No matter where Isabel’s thoughts began, they ended with Alex dying. Sometimes she killed him. This surprised her, because she had visceral beliefs in non-violence, karma, and reincarnation. She saved spiders and relocated turtles, and, after reading a biography of Albert Schweitzer in 5th grade, did her best from then on to avoid crushing ants. A devotee of British mystery classics by Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham, she had never imagined that contemplating her own husband’s murder could be almost as exhilarating as a great read. Again and again, her thoughts were drawn to his extinction 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 pictured him drowning in his bowl of high-fiber cereal and 1% milk. From her office cubicle overlooking Grand Central where she talked all day on the phone, Isabel watched from the corner of her eye as Alex repeatedly tumbled slow-mo through the air against the backdrop of the Chrysler Building.
A bit 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 tomato and a bit of pecorino, and she would be a widow. So much simpler and cheaper than divorce. If he died that way, the children would have the chance to remember him, in time, in a more sympathetic, albeit mythical, light. There would be an autopsy, of course, because healthy men in their forties, even nationally-ranked alcoholics, are not expected by actuarial science to expire in their dinners. The results would confirm death by peanut butter, their son’s favorite food, a tragic accident. Isabel didn’t think killing him was a real possibility, but it was such an enticing and easy option that her mind led her back to it each time her hand reached for the Jif.
She was cleaning the kitchen in Southampton according to her mother’s framed “Rules of the Inn” bullet-pointed checklist before the Sunday afternoon drive back to town with the sun in her eyes. Through the windows, she watched the children frolicking in the pool. She had taught both to swim before six months, and they were as comfortable in the water as the penguins at the Central Park Zoo. Their sleek heads breached, laughing, and sounded again immediately; ebullient champagne corks bursting from the reflected sky blue water.
When her parents bought the house in 1970, her father had Ma Bell install wall phones just inside the kitchen, porch, and front doors so that wherever he might be—pool, flower beds, vegetable garden, tool shed—he’d never miss a call. The instant it rang, whoever was closest answered, then sprinted with the receiver and handed it off to him like an Olympic torch. Their extraordinarily long curly cords allowed him to continue to garden, barbecue, bar-tend, play backgammon, or mark territory by peeing on the Rosa rugosa hedge while he single-handedly controlled the bulk of the international US rice trade. It rang now, interrupting Isabel’s memories from the previous century, and she crossed the kitchen to answer, terra-cotta tiles smooth and cool underfoot. Perhaps it was the NYPD calling to say her husband had been killed in a freak accident.
“The parakeets died again,” Alex said as soon as she picked up. “It wasn’t my fault. Ex-birds, you know, like the dead parrot on Monty Python.”
His voice brought Isabel back to his yellow camel teeth, his cheesy morning beard odor. She concentrated on remembering to breathe. She frequently caught herself forgetting to altogether, or doing it wrong, and not getting enough oxygen to her brain. So much for involuntary muscles. She inhaled through her nose until her lungs were fully expanded, then exhaled from her mouth. Good in, bad out. And again. “You killed the children’s pets two weeks in a row and you bring up Monty Python?”
“I was reading on the couch! Barron’s, you know, it’s Saturday.” He fancied himself an investor but was actually a contrary indicator. “I went in to check if the water was boiling yet. For pasta.” Isabel heard ice cubes. He swallowed and went on. “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?” His cadence was jaunty, upbeat.
Isabel couldn’t fathom why the sky didn’t suddenly go black, why a bolt of lightning didn’t blaze into being and pierce him through where others have hearts. Everything he said was a lie and the universe didn’t care. She wished she were swimming beneath the pool’s surface, where sun rays were refracted into a fluid golden net that floated in the water and wavered, projecting glancing shafts of flashing light onto the sides and bottom. “What did you say?” she asked, coming up from deep.
“It was obviously the damned exhaust from the buses idling downstairs,” he said. “I left the kitchen window open. Shouldn’t have after last week, my bad. Did you call the MTA as I told you and formally complain about the fumes?”
“Jesus, Alex. Just admit you got plastered and fell asleep and the pasta water boiled away. That the fumes from the Teflon poisoned the birds like canaries in a coal mine, you lousy bastard.” She’d spoken almost the same words days before. That she would ever be called upon to repeat this statistically improbable string of events more than once in her lifetime seemed incredible, yet here she was doing it twice in eight days. The birds hadn’t even been named yet after the previous pair’s untimely death. From the pool, she heard her children’s voices ring in call and response.
“Marco!”
“Polo!”
“What a load of crap!” Alex spluttered. “It was the damned crosstown buses!”
It wasn’t even three o’clock. Isabel’s father had been a stickler about never having cocktails before six and always changing for dinner. Alex’s father favored polyester Sansabelt slacks and treasured a clock with 5 at all twelve stations and script that proclaimed “It’s always five o’clock somewhere!” Cocktail picks with faux stuffed olives at their ends served as the timepiece’s hands. Isabel could tell from the thickening of Alex’s tenor exactly how many sheets to the wind he was, and how much of what he’d already consumed on his diurnal progress. His daily Great Chain of Alcohol followed a prescribed hierarchy. First a few Scotch and sodas, maybe three, four. Then a bottle of quaffable chardonnay, which he felt didn’t count because it was white. And finally, with dinner and after, a superior Italian Barolo or Amarone, often one of each, until he passed out in the living room, snoring explosively. He denounced his parents as drunks, yet maintained he was merely a social drinker, if a solitary one. Just a card-carrying whiskeypalian, he liked to say about himself.
“We live on the 11th floor, for heaven’s sake! It’s not the bloody buses.” Alex had killed four cheery little birds through drunken negligence. Isabel no longer attempted to set him straight or explain the truth; she’d finally given up. For more than twenty years, he had asked her every morning to fill him in on what he’d done or said to whom the night before, and had laughed at her recounting. At first she’d enjoyed it, and worked at delivering funny monologues to entertain him, until she realized how twisted the whole production was and stopped taking pleasure in it. Although she was hardened to his being not at all who she thought she’d fallen in love with, hope continued to sow itself unasked, took root, and persisted in sprouting from the widening cracks. “Can’t you just once admit it’s your fault?” She was desperate for a yes and angry with herself for wanting it.
He laughed. “That’s my Isabel, always so quick to judge. As you know, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think. But it’s your job to tell the kids the birds are dead. 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. I won’t.”
“This is no time to let your antagonism towards me prevent you from doing what’s best for the children, Isabel. Cut the crap, you’re a mother, for God’s sake. You tell them the crosstown bus fumes killed the damned birdies, and Daddy made a mistake by leaving the window open. That it was a fucking accident. Okay, that’s it.” His conviction that he was always but always right and his ludicrous pomposity made her marvel again how it was she still hadn’t left him. Even his ability to play Chopin études with heartbreaking bravura, although only halfway through, no longer touched her. It had been this skill, this sitting at a piano and having glorious music flow from his hands she’d found so compelling that she’d left her first husband, Pierce, who was a hell of a guitar player and a far better musician than Alex. Later she realized it was the music, not the man, that had made her swoon.
Drop dead, Alex. Twice. Her daily prayers for his cosmic comeuppance remained unanswered. She hung up, sealing the genie in the bottle, and went outside. Tossing her pareu on the deck, Isabel dove into the pool that sparkled like a giant Hockney across the emerald lawn. The westbound traffic on the Long Island Expressway slowed to its inevitable Sunday crawl at the Douglaston Dip as Isabel examined the endgame of her marriage. Even the surprise-free perspective of hindsight didn’t fully illuminate the mystery of falling out of love. One moment she‘d been consumed by him, his voice, his touch, and then she wasn’t. The banality of daily life had soon exposed Alex for the man he was: the mean, unreconstructed alcoholic child of two alcoholic-denier parents. Despite the revelation of his true nature, nothing changed for Isabel, who’d been under constant siege by the overwhelming biological urge to have his children ever since meeting him.
Isabel was married to Pierce when she met Alex. They’d been together since their arrests seven years earlier for conspiracy to sell half a million hits of blotter LSD. The feds had been eager to bust Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor and mind-expansion advocate for years. Leary and Isabel had friends in common up in Millbrook. The instant Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 which made the drug illegal, they went after Leary and his circle. It was the most expensive federal drug sting up til then, with synchronized car chases across four northeastern states, seven arrested co-conspirators, and marshals with brandished guns bursting through Pierce and Isabel’s bedroom window. The two had been living together and would never have formalized it, but Isabel’s father insisted they marry to impress the Federal judge and the Southern District of New York with how much they’d already reformed and embraced prevailing social mores. Although they didn’t get Leary, Isabel and Pierce were convicted of felony conspiracy. As it turned out, the chief conspirator jumped bail, the case never went to trial, and Isabel got two years’ probation, a marriage, and a husband, none of which she’d wanted in the slightest.
Within 48 hours of meeting Alex, Isabel knew she was going to leave Pierce. Years before, she and Pierce had agreed that if either ever fell in love with someone else, they would send the other their favorite EE Cummings’ poem:
it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch…
Careless in her happiness, without the slightest warning, she’d gone to Western Union and sent Pierce a telegram with the full text. He instantly went on what later proved to be a two-year bender that ended with him moving to Saudi Arabia to work on oil pipelines for a further three years. In every relationship there is one who loves more, and both had always known it was him.
When Isabel’s friends asked what had attracted her to Alex, and they were often mystified, she recalled his mellifluous laugh, and that she had first seen his arm reaching over her shoulder to pay his bar tab. That unlike everyone else at JP’s that August night, he was wearing a jacket and tie, and combined with the gold American Express card, it was enough to make her spin her stool to check to whom these things belonged. So few people she knew were solvent. She found herself face-to-face with a not-tall-at-all redhead, a physical type whose height and coloration she’d never remotely considered.
Isabel and Alex were married on Valentine’s Day of ’79, still in the grip of infatuation six months after they’d met and ten days after her divorce from Pierce became final. The event was perfunctory, in a judge’s chambers in the Criminal Courts Building on Center Street, with the judge’s secretary and Isabel’s father’s lawyer to witness. Afterwards, a white Rolls Royce took them to the Tavern on the Green, where they sat in the Crystal Room overlooking Central Park and drank champagne with their immediate families and a few close friends. Alex’s parents gave the couple a life insurance policy on Alex with the first year’s premiums paid up, which Isabel thought a very peculiar wedding gift. Her parents gave them a check for $555.55, ostensibly for good luck, and the less than princely amount offended Alex, as was intended, but considering how her parents felt about her whirlwind divorce and remarriage, didn’t surprise Isabel one bit.
Isabel wanted to take a wedding trip to Europe and introduce Alex to her family in France, Switzerland, and Italy who were once again reeling from her exploits. Nobody had ever gotten divorced in the family before, except scandalous cousin Mireille, two of whose three ex- husbands had died opening their wrists in the bath. Isabel was confident her relatives needed only meet the man she’d met in a bar and married so quickly to see he wasn’t the caddish fortune-hunter they all believed he was. But Alex wanted to drive up Highway 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, stopping at the sybaritic inns and luxurious hotels whose brochures he wrote away for and kept in a meticulously curated file, so they flew to California and stayed in the best rooms at all of them, expense be damned. In the stretch limousine Alex believed added class and elegance to the gritty drive home through Queens from La Guardia, he informed Isabel that she needed to procure $5,000 from her father to pay her half of the American Express bill for their honeymoon.
Isabel had never thought of herself as a good catch. Besides the fact that she was small fry as these things go, it wasn’t how her mind worked. The realization that Alex didn’t love her and had made what was fundamentally a business decision to marry up, was devastating. This time around, in this marriage, it was she who loved more, and, as the desire to reproduce with her new husband continued to strengthen, she felt compelled to help him recognize he did indeed love her. Unable to confide in anyone and confirm her family’s and friends’ worst fears, she instead constructed the illusion of a marriage of true minds so well that both she and Alex moved in and often believed it themselves. It takes enormous energy to maintain this sort of defensive deception that’s limned with hope against great odds. At the time, Isabel didn’t know that lust was a temporary aberration that served as a placeholder until the roots of evolutionary imperative gained hold. She simply knew she was fully invested, a waiting empty vessel, and that judgment and choice had nothing to do with it.
She had never played with dolls or dreamed of marriage and children. Growing up, her idols were Margaret Mead, Thor Heyerdahl, Heinrich Schliemann, and Eleanor Roosevelt. She read incessantly and wanted to be an archaeologist. Now, overnight at 28, she was mystified by how her latent biological clock had been commandeered and set in motion by an alien force intent on manipulating her will by controlling her body. It would be years before she understood how little personal decision is involved when it comes to the survival of the organism…How thrilling it is for inbred genes—and Isabel’s ancestors were all intermarried, even her parents were first cousins—to sniff out fresh ones they have no relation to. It wasn’t the parents who wanted a squealing infant so much as the entire human species rooting for its reproductive success.
By the time their daughter was born nine years later and their son six years after that, Isabel had progressed from obsessive procreational lust to imagining how to execute the perfect murder. But she couldn’t live out that particular fantasy, because even though Alex was, and would remain, a total shit, he was the total shit father of her children. Like many, she thought they’d still be better off with two parents even if one was a dud. Besides, she simply couldn’t condone violence. So Isabel and Alex decided to move to a bigger apartment. The plan was that the whole unhappy family would relocate to a bigger place where additional space would dilute their misery to a more endurable level.
Isabel got a lead from their pediatrician on a very well-priced apartment in Riverdale and convinced Alex they should go see it. The following Saturday, as the family waited for the parking attendant to bring down the car, Alex suddenly announced that he wasn’t in the mood to go to the Bronx today, or, most likely, ever, and walked up the ramp and out of the garage. Isabel called her mother and picked her up, and then drove with her and the children to deceptively charming Riverdale to see the apartment. The three bedroom coop on a hilly tree-lined street off Van Cortlandt Park was a deal no square-footage-deprived Manhattanite with a 13-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son still sharing a bunk bed in a windowed closet could pass up.
The apartment was large and affordable. As they walked through, it heartened Isabel to think of demolishing the early 1960’s Pepto Bismol pink and mint green bathrooms and ripping out the grubby kitchen. Renovation offered a blend of obliteration, creation, and artistic expression within the strict confines of a budget she found exhilarating. She had previously handled the remodeling of the river rock craftsman’s cottage in Boulder she’d lived in with Pierce, and her parents’ house at the beach, and both had satisfied her stifled sense of agency, creativity, and competitive spirit. So much so, that as she walked around the Riverdale apartment visualizing how it would look when she was done fixing it, her optimism surged unbidden. Yes! She would punch through the kitchen wall and put a water spigot on the little terrace so next year they could grow herbs, tomatoes, flowers, lettuce, instead of the pots of dead poinsettias and azaleas, faded red saucer-sled, and unwoven folding beach chair that littered it now. She’d put a table and chairs out there and make it an al fresco dining room. Isabel pulled out her phone and called Alex.
“Alex here,” he answered as always, even though he knew it was her. He liked to cause discomfort and put people on the spot.
“Hi. We’re up here in Riverdale…” Isabel began.
“And you’re lost? Have a flat? Forgot your passports?” He chuckled at his wit.
“No, we’re going to stop at Fairway on the way home to pick up stuff for dinner and I wondered if you had any particular cravings.”
“You know better than to ask open-ended questions, especially of that sort, but yes, pheasant under glass.”
“Fairway’s always out of glass. Something from column B?”
He pondered, chewing. She guessed it was a garlic bagel, extra butter.
“Okay, chicken curry, peas, rice, and your yoghurt and cucumber sauce with mint. Yes, hi there, may I have a large coffee, please? Milk, thanks. Between dark and regular, but closer to regular. Hi, sorry, I’m having a late breakfast at the corner. Honestly, these people, how hard is it to pour coffee right? How’s the apartment, a dump?”
The most important thing Isabel learned in three years as a member of her women’s spiritual development group was to give herself time to reflect before speaking and not dash headlong into argument, no matter how tempted or right she might believe she was. Very small changes can break a pattern of behavior: thinking in unaccustomed ways, using different words, counting to thirty. Not mentioning that Alex was having breakfast after noon. Not calling him a racist.
“Not a dump at all, it’s lovely. Spacious, sunny, 3 bedrooms, two baths, multiple exposures, park views, outdoor space. Close to highway, bus, and subway. Parking included in maintenance. The whole shebang.”
“You should be in real estate.”
“I am. My mother is going to help me buy the apartment.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, that’s lighter than I like it, would you pour a bit out and add some more coffee? Thanks, that’s great, and now just a tad more milk? Okay, stop!” He swallowed. “Even having to deal with these people, it’s still a lot better than your coffee, you know, Isabel.”
“I don’t make coffee, Alex. I don’t even drink it.”
“That’s just what I mean. “
No matter how awful things get, people continue to believe that this time everything will be different, this time it will actually change. Marriages can be saved, snatched from the jaws of perdition, resuscitated because compromise and obligation warm on the pilot light of wedlock long after other flames have been extinguished, especially when there are children. She scribbled a shopping list in her agenda.
Isabel and the children returned home a few hours later laden with grocery bags. Alex, ensconced in his big armchair, was drinking Scotch and watching his favorite film, The Lion in Winter. He reveled in the cruelty Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine showered upon each other, on their three unfortunate sons, and on Alais, the unlucky Princess of France. Royal British savagery at its sharpest and most brutal. Alex, who’d been a boy chorister in the English tradition, had a thing for British kings, and identified especially with Henry VIII, who, like Alex, had ginger hair, fine ankles, and possessed an excellent ear.
“Come say hello to Daddy,” he commanded. He often joked about what fun it would be to have a big ring people had to kiss, like the Pope’s.
“Let them pee and wash first, Alex. Kids, please clean yourselves up and then come talk to your father. I’ll start dinner.”
“Don’t defy me, Isabel, you know it’s essential for parents to present a united front. I insist on your full support. And my drink needs repair.” He never had a second or third, just kept fixing the first. He rattled the remaining ice in his glass at her.
“Let them pee. We’ve been in the car all day.” She took his glass. Yes, she was most certainly an enabler, but for all the right reasons; the sooner he passed out, the less time they’d have to deal with him. She went to the kitchen and made it a big one.
Alex took the drink and eyed it critically before having a swig. “I’ll give you this, Isabel, you know how to make a good Scotch and soda.” He took her hand. “Hold on, stand over here, I want to see something.” He moved her by the arm until she stood in front of him and then scrutinized her. “What is this schmatte you’re wearing? I’ve told you a thousand times not to wear raglan sleeves. You have no shoulders to begin with and they don’t flatter you.”
Isabel looked down at the gauzy cotton Indian peasant shirt from 8th Street she’d had longer than her children. “It’s the coolest thing I own, it’s almost 90 degrees out.”
“We have mirrors, you know. You can see for yourself if you look like more of a cow than usual without my having to remind you. And don’t ever look down like that, it gives you more chins than a Chinese telephone book.”
The children came in as he spoke. It was so much worse when they heard him talk to her that way. Isabel hated it, felt humiliated, but couldn’t figure out what to do. She wanted to weep, howl, dispatch him for good, but she went to the kitchen and started dinner instead.
She slammed cabinets and drawers and rummaged loudly for ingredients to release the pressure and stabilize her roiling emotions. Alex hated noise, it upset his sensitive musician’s equilibrium. She clanged pots and pans, ran the water full force, opened and closed the oven door, both to annoy him and drown out his voice. With his wife occupied in the kitchen, Alex turned his attention to the children. Isabel tried not to listen while she slashed chicken into manageable pieces with a seriously sharp 10 inch chef’s knife. She’d never be able to stab him, she couldn’t even deal with chicken blood.
“No, Daddy, really, it was a very nice apartment. I’ll have my own bedroom and pink bathroom, but Mama wants to change the tiles, so I’ll probably just get pink towels.”
“Well, at least you’ll have nice towels, because you won’t have any friends. Your school chums will drop you the instant you move out of Manhattan.”
“Mama said it won’t make any difference, we can be here in twenty minutes. And my room will be big enough that I can have friends for sleepovers.”
“Trust me, Pumpkin, there isn’t a self-respecting Chase School parent who’s going to let their daughter come visit you in 718. You can forget it.”
“Don’t say that, Daddy. The apartment is right down the street from Riverdale Country Day School, it’s not a slum, you know.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck. Come here and sit on my lap.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But I want you to.”
“Please no, Daddy.”
“Let me! I’ll sit on your lap,” the boy yelled as he ran across the room and jumped onto his father’s knees.
Alex pushed him off. “Did I invite you to sit on me, you little sissy? I was having a conversation with your sister that you’ve rudely interrupted.”
“But she doesn’t want to sit on you and I do! I can sit for her, Daddy,” he explained as he clambered back onto his father.
“Stop it! I don’t want you on me!” Alex shoved his son off his lap and onto the floor. “Get out of here, mama’s boy. Go in there with your mother and allow me to continue talking to your sister.” He pointed to the kitchen. Both children’s eyes were full of tears, but they were absolutely not going to allow themselves to blink.
“You, on Daddy’s lap right now.”
She sat down stiffly on the edge of his knees. He put both arms around her and pulled her towards him. “Daddy! I’m not comfortable. Let me up.”
“Wow, Pumpkin, you weigh a ton, better lay off the pasta. Don’t want to turn into a whale like your mother, do you?” He tickled her middle roughly, which she hated. When he stopped, he grabbed her hands and inspected them. She’d had eczema since birth, and was mortified by the irritated red skin on her fingers. She did everything she was told to make the lesions recede, never using soap and sleeping in white cotton gloves stuffed with prescription moisturizer, but it didn’t go away. “Your hands are a disaster, Pumpkin, you’re not taking care of them. How on earth do you expect people will like you, much less love you, with that disgusting skin?”
“Stop, Daddy, I want to get off!” With effort, she freed herself.
“Here, make yourself useful, fatso. Tell your mother to fix my drink.” He handed the girl his near-empty glass and pointed the remote at the DVD player.
In the kitchen, Isabel hugged the children. Using a voice that Alex would hear in the living room, she said: “Thank you, sweetie. Hang on a sec while I remedy this drink and then you, my boy, will go give it to your father. Put the lid on the rice and turn down the flame, please” she said to her daughter. She made Alex a drink strong enough to have knocked out Rasputin in the first round. Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely manage to line up the bottle with the glass. “Dinner will be ready in less than half an hour, Alex.” She lowered her voice and whispered to the children. “You guys go watch something in our room. Give him his drink and then stay out of his way. I’ll come bring you a picnic dinner to eat in there. Alright, my darlings?”
Isabel sautéed the onions, garlic, and ginger she’d chopped before adding the curry spices to the pan. When the aroma was right, she stirred in coconut milk and added the chicken. It would be highly seasoned, the way Alex liked it. How much peanut butter would it take, she wondered, to ensure that he’d suffer a fatal allergic reaction? Not just swelling and discomfort, but cardiac arrest.
She’d had to stab him with an EpiPen once years before when he accidentally ingested a speck of almond in a tart crust at The Four Seasons. She’d been surprised at how rapidly and badly he’d reacted to an amount so tiny she couldn’t even taste it. His throat had begun to swell shut within moments. Surely a tablespoon would be enough; it seemed a massive dose but not so much that she wouldn’t be able to explain to the police later how such an amount accidentally found its way into the curry. She felt not the slightest trepidation as she added it to the pan and stirred it in. When she tasted the finished product, there was not a soupçon of peanut detectable in the delightfully pungent blend.
“I think I’ve outdone myself this time with the curry,” Isabel told Alex as she came out of the kitchen smiling. She put the tray with two bowls, wine glasses, and a bottle of white down on the coffee table in front of him. “Let’s eat out here and watch the Plantagenets battle it out. Do you mind rewinding?” she asked as she uncorked the wine. “The kids are having a picnic in our room with the Disney Channel” She handed him a bowl, a fork, a napkin. She poured two glasses of wine and gave him one. “Cheers!” she said as they clinked. “To your good health.”
Sylvia Totah Calabrese was 4 in 1955 when she arrived in Manhattan as a stateless political refuge. She never left. When life permitted, she enrolled full-time in college to pursue her passions for reading/writing and archaeology/anthropology. In 2013, she received a BS Evolutionary Biology of the Human Species and a BA Writing from Columbia University. In 2014, she received her HS diploma from the girls’ school she’d been expelled from in 1967. She lives in Harlem.
