If you had asked me to draw the outline of the state of Maryland, I would have been completely stumped. I had a baby in Canada and eventually the two of us moved to Baltimore, a place I’d never even visited, so I could attend graduate school. Finally, I said something along the lines of “Yeah, I was just looking for someone to work out with at the Y.” I’m married, and in a good relationship.” It took a while for me to process that one. She suddenly blurted,“You know I’m straight. In my neighborhood square one day, the woman with whom I was chatting appeared to think I wanted to have sex with her. I smiled too much and seemed to be inappropriately friendly. I moved to Canada after college and there I felt like an overly-happy American idiot. In spite of my fascination with and love for Diane Arbus photos, I had grown into what my father called, a “beach bunny,” which in the Bay Area was seriously uncool. Even the food in our home was different: homemade yogurt, halavah, stinky cheeses wrapped in crinkled tin foil.Īt college in Northern California, I felt like a So Cal dumb-dumb plunked in the middle of clove-cigarette and Eurocentric intellectualism. Our house was also the messiest and my parents-unlike those of my friends-grew marijuana and went to the nude beach. Still, I felt like an outsider as mine was the only Jewish family in our tidy, suburban neighborhood. In Southern California, where we settled, I finally found friends.

We drank tea on her screened porch and watched my sister-along with a pack of scraped-knee and scabbed-elbows boys-scramble across the lawns, always hollering. I took shelter from them with my best and only friend, the 70-year-old woman, Mrs.

The children there seemed even more feral-climbing fences, breaking into attics, sliding down stairways on mattresses. In the courtyard playground of the graduate student apartment where my family lived, I liked to put on a necklace and shades, take off my clothes, and watch the kids from afar. They wailed like little megaphones and hit each other over turns on the teeter-totter. When I was a tiny kid in Boston, other children seemed unhinged.

Mary jane by jessica anya