He tried to push my dad off of me; my mother and aunt struggled to yank my father back in the opposite direction.

And then Dad said, with stiff jaw and spittle forming at the corners of his mouth: “If you wanna be a fucking faggot, you won’t do it under my roof!”

And that was just a joke.

So it was far easier, far safer just to stick with dudes. And it wasn’t torture. I never went for grunting cavemen with jock itch, or any loping bad boy with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. But I did like smart boys. Strange boys. Boys who dressed like New Wavers, boys with Apple IIs who probably wound up billionaires, boys who painted or played guitar, or raised all manner of small rodents.

I also pored over the bra section of the Sears catalog, trying to detect the dusky outline of a nipple beneath a layer of white lace. I kissed my friend Danielle on the mouth while role-playing “house” as husband and wife.

In my early 20s, I went to a lesbian nightclub called Hepburn’s in Philadelphia with some gay friends. Despite growing up in a house full of self-righteous bigots, I retained a socially liberal core. Like pancakes in a Teflon pan, my parents’ lessons had a tendency to smack the surface and slide right off again. So it wasn’t that strange to find me in a gay club. I rather enjoyed looking. And to my utter fascination, there were quite a few women there who didn’t look like lumberjacks. How could my mother have missed this?

A female ambled over to us. She was what you’d call “butch.” She thrust her face close into mine, scowling. “Are you gay?” she demanded.

I immediately felt foolish. The fact is, I didn’t know what I was. I dated guys because it was easier, but I felt like I could potentially be … well, anything. I was flesh and nerves and thoughts and emotions and electrical impulses. And in that moment, all of it was caught off-guard.

“I … I don’t know,” I stammered.

She shook her head and cackled.

She looked at my lesbian companion and said: “Certain people just have no business being here, ya know what I mean?”

To my dismay, my lesbian friend nodded.

——–

Ten years, several boyfriends and two fiancés later, I found myself an unattached 30-something woman in New York City. I opened myself up to dating again. And this time, I broadened my dating options to include women.

For a long time I felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to have a sexual and/or romantic relationship with anyone but guys unless I was willing to cut off all my hair, start listening to Melissa Etheridge 24/7, wear Birkenstock sandals and take up hiking. I’d also been under the mass spell that all females must prioritize their physical appearance in order to please men and stir envy in their fellow women, or otherwise be considered permanent outcasts.

But I began to recognize attractiveness in men and women I never would’ve considered attractive just a few short years before. I found more to be enchanted by. My mind exploded, as if I’d been living life from inside a tiny buck-fifty single-screen cinema, and was suddenly seeing the world on IMAX. My appreciation for the gorgeous variety and complexity of humanity was expanding.

At the outer reaches of my consciousness, there had long lurked a stubborn belief that enjoying the intimate company of a woman was a cop-out because you were fat, or hopelessly ugly. It was a surrender. My mother equated it to marrying a black man, like her fat sister Phyllis had done.

But if I were the kind of woman who settles, I could’ve settled for one of two men who wanted to marry me. And I could be getting halfhearted oral sex once every six years — provided I was willing to cover my entire crotch area with a huge swath of Saran wrap. Or I might still be pacing wildly from room to room in our Upper East Side apartment, at the height of a brain-searing panic attack, trembling and begging the gods to “Make it stop! Please make it stop! Oh dear god please, somebody help me!” and he’d be sitting at the kitchen table with his head bent over a map of an imaginary place, ignoring me completely, putting another tidy pencil mark on a nonexistent crossroads.

I ended those relationships, with good reason. That’s right, the fat girl did the calling off. It was the fat girl who willingly gave up a perfectly good, 32-inch-waisted Ivy League graduate with a handsome inheritance. The fat girl walked away from the chiseled, sexually artful would-be runway model (and yes, he was straight). Neither was as self-aware as I was becoming, and in both cases I ultimately didn’t feel we were growing together.

Nobody else’s “perfectly good” was going to be good enough for me. Not anymore. I listen to my gut now. Not to the twisted theories my mother used to parrot from god-knows-who. Not to the ads or movies or TV shows that tell me how I should look, dress, behave or spend, or who I should desire, pursue, fuck or fall in love with.

I had an instinct for certain things when I was a child. I understood more than I knew. I mean, my mom probably wouldn’t get this, but we’re all made of the same stuff, I think. Like a giant melted polymer mess in a vat at the doll factory. We don’t become an individual someone until we’re poured into a particular doll mold, and some line worker slips us into a pink chiffon dress or a pair of turquoise swim trunks, and maybe the marketing department gives us a name. But if that little doll-heart begins to glow from the inside, and the polymer begins to soften, and we begin to sense what we’re made of and can forget how we’ve been shaped or duded-up, should we be ashamed by who’s lighting us up? 

We all know “Eat, Pray, Love” has hijacked book clubs worldwide, and will only become more popular with next week’s release of the Julia Roberts movie, but less is known of the way it has affected international travel, creating a kind of bourgeois sexual tourism. I feel bad for these women, who seem to think that by following the same steps as one writer, they can somehow graft her happy ending onto their own frustrated lives. My disdain was such that early in my trip, I wrote a story about how they were ruining Bali (the story recently ran on Jezebel).

At 29, I’m not looking for a man. I’m six months out of a nearly two-year relationship so void of passion and emotion that I might as well have been alone the entire time. For the past few months I have enjoyed traveling by myself in Asia, avoiding all offers of romance. One pale Englishman in Laos asked me, his eyes wide and moist, if I wanted to have a bit of fun with him.

“Fun for whom?” I asked and went to bed early that night with my book, happy that I only had to share my room with the large frog on the wall of my bathroom.

Spiritual types like to say that Bali is a great power center of the world and that the island itself is a woman. I am wary of assigning gender to land masses, but the place does feel different than the rest of Asia, almost nurturing, and it’s hard not to feel supremely happy when you are paying $15 a night for a ridiculously beautiful hotel with carved teak canopied beds and volcano views. One night on the shared balcony I become fast friends with Susi and Nicole, two independent travelers. In the mornings we share coffee and in the evenings we stay up drinking beer and rice wine, a cloying drink sold cheaply around the island that tastes good mixed with guava juice. We laugh loudly and talk about the things we’d change about the world — men should be more in touch with their emotions, people should be more tolerant. These are not new ideas, but watching the light sink behind the temples while nearby children practice Balinese music, the ideas feel, at the very least, worth repeating.

One night we go to a local warung, a popular food spot called Dewa’s. We sit at a communal table with an extremely tall Dutch guy with disheveled hair named Jorick, whom Susi engages in some intense debate that I am too drunk on local Bintang beer to care about. We all agree to go dancing the next night, but it’s raining, and so Jorick stays on our balcony with us, drinking wine and playing music from a tiny iPod speaker. We play question games like college kids, the kind of silly philosophical head-scratchers only enjoyed by those with the luxury of time to burn.

“If you had to choose, what would you give up for the rest of your life? Pasta, bread or rice?” someone asks.

“Easy, pasta,” I say.

“Sex or music?” Jorick asks.

“Music,” I say. “No, wait!”

He shows up on the balcony the following evening as well, his lanky frame ducking around the dangling light fixtures. That night, as the bats barrel past after the rains, diving at the insects clustering around our lanterns, we continue our conversations from the night before. I find myself agreeing with Jorick often, and understanding both his accent and his point of view when the others don’t. We have moments of prolonged eye contact, but I don’t think much of it until we go to the store for more beer. Inside he picks up a basket, and we walk together to the stand-up cooler. “How many do we get?” he asks. I know it sounds crazy, but there is something I love about the way we get those beer bottles together and the way the veins on his arm stand out a bit as he holds the basket. It feels almost carnal, like a prehistoric desire, as if holding a shopping basket were the modern equivalent of being able to club a woolly mammoth. All I know for sure is that as we check out I feel my first shiver of attraction for Jorick.

I could write what happens next, after the wine and beer bottles are all empty, but Gilbert already has done such a lovely and accurate job: “Yes, I did come to his bed with him, in that bedroom with its big open windows looking out over the nighttime and the quiet Balinese rice fields … It had been a long, austere season of solitude. I had done well for myself … What I remember most about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us.”

Here is my movie montage with Jorick: The impossible beauty of Bali becomes even more vivid, the edges crisper, like a two-week magic mushroom trip. We rent a motorbike and drive around the countryside, dipping into valleys and ascending to views of volcanoes. Children run out from homes built like temples to wave, kites fly above us, always airborne. It is so perfect that it almost frightens me, like stumbling upon a house made of candy in the woods. There has to be a downside to this. We stay in our room so much that the housekeeper tells me later she had no time to clean it.

Do I realize I have become completely, embarrassingly Gilbert-like? No, at this point my blissed-out body has overtaken the judgmental, cynical part of myself. The New York part of me — the part that sneers at romance and sincere, naked emotion — has disappeared in favor of an unself-conscious, googly-eyed sap. When Jorick leaves to meet a friend in Vietnam, I have a physical reaction so intense I think I might be pregnant. (I’m not.) Over the next days, I behave like a love-addled teen: listen to Coldplay, gaze meaningfully from the bus at the passing scenery, scribble in my notebook about the beauty of the sky reflected in the water of the rice paddies. Recently I reread “Eat, Pray, Love,” and I realized one sentence was almost a direct quote.

It is only when I arrive home that I fully comprehend the irony of the past month: Cynical writer goes to Bali to make fun of Elizabeth Gilbert wannabes only to become perhaps her closest emulator.

I feel stabs of guilt for being so harsh on those women, searching the island for their romantic bliss. Who am I to laugh at their longing? By all means, ladies, come to Bali, I want to tell anyone within smiling distance. Find a wonderful man in a wonderful place. But if I could tell those women one more thing, it would be that maybe they should stop looking so hard. Because if there’s a romantic cliché that’s held true — for Elizabeth Gilbert, and now, for me — it’s that bliss usually happens when you aren’t hunting it down.

These days, as I plan to go meet Jorick in Europe, my “Eat, Pray, Love” overlap still makes me a bit uneasy, like carrying around a book with an Oprah stamp on it. My spontaneous romance has a whiff of the already discovered, which is both annoying and embarrassing. I can anticipate future conversations with women.

“So. Where’d you two meet?”

“Bali, in Ubud. I was there alone having some time to ponder my life’s purpose and –”

A flicker of recognition spreads over the listener’s face. “Wait. Isn’t that where –”

“Yes, but it’s different,” I’ll protest, trying not to sound too defensive. “I’m not divorced, and he isn’t even Brazilian.”

Of course, there’s a good chance our relationship, like most, won’t work out. Not everyone is as gifted with happy endings as Gilbert, whose marriage to Felipe became the basis of her second tome of self-discovery, “Committed.” No, in the end, I’m just Jessica Olien, unknown writer and walking example of the Murphy’s Law of Relationships. But, like Jorick says, it would be stupid for us not to see what happens. You never know.

I just don’t expect a book deal out of it.

Jessica Olien’s writing has appeared in Slate, Bust, theatlantic.com and Jezebel.

But “normal” is not good. Normal means the things that didn’t work in Haiti before the earthquake have endured. That which seemed reassuring when I got back now seems depressing, tedious and ominous: Even the earthquake couldn’t change this place?

I am told that the American reading public has “Haiti fatigue,” that they don’t want to read stories about the disaster and its aftermath anymore. Part of me wants to retort, “You know who else has Haiti fatigue? Haiti.” But in truth, I don’t want to read about the earthquake, either. I don’t want to read about the conditions in the camps, or the increase in violence against women, or hurricane season, or what Sean Penn is saying today. When news stories about Haiti cross my in box, I skim them and then move them to a folder that I imagine, maybe wrongly, that I’ll be able to process someday. Most of the time, it’s too much. Knowing about something doesn’t mean you know what to do to fix it. Sometimes it feels as though words don’t matter as much as they used to, that we no longer live in a time when a persuasive essay or a provocative novel could change the world. Images and words flicker across our screens and minds, alighting only momentarily, and little surprises us. News stories and images of suffering rarely compel us to action but resign us to apathy and feelings of powerlessness. Why search the news for the stories that weigh on us and break our hearts when these only lay bare our futility and the inevitable gulf between our best intentions and our capabilities?

I’m sick, too, of stories about the Haitian people’s “resilience,” their indestructible spirit, their hardiness (which is eerily reminiscent of the justifications for the enslavement of Africans) — as if their minds and bodies are different from those of the rest of us, as if their endurance of the unrelenting sun, hurricanes, homelessness is anything more than what it really is: survival amid suffering when one doesn’t have a choice.

So I am back in Port-au-Prince, trying to find a perspective on things that isn’t coming out elsewhere, hearing stories. People are eager to talk, especially when they find out that I was anba dekomb (under rubble). Sometimes it feels as though the whole city has turned into a casual support group, meeting every day and everywhere.

On Haiti’s Jou Drapo, Flag Day, which in any other year would mean uniformed schoolchildren parading through town with paper flags, a woman named Nicole sits on a low wooden chair in the tent community in Pétion-ville’s Place Saint-Pierre, giving manicures and pedicures to other residents of the camp. She is in her 40s, compact and strong-looking with her hair in six puffy braids and a pair of glasses low on her nose. She wears a black tank top and a pair of jeans covered with the residue of her work — splashes of spilled polish, dustings of filed-away keratin. Like manicurists everywhere, her own fingernails are a mess. She is applying false nails to a young woman’s hands — super gluing long, clear extensions onto each nail and trimming them to the requisite length. They still look long and cumbersome, and I ask the young woman, “Can you do anything with those? Can you wash clothes?”

“I can do everything with these,” says the young woman. “Even braid hair.”

Nicole, whose home was damaged in the earthquake, lives in the tent community with her four children, who are 9, 12, 14 and 15 years old. She wonders aloud where all the supposed aid money is going. Haiti is in a fog of humanitarianism. That was the case even before the earthquake, with countless NGOs of different size and provenance and mission bumping up against each other, stepping on each other’s toes, obscuring each other’s projects. But it is a continual surprise how uncoordinated and piecemeal the aid effort is. No one seems to know where the aid is. They are aware that billions of dollars have been donated for Haitian recovery and reconstruction, but in everyday experience no one sees much of anything. They say, “Préval’s got it,” or, “It’s still in Clinton’s and Bellerive’s hands.” The aid is invisible — despite the “We Are the World” broadcast, despite the huge outpouring of international cash and international sentiment. Change, in the end, is not what we imagine it would be.

“They should build houses out of wood, or plywood,” Nicole says. “It wasn’t the earthquake that killed people. It was the cement blocks. We can’t afford to rent houses — houses are expensive! All this that I’m doing now,” she says, gesturing to the tray of different colored polishes in the plastic tray beside her, “is just so I can feed my children. We don’t know how long we can survive under these prela [tarps]. The state has to give us a little help.” She begins to buff the young woman’s nails, trying to even out the surface between the glued-on acrylic and the natural. I ask if her kids are in school.

“Not now,” she says. While her children’s school did not fall in the earthquake, it is still, like most schools, a multistory cement building — the sort of structure that gives Port-au-Prince residents chills. “The earth is still moving. I’m afraid. I want my children near me. If they are far away, I can’t control what happens to them.”

A pair of evangelical Haitian women arrive, two “servants of God” with lace kerchiefs over their hair, who have come to preach in the camp. The leader is a robust woman with a commanding presence; her tone is accusatory, angry, and she speaks of the earthquake as God’s revenge on sinners. Some camp residents watch with mild interest, and others ignore her.

One of Nicole’s neighbors in the camp shows me how the tents have electricity, wires running illegally from nearby electrical poles and crisscrossing the camp, cellphones charging in outlets dangling in midair above the canopy of tarps and sheets, light bulbs fixed in the entrances of crowded tents. I can’t imagine what will happen if an electrical fire breaks out in the camps. They don’t have electricity all the time, only when the state turns on the grid. “You should see the camp when they give electricity,” he tells me, smiling. “Everyone turns on their music, and you can’t sleep for all the noise.”

Nearly seven months after the earthquake, strangely, I find myself missing the emergency. Amid the tragedy, the sickening uncertainty, there was hope for change. The hours and days after the earthquake were hell, but an urgent and emergent hell: Because everything was thrown into tumult, no one knew where the pieces would land. Now it is clear how much institutional brokenness has endured. The crisis that, just half a year ago, felt like the end of the world is now chronic and stretching into an infinite horizon. Disaster, it turns out, is not an event but a process; the real crisis in Haiti comes not from the movement of the earth but from those structural, social and political factors that remain, seemingly intractably, intact amid so many broken things.

This is my selfish wish: to have been involved in relief at a time when things seemed morally unambiguous and every action was useful, even limping around the U.N. logistical base trying to find food for the injured, even scraping hardened sugar off the counters to mix with the oatmeal powder I found in the pantry, even sitting on a pee-scented cot holding someone’s hand and talking about anything. There was no question of what to do; the only choice was to do.

Now things are at once normal and completely strange, but the strangeness has a way of being absorbed into the landscape.

It is late May. Monica, Claudine, John and I drive out of Port-au-Prince. Monica and Claudine are both 22, the daughter and niece of Melise, the woman who lived, worked and died in the house I stayed in before the earthquake. Claudine was raised by Melise after her own mother died in childbirth years ago, and considered Melise her mother. John was my former landlady’s driver, who ran for hours to find the hammer and the flashlight that Frenel used to break me out of the cement on Jan. 12. Bathing suits under our clothes, plastic sandals on our feet: We are going to the beach in an overheating borrowed car, the radio on and a man singing, “Bondye renmen m, li ba m kouraj…” (God loves me, he gives me courage).

We drive past the uncleared rubble and the collapsed buildings hanging open with their plastic Venetian blinds drooping from crushed windows like the gills of a dead animal, and then we turn and drive more, until at last the roads become less congested with aid vehicles, up the coast through a treeless landscape that, viewed at a distance, is a patchwork of tents as far as the eye can see, white and a color I’ve begun to think of as “tarp blue.” As we drive far down Route 9 and draw near the tarp-dotted, shimmering hillsides at Bon Repos, Claudine exclaims, “Mezanmi! How can they do this?” Suspended in the foreground of this camp as you approach it from the north, there is a billboard for cigarettes featuring an attractive young light-skinned couple lounging with a yacht in the background. The woman reclines in the man’s lap, and her long, wavy hair cascades. “Mete w alez!” it commands, in Creole. “Make yourself comfortable!”

The water is clear and blue; the shore is rocky, not sandy, and burns our feet. We buy little plastic cups of freshly cooked conch doused in vinegar and hot pepper, and fried plantains, and eat them in the shade of a palm tree. To our right, we watch a group of Brazilian peacekeepers. They have their own section of the beach carved out, with palm trees painted U.N. blue and white and yellow tape demarcating the borders. One soldier stands in military fatigues with a machine gun while the others man their barbecue wearing board shorts and shiny blue Speedos.

The water is warm and salty and stings our eyes and we take the sorts of ridiculous, unflattering photos one takes when seawater keeps washing into your eyes and the tide keeps pulling you around and menacing your bikini top. Claudine wears a pink shower cap. Around us, several couples engage in protracted submerged make-out sessions and, as we lounge in the shallows, I glance about in mock-seriousness and say, “We’re all going to get pregnant.”

I remove myself for a moment and try to view this scene through a God’s-eye lens, rising up and over the beach like the camera setting up the establishing shot at the beginning of a film: In the blue water, I see Monica and Claudine, recently motherless. On the shore, watching our clothes, leaning against a palm tree with one leg bent behind him and chewing on banann pese, I see John, who found and retrieved Melise’s body in the rubble four days later and buried her in a temporary grave, and who says, “She was like my sister.” But today we don’t look like victims or players in an international humanitarian event that, for a while, at least, captured the attention and the imagination of the world. For this moment, we are a group of friends, sticky with seawater, looking for our sandals and squinting into the sun. Our feet on the ground, toes digging into the rough sand as we look out over the ocean into uncertainty. Haiti is not hell, or even limbo, however biblical it may appear at times. Amid the suffering and the absurdity, it is still a place, as all places are, on this sometimes-shifting earth.

Berthold finally spoke. “So,” he said finally. His eyes, I noticed, were a beautiful, liquid golden brown, like a stream of perfectly brewed tea. “You are from New York City?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, yes, I live in New York City. But I grew up in Omaha. In Nebraska.”

“Nebraska?” He frowned. “What is it?”

Several bottles of wine later, Berthold had me pressed against an ancient wall in a cobblestone alley, crushing his mouth onto mine. His breath tasted sour, of cigarettes and liquor, and he forced my jaw open to accept his tongue, which wriggled thick and slightly cold in my mouth, like a slab of reanimated sashimi. I was forced to store my own tongue in his mouth, pressing it somewhere between his undulating dorsum and the wet inside of his cheek. Our incisors met with a crunch, faint but sickening all the same, like a greasy butter knife scraping against a china plate. I pulled away for a moment, pretending to catch my breath.

“Look at this wall,” I murmured. “It’s so old. Imagine. Mozart probably peed against this wall.”

Berthold kneaded my neck hard with his chin. “Please,” he whispered. “Come please with me now, to my home.” His arms snaked inside my jacket and wrapped warmly around my waist.

Horrible kissing aside, I was tempted. I liked being with him. I knew his last name; I knew his occupation. I was convinced that he was neither a thief nor a serial killer, nor was he planning to abduct me in order to conduct grisly acts of medical experimentation and/or cannibalism. I had gone home with many, many young men about whom I knew a lot less — and when what I did know was a lot less encouraging. But that night, something held me back. Somehow, I wasn’t yet prepared to go home with an Austrian stranger named Berthold who was old enough to be my father.

He seemed to understand, and after I agreed to have dinner with him the following night, he insisted on seeing me to my hotel.

“The Hotel Kummer,” he said softly, when we arrived. “Do you know what it means, Kummer?”

I shook my head.

“Sorrow,” he said. “The Hotel Sorrow.” He gazed past me into the lightless void of the welcome hall. “Maybe next time I see you, you have no more sorrow, Rachel.” It was the first time he had said my name.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was still jet-lagged, but the unease that kept me awake was something else — a vague, nagging feeling that I had lost something. Fully awake, I found some change and went outside to the all-night Käsekrainer stand across the street. The Käsekrainer is unique to Vienna; it is a special kind of sausage about a foot long, thicker than a broomstick, the crisped skin a mottled pinky brown and heavily beaded in hot fat. When you bite off the tip, a piping hot gusher of runny white cheese coats your tongue, singeing the roof of your mouth and any other parts of your body on which it may happen to land. At this very stand, on my first night in town, I had suffered a direct hit of cheese to the eye. My cries of pain were quickly drowned out by a chorus of cruel laughter from a pair of young neo-Nazi skinheads standing next to me, and I had fled from them in terror.

Now, as I stepped up to the counter and ordered a beer, I wondered if they had really been skinheads at all. I could have imagined the swastikas on their shirts. I wondered if this was my “sorrow,” as Berthold had said. To always see skinheads where there were none.

———

Berthold was already at the restaurant, drinking a gin and tonic at a table near the window. Over a dinner of Wiener Schnitzel with spaetzle and blackberry jam, he told me about himself. He had grown up in a small Alpine town near the Italian border, the youngest child of a policeman father.

“Your father was a policeman?” I said, frantically doing the math in my head. Berthold was in his late 40s, which would have made his father at least 80, which would have meant he was a “policeman” during the –

Berthold interrupted me before I could finish the horrible end of my thought. It didn’t matter, he said. He didn’t like to dwell on the past. He wanted to feel young. He stubbed out his cigarette against the word “Cinzano” printed in blue at the bottom of the ashtray, and reached across the table to touch my face. Softly, he murmured something in German.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I say: You are a beautiful child.”

When Berthold kissed me outside the restaurant, there was none of the unpleasant choking wetness of before, and when we broke apart and he asked me, again, to come home with him, this time I didn’t refuse.

In the weeks that followed, we saw each other regularly. I only had sex with him one more time, mostly out of politeness, but I still enjoyed his company. Berthold was solicitous and fatherly, making sure I ate and bringing me little gifts — old sepia-toned postcards, a toy elephant made from wooden beads and elastic string. When he wasn’t working, he took me to art museums or for walks in the Prater, the large park on the outskirts of the city. After an hour or so, we’d stop in a café. Berthold would reach across the table and pat my hand distractedly while he fussed with his lighter and his tobacco and his gin and tonic. I imagined that the people who smiled at us as they walked past took us for a father and daughter; an estranged pair, perhaps, our halting conversation not borne from a language divide but from the bittersweet effort of getting to know each other again.

I suspected Berthold knew I was, shall we say, not of the Master Race, but he never brought it up, just as I never brought up who his father might have been arresting when he began his career in Austrian law enforcement in the very early ’40s. It didn’t seem fair to force someone to confront his family’s Nazi past until you’d been dating for at least six weeks.

However, there was something that had been bothering me that I felt I had to bring up. The other night, I had struck up a late-night conversation with the monosyllabic, grease-spattered sausage man, and he had begun to ask me about my ethnic background. Cagily, I had replied that I actually had relatives who had lived in Vienna.

The sausage man had snorted. “In the Second District, maybe.”

“What’s the Second District?” I asked.

He gave me a look that chilled my blood. “The Jewish district.”

“This man,” Berthold shook his head angrily. “This man has no right to say this to you.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I mean, I know he didn’t mean it as a compliment, but really, all he said is that I look Jewish. Which, you know, I kind of already knew.”

“No,” Berthold placed his hand over mine, and gazed deeply into my eyes. “No. You are beautiful. You do not seem Jewish at all. Please not to worry. Some people in Vienna still are full of hate.”

———

On Sunday mornings there was a huge flea market in the empty field just past the Naschmarkt. It was known as the biggest and best in all of Central Europe. I had begged Berthold to go with me, and on my last day in Vienna and our last afternoon together, he finally agreed.

It was another beautiful day. Spread before me as far as the eye could see, the detritus of Europe glittered, a vast museum of the unexceptional. Faded biscuit tins and bits of old glass, picture frames and atomizers and eyeless dolls with matted hair and parted lips; the sun hid the chips and scratches with dancing spots of light, lending the stacks of painted china and the rows of dusty old clocks an eager new sheen, like bedraggled puppies putting on a valiant show for prospective parents at the pound.

Berthold was soon deep in negotiation at a table piled high with luridly colored barware, and it seemed most of the items for sale in the inner stalls were out of my price range anyway, so I made my way alone to the outermost edge of the market, lined with makeshift stands bearing merchandise of a decidedly less rarefied nature: broken toys, scraps of greasy clothing hanging haphazardly against a length of wire fence. A large man carrying a stack of cardboard boxes brushed roughly past me, nearly knocking me to the ground. I grabbed the edge of the nearest table for balance, and suddenly I saw it.

It was at the bottom of a half-empty carton, tucked carelessly inside a creased plastic sleeve like an old comic book. The cloth was badly discolored, and its frayed edges had started to fold up on themselves, but there was no mistaking it for what it was. A yellow Star of David bearing a single word in faded black: Jude.

When I was a very small child, long before I had heard the words “panic attack,” I used to tell my mother that my “tummy was beating.” I’m not sure she ever knew what I meant, but to me, it seemed the best way to describe the terrible feeling of descent, of dread, as though I had mistakenly swallowed my pulsating heart. Now, I actually thought my heart might force its way out of my body and land on the grass with a bloody squelch.

Taking my frozen panic for interest, the woman behind the card table pounced. Nattering aggressively in an unfamiliar language, she seized the star from the carton and pressed it hard into my palm. The plastic sleeve fell open, and I could feel the coarse cloth against my skin.

“No,” I cried, and yanked my hand away, knocking a small metal vase and a ceramic ashtray to the ground. The woman began to scream at me, waving the plastic-covered star in my face in an accusatory salute. Suddenly, I heard a man’s voice behind me, shouting angrily and harshly in German. Berthold had come to my rescue.

The woman changed her tone and held up the star cajolingly, gesturing toward me. Berthold grabbed my elbow and jerked me away, an act made somewhat less masculine by the fact that he was carrying a shopping bag full of table linens and an enormous lamp shaped like an elephant.

“That woman …” I stammered.

He sniffed. “That woman was a Gypsy. Who knows how she gets what she is selling.”

“But the star …”

“You don’t want that,” he said.

“But I do,” I said softly. “It was there for me to find.”

“Forget about it!” he shouted. “It’s not nice! It’s not something to buy!”

The harshness of his voice seemed to startle us both, because he immediately plastered his face with an artificial smile. “I have bought some wonderful books, books from when I was a child. Come! We’ll have lunch, and I’ll show you.”

I took a long look at his hopeful face. He had been kind to me. For a moment, I wanted to tell him that all was well, that of course I’d forget about this, that my memories of Vienna, and of him, would be nothing but drinks in cafes and the glittering foyers of grand museums.

“I’m not hungry,” I said instead.

We said our goodbyes later that afternoon. He dropped me off at the hotel, kissing me on the forehead like a child. We promised to keep in touch, but I knew we wouldn’t — we both knew. I was leaving to face the future. And Berthold would always be a part of the past. 

- – - – - – - – - – -

Every woman is born with a set of hopeful eggs stamped with a “best if used by” date. You don’t know exactly when that date is, but by the time you hit your 30s you know it’s drawing near. Yet, there was no potential husband in sight. I hated to think of myself in statistical terms, but there I was at 31, one of the 43 percent of black women in this country who had never been married. I began to notice families, all over town. They were at the market, at the mall — happy couples with their adorable tots in tow. My envy ran deep. Single motherhood was never in my plans. It was just so … typical. But it seemed like a minor detail now. At least I wouldn’t find myself at 50, childless and full of regret.

I had met Michael on Black Planet, an ethnocentric dating website. We started chatting sometime around Thanksgiving. He looked great on paper — an excellent prospect. It had been a long, lonely 18 months since my last relationship, so by the time I met him, I was ready to hope again. So ready, in fact, that I ignored some obvious warning signs. We had our first date after talking endlessly on the phone for several weeks. By our second date, I knew he was a neurotic narcissist, and a pathological liar. On our third date, New Year’s Night 2002, we conceived a child.

Though I was committed to my course, I knew there was another person to consider in all this. Did the father have a right to know? I wasn’t sure he did, but what about the child? One day she would start asking questions. How could I say I never bothered to tell him? She wouldn’t understand. So, I finally called him one day and blurted it out, hurriedly explaining that there was no obligation, financial or otherwise. He feigned interest at first, mumbling something about how fatherhood was a privilege. Then I never heard from him again. This was perfectly fine with me. In fact, I considered myself lucky for it. This was my enterprise and mine alone.

- – - – - – - – - – -

About a month before my due date, I can remember sitting in my sunny bedroom — despairing. All the doubts I had been suppressing were suddenly closing in on me. To make matters worse, the Beltway sniper was terrorizing my neighborhood. I could just see the headline: “Unmarried pregnant woman, shot dead at the Sunoco station in Takoma Park.” I had an apartment with large windows throughout, a terrific view overlooking Sligo Creek. There I sat, watching the water rush over the rocks below, entranced, thinking about the prospect of raising my child alone.

I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, so all my close friends and family were 3,000 miles away. There was a real possibility that I would have to face the maternity ward alone. My dad offered to come, but I wouldn’t have it. I was barely speaking to him then, still smarting from an epic row we’d had three years prior. We have since reconciled, but at the time, I wasn’t ready. I knew he would try to insist, so I lied.               

“It’s no problem to take off work. I can fly out on the  25th.”       

“Thanks, Dad, but I’m fine. My girlfriend from work will be there.”

In a perfect world, my cousin Pam would have been the one to see me through my labor and delivery. Though only in her early 40s, she had been the family matriarch for as long as I could remember, and had even helped to raise me. But I couldn’t expect her to be there this time. Her husband was suffering through his last few weeks of life. His lung cancer had spread to his brain, and the prognosis was about as bad as it could get. Pam had three teenage girls in the house, and was working two jobs just to keep her head above water. I just couldn’t add another crumb to her plate. So, once again, I lied.               

“Girl, you cannot have this baby by yourself. I will figure out a way to get there in time.”

“Don’t worry, Pam. My friend from work will be there.”               

“But what if you can’t find her when you’re ready? Do you have a backup plan?”               

“Pam, trust me, I’m fine.”

She was distracted, or she would have seen right through me.

- – - – - – - – - – -              

Despite all of my talk of independence and self-reliance, I didn’t really want to go it alone. I had one last hope: The Lady E, my best friend and sister-soul mate. But though she desperately wanted to be there, she was far away in Oakland, Calif., and flat broke. Neither one of us had plane fare, but she had an idea. She had worked her way through Berkeley as an exotic dancer. After  graduation, she swore she would never dance again, but this was an emergency. I needed her, so she resumed her alter ego “Cotton Candy,” and pulled on her go-go boots for one last hurrah. When she phoned two weeks before my due date, I burst into tears at the sound of her voice.

“I’m all alone,” I sobbed.

“Don’t worry, girl. I’ll be there.”

As it turned out, I was almost a week late when The Lady E arrived on Wednesday, Oct. 2. She just had to get back to work by the following Monday, no matter what. I explained the situation to my doctor and begged her to induce my labor. She was reluctant, but promised that if I didn’t go into labor by Friday, she would see what she could do to help me out. I had heard that walking helped to stimulate labor, so I walked and walked for two days. We shopped for the baby, took nature walks along the leafy, wooded creek path around my place. Then we shopped some more. We were both exhausted, but it must have worked. I went into labor on my own, early Friday morning, Oct. 4, 2002.               

At last, it was my time. Once I got to the hospital, the day went by in a blur. I had no intention of bringing my child into the world “naturally.” I wanted all the drugs I could get, and I made it known to all who would listen. The first thing they gave me was demerol — straight to the vein. It made me thick-tongued and hazy. But it also took the edge off my pain and frazzled nerves. For a while, the labor was going along smoothly, easier than I expected. Then everything changed when the baby’s heartbeat became erratic. They had to give me oxytocin to speed up the process; it was only then that I knew what real pain was. Here’s the thing about contractions: When they come, the pain is so intense you think you can’t bear it. But then you get a break, a chance to catch your breath. It really wasn’t so bad until they gave me that evil drip, that oxywhatever. After that, things got ugly.               

The contractions started coming faster and faster until it seemed like they were almost constant. I had just enough time to throw up and curse the gods before another one hit me. Lady E was a rock. She tried her best to assist me with my breathing. She even held my vomit bowl at the ready, The Lady E, with her famously weak stomach. She would normally run in the other direction if she had any inkling someone might be ready to hurl. But there she was, dutifully holding that little pink, crescent-shaped bowl without so much as a flinch. I will never forget her loving expression in those moments.               

I was lucky for a first-timer. My labor was only eight hours compared to the average 15, but to me it seemed like an eternity. Once I was sufficiently dilated, a little Asian man came into the room and talked my head off about the epidural process. I couldn’t catch my breath, but I so wanted to tell him to shut it. I had read everything I could get my hands on about labor and delivery, and seen at least a hundred episodes of “Birthday,” on the Learning Channel. As far as I was concerned, I knew more about the procedure than he did.               

Finally, he gave me a big, fluffy pillow and told me to lean over it and expose my back. I tried to focus on a fixed spot in the green and blue speckled linoleum — anything to avoid visualizing that gigantic needle, but it wasn’t so bad. The insertion went smoothly, and once the anesthesia kicked in, I was on easy street. It was as if my lower body had ceased to exist. The nurse instructed me to push with the contractions, but with no sensation in my lower body, this was no easy task.               

“Watch the monitor,” she said. “When the needle starts to spike, push.”

I settled into a rhythm — needle spike, push push — needle spike, push push — needle spike, push push. I had been doing this for about three hours or so when my cousin suddenly shrieked,

“She’s coming. I can see her hair!”               

My little Sophia had finally arrived. In a flash, the doctor put this warm, wiggly thing on my chest for a few seconds before whisking her away to be weighed, measured, cleaned and serviced. Oddly, the thing I think I remember most about that moment was the delicious smell of her. All those deliveries I had seen on “Birthday,” the babies were covered in this pinkish goo. I just knew it would be smelly. But it wasn’t. It was the sweetest, most wholesome smell you can imagine — like fresh spring water and dryer sheets. Everything that happened before that moment — the pain, the fear — was a distant memory.               

We drove The Lady E to the airport on Sunday morning. Sophia was so quiet on the way home, that I kept looking back at her through the rearview mirror. How odd to have a baby on board. When we arrived home, it felt like a momentous occasion, the first day of our life together. Just the two of us. I was at once exalted and panic stricken. OK, so I’ve cooked up this little creature — and isn’t she lovely — but now what? I looked into her squinty little eyes, the first time I really got a good look at her. “We’ll figure something out.”