We wandered down a street of restaurants and bars after catching a movie and saw an elderly man being heaved up and down a red carpet by a heavy vacuum through the window lined with fake tulips. I knocked on the window because by the sign on the door, we were ahead of closing by an hour, and as you must guess, I am ever hungry no matter how scary the menu may be. (The completion of that paragraph took two Twix bars.)

The baby is overdue, and getting fat I imagine. I stayed in the bath tonight for almost two hours to remember being lighter and temporarily alleviate the pressure that is smashing down into my pelvis. Is he waiting to share Iliojuet’s birthday on the 16th, or Jazz Pianist’s on the 18th? Or am I turning off my nightly contractions because I still don’t have a name?

Suggestions welcome by the way. Boy names not too common, not too granola, not too cheesy, not too pretty, not too nerdy (someone suggested Clovis), not too mean, not too exotic.

The man cleaning at the restaurant beckoned for us to come in, and said, “Table for three in corner” meaning Freddy, me, and pregnancy, and wait, how did he know I wanted those soft-skinned spring rolls with cabbage and peanut sauce and that Freddy needed a beer right away? Sixth sense? But would anyone with a sixth sense hang a portrait of George Washington next to photos of the king and queen of Thailand on walls painted reddish purple?

When I signed the check, he said that my first name in Thai means “wait for me”.

It’s no exaggeration to make the claim that 99 percent of the children attending state piano competitions here are Chinese-American, and that four out of five teachers entering their students are Russian. Walking into a sea of such neurotic and intense competitiveness, you feel pity for the more sensitive kids who stammer their way through pieces much too advanced for their abilities and come to rather dislike the arrogant performers who with streams of notes and nuances perfected through hours of methodical diligence bag their first prizes as a matter of course. In the end, none of it matters. I really don’t know why we musicians do this to ourselves.

I had three students win 1st prize for their age groups, and all three were Chinese. My most gifted student, a ten-year-old boy who is more talented than anyone I have taught, who was the single pianist out of two hundred students who played soulfully and was connected to a spirit beyond himself, was given only an honorable mention. But never mind, because a week after the competition, he has already learned a Bach Prelude and two movements of Schumann’s Kinderscenen while the three adorable but rather untalented 1st prize winners will take four months to learn their next challenging piece.

When does the distinction between artistry and good teaching become obvious? I was so sure that his love for music and talent would be unmistakable, but this particular judge was listening for crossed t’s and dotted i’s. It’s like awarding a prize for a short story based on which entrant has the stiffest and most mechanical handwriting. (And in fact, another one of my students who competed in his age group, who has no imagination for phrasing or sound, won second prize). No accounting for judges however; I feel certain that a real pianist would have noticed him right off.

*************************

My baby is due this week, and I’ve scarcely given him a thought. I don’t have a name, I don’t have the hospital bag packed. I am sure I wasn’t this apathetic about the birth of my daughter–in fact, she might be part of my problem. On the weekends we lie awake past our bedtimes, she and I engrossed with our new books, she with her reading lamp on her side of the queen bed and me with my reading lamp on my side of the queen bed. I always fall asleep before she does.

This morning while she slept, I brought in some fine scissors and tweezers and painstakingly removed the five stitches up on her forehead from a gash she received last Monday after colliding with a coffee table. (I have a small horizontal scar mirrored on the opposite side of my own forehead, also from the corner of a coffee table.) To me, it’s unimaginable that I could feel this close to any other being, so I will hope for the hormones to kick in after his birth and let you know whether I fall into the sad state of dreadful post-partum depression.

Freddy had taken Daisy to the ski slopes, and without them I slunk into my natural state of extreme laziness and lay in bed to read another bloody mystery by another up-and-coming Swede. At half past 2 my mother let herself in.

My mother and I have been on fragile ground lately, even more so than usual, and this is because of my pregnancy and my preoccupations with motherhood. In my dreams, I shake her by the shoulders for lacking a maternal and nurturing spirit. Last time she came over, she said You’re getting so big. Well yes, what do you expect was my reply. She reached out to touch my stomach, and I recoiled involuntarily.

She called from the kitchen and I and the heavy belly heaved ourselves off the bed and down the stairs. First she wanted to know if there was anything to eat–she was hungry–and then she asked to use the phone because she had forgotten her cell phone. Then she asked if she could borrow Freddy’s truck to move some bookcases from one house to the newer house she had bought in December.

I opened the pantry to get the spare key to the truck that is kept on a hook, and her eyes snooped along the kitchen counter until they found something disagreeable enough to berate me for. It was a Japanese woodblock print calendar she’d sent that I hadn’t removed from cellophane wrapping. Zulieka, why haven’t you hung this up? It’s a calendar. It’s almost February. (A whole twelfth of the pages are now wasted!)

I didn’t feel up to placating her or apologizing. I told her it was none of her business. She didn’t need to check up on whether I put her practical and thoughtful gifts to good use. You really don’t understand, do you, she said. It’s a fucking calendar, I yelled. It’s not as if a lot of thought went into it; it came with your buy-one-get-one-free coupon. I have a calendar on my iphone, a calendar on my computer, and Iliojuet sent me a calendar too.

She sat down on a kitchen stool with great sadness in her eyes. Here! I dropped the truck key into her hand and handed her the calendar. Maybe you know someone more deserving of this lovely calendar! Maybe I will come to your house unannounced and scream at you for not wearing the slippers I got you last Christmas!

I just really wanted her out of the house so that I could recoup and save some sanity for the rest of the day, but of course she would not leave. I went upstairs and slammed the bedroom door just like a thirteen year old, and she followed me up. I begged her to leave and come back another time when I was feeling better, but she would not listen. She continued her quiet, sad talking about me needing psychological counseling to work out my anger issues, about how she is sorry that I can’t be nice to her, about how she knows I must be very unhappy. At least she did not come into the bedroom. I sat on my bed and stuffed my index fingers into my ears, and read more of the mystery. I was very sweet to Freddy when he came home.

When it comes to being identified as an Asian woman, I am very thin-skinned, because it points out the disparity between how I see myself and what sort of impression I make on others. I don’t go through my day thinking that I am Asian, and in fact, other than having an intermittent craving for sushi, I never think about being part Japanese. I don’t consider “ethnicity” as something that sets me apart. I don’t feel that I have any of the stereotypical qualities–not delicacy, quietness, mystery (frequently cited by friends who have visited Japan: “You can’t tell what they are thinking”), graceful movements, care of small details, self-sacrifice for the family, or the ability to pack eighteen sweaters into a small carry-on.

When Professor McFitzpatrick took me for a walk down Beacon St. last summer, he pointed out all the white dudes with their Asian girlfriends teetering on heels to compensate for the height difference. “I’ve never noticed so many interracial couples before” he said. It hit like an icy snowball on the neck: he sees me as being like these women, and he sees himself as being part of an interracial couple. Then I took a look at myself wearing a short dress with ridiculously tall cork-heeled espadrilles, a bit underfed on more rice than protein, trying too hard probably, and although with the heels I was an inch taller than Professor McFitzpatrick, I might have passed for a slightly skanky almond-eyed mistress vying to trade sex for a green card. Geezus. A full notch lower than a Russian bride.

“So what’s the deal with being Irish then? Are you a type?,” I asked. “Do you break out in song, dance gigs, and mourn the loss of your bonny lass?” And so he did, right there on the sidewalk, break out in melody–it was a Grateful Dead song (I can’t tell you which). He belted it out, and I cowered in the same exact way I remember my mother cowering when my father would explode into song and dance.

He said later on that he identified with being Catholic more keenly than with being Irish, and blamed that for overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt, even though he wasn’t particularly religious.

I want to thank John Wood for mailing me “The Third Policeman”, and Nuumi who worked six years ago in a bookstore in was it Toronto? who sent “Sheep in a Jeep” and a poignant short story which, Oh God I’m so Sorry, I ripped to shreds in an evil fit of inflated bitchy glory (I remember that story, and I have images of the leaves in it in my head still), and Tony P. who sends missives that go down like cure-all hot toddys, and Phillip Markendoff who hung up on me in what I’m supposed to interpret as his disgust at my pathetic personality but who is he kidding, and SP whose musical and literary recommendations I have taken to heart, and that bicycling lawyer in Philadelphia, no Pittsburg, who shared my love for William Gass, and VJ who leaves comments, cheers VJ, and Dr. Hoyt who while in residence would email me emergency room stories, and the half-lost lovely Mormon girl with her disaster anecdotes, and the other Mormon girl who is this unbelievable shining orb of alive delight, and Ms. L. White who doesn’t need to do anything except just exist to deserve thanks, and the musician with the beautiful half-Japanese children, and Eddie Lin eating knuckles and such, and David who almost has me convinced that not everything that comes out of me is crap. This is crap, isn’t it, giving an Oscar speech as if I’ve achieved some great dead that ought to be shared with any human being that I’ve come in contact with for three seconds?

But that’s not how it is: I’m a beggar, and I’m thanking you for just making eye contact on the street. I remember you from seven years ago. I’ll stay for anyone who turns and looks before walking away. Yes, I’m that desperate.

Being seven months pregnant now, this is more difficult to accomplish. A man looks down five times a day to direct his hunka-hunka towards the cistern, and though I need not look, my parts are certainly felt in a big way, with each step up the stairs increasingly heavy, and the belly become a real structure that heaves up the boobs and pushes down into the pelvis. From an aesthetic point of view, I look ridiculous as a pregnant woman: I’m a curve-less straw with this amazingly spherical growth attached. It’s so round, and just like a ball, it gets kicked and thrown, but from within. There is some amazing, unpredictable footwork going on in there.

This time around I am not as enthralled about being occupied, and I have to raise some semblance of excitement by pretending that because 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, my baby boy is going to save the world. I didn’t have a real job when I had my daughter, and those first months were still stressful and difficult. I’m very much dreading lugging in a breast pump and taking twenty minute breaks to be sucked by a buzzing machine while the baby without his mother sucks instead on bottles and pacifiers and his thumb. So what if other mothers have to do this, and this is the new reality for women who have fought an uphill battle to be admitted into the workforce? I think it’s tragic.

There’s a verse in the slave’s lullaby that most people leave out:

Down in the meadow,
lies my poor little baby.
Bees and butterflies pickin’ at his eyes,
poor little thing is crying Mammy.

I would say a majority of American female artists, at least those whose work we know, did not have children. (I’m just saying this, without any real research. Who has time for research?) And yet the philosophical claim of women who have banked (as in ka-ching) on having a distinctly feminine output is that artwork by women has a different set of aesthetics by which merit can by judged than the usual, more conventional and historically entrenched standards of the males who have been accepted as standard museum or literary fare. If you have birds flying into vaginas in your painting, you can be a great female artist, even if a look at the work without any gender-based reference point reveals that it is a piece of crap, i.e. Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo and the recently deceased Helen Frankenthaler. Those three belong to what I think of as a dreary set of mustachioed, unsmiling crones, with quite ugly paintings. If you say what you really think of their work, you get stoned for being a misogynist. (Of the three, Frida was the most original.)

So there are famous male artists too, who by force of personality rather than talent have made it into the more rarified upper stratospheres of the art world, but I would hesitate to say that any of them are leaning on the “singularly male” point of view, or on what comes of seeing the world through the one-eyed member, as the crux of their style. Too many penises to compete with–it ceases to become a political statement, or even an interesting one.

Isn’t there any way to escape being a woman artist, a female poet, a woman writer, or a woman composer? The gender is imposed as if it is miraculous to be both a woman and anything else creative.

I found a lovely sounding Steinway at a local church that was donated several years ago by a generous parishioner (Santa, that’s what I want for Christmas.) The church was gracious enough to let me use the piano for some recordings and a couple of concerts for a low rate, so when they asked if I could accompany some of their Christmas gigs, I said sure. They mentioned that I would be playing for a group from “Levon Yardley” this afternoon, but I still hadn’t figured out who or what “Levon Yardley” was even after waiting for patients from the Levon Yardley House to be lifted or coaxed into the sanctuary.

The program started with Jingle Bells, which, sung by the two dozen or so adults with various mental disabilities, reached a feverish pitch of enthusiasm. Everyone was having a good time–the singers, the audience, the director. I thought I was going to have a good time too. Real holiday spirit.

I can’t get some of my students to sing during their lessons, they’re so afraid of the sound of their own voice. So being with people who jump right in and open up their throats is refreshing and heart warming.

But then, you know the “Glo-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-o-oooo-RIA” song? This refrain is everyone’s favorite part of the carol, and during performance the volume suddenly ramps up for the word “gloria”, far exceeding the attention given to the actual verses, which are dramatically and musically inconsequential. All breath is spent on the forever descending single vowel sound of “o”, after which, gasping for air, church-goers manage to spit out scantily “in excelsis deo”.

In this instance, no less passionate than a more traditional interpretation, the o’s of the glorias were howled in forty-three different keys (major, minor, and made-up) and went up and down and sideways, and none of the singers knew when to stop with them. There was no in excelsis deo to thwart the flood of brayed o’s.

I could do nothing to control myself. Don’t be too hard on me; you weren’t there to hear it. I put my head down to try to shield my face with my hair, and I really cried. My bowl full of baby was jiggling, my fingers were slipping and shaking, and there were three more verses.

I was tense as a child, getting stressed out over my mother’s unrelenting strings of criticisms, worried about keeping the daydreaming in check at school, worried that my father was going to die and leave me alone with the poisonous creature who birthed me. I must have started gritting my teeth at night at around age seven or eight, because it was after staying the night a friend’s house that the problem was first noticed.

During the years after having my braces removed and using a retainer, my parents had to buy new retainers every month because I would grind through them in my sleep. Since then I’ve sort of forgotten about the grinding, finding it mildly uncomfortable to wake up to aching jaws, and having gotten used to episodes of TMJ, but last week I managed to crack a molar wide open.

I could stick the tip of my tongue into the fissure–truly alarming. I hadn’t been to a dentist for four years, and I spent my Monday morning calling around to find a place that would take my insurance. I was able to schedule a cleaning on Tuesday morning, followed by filling work on Wednesday, and yes it did occur to me that there might be something amiss about a practice being able to offer me immediate attention, but then maybe my case was of especial concern.

Didn’t find the stains on the ceiling and the musty smell of the Dr. Laudanum’s practice very comforting. It made sense however when Trisha the receptionist greeted me in the way only people from small towns can master. We are all in this world together, you, and I, and my enormous breasts that are sitting on the desk, she said. We are not exactly professional in our bearing, and our threadbare carpet is from the 1980’s, but we will show you our love by arguing with your insurance company for hours to get your filling paid for (and that she did.)

The clinician who cleaned my teeth had palsy. This Dr. Laudanum, who has pictures of his two rather unattractive daughters on several walls, must be a very kind person, I thought, as I spat blood into the little sink. He has held onto this employee despite her debilitating handicap, and despite the fact that she is going to be responsible for a loss of clients. Once she was able to anchor her picks against the enamel of my teeth, she managed okay for a stretch of time before involuntary shaking would force the pick to scoot into my gums or lips.

The next morning I met the good doctor himself. He wore a golf shirt, was slight, and had a cough. A camera pointed in my mouth threw the image of the cracked tooth onto a large monitor. I felt a little sick. What the hell is wrong with me? I’m like one of those disturbed parrots that pull out their own feathers.

All fixed now, no other cavities. I think I will wait another 5 years for the follow-up visit.

Oh god, what a wonderful time of year this is. Sunday Kiki down the street called for the third time to remind me of her “Saffron Road” party, marketed as an eco-friendly version of the Tupperware parties of yore. Grapefruit-scented salt scrubs, bamboo utensils, glass bead bracelets made in Ghana; we all desperately need these things. She put videos of herself out on Youtube spraying the Saffron Road Lavender All-purpose Cleaner in her mouth to show how safe it is. It is only like $7.99, a small price to pay for saving the earth.

Last year Kiki sold me some Barefoot Books (another home sales enterprise). They are terribly written, with a kind of sheen on the pages that makes my mouth feel chalky, but after all I depend on her exclusively to babysit my daughter so there’s no diplomatic way to get out of buying this junk. Kiki was offering sangria and crackers with tapenade, and had spent the whole weekend cleaning her house with the lavender spray and appointing the Christmas tree with silver ornaments and white lights. A middle class on-the-fence conservative clutch of women (say they voted for Obama and believe in diversity but don’t actually have any black friends, and yes without exception they all drive SUVs no less than five years old although their brand of laundry detergent is safe for the environment) was in attendance. It’s safe to say no one wanted to there, but we all dropped at least 30 bucks in the spirit of…what? To think, I could have bought potatoes and a real red roast beef instead.

Because they seem to surface despite attempts to drown them.

My professor with Tourette’s syndrome or whatever it is that makes your head loll forward involuntarily, mail artificial hearts to the wrong country, blink rapidly when the conversation gets boring, and walk without bending at the knees, is out of the bag. You know me well enough now; isn’t he just my type? Ambitious, academic, Irish, a drinker, a smoker, taking drugs for ADHD during the day and sleeping pills at night while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation re-runs and Yankee games. (That’s a hint–he’s not a Bostonian.) Aren’t I just what he needs?

Where does he teach? He teaches at Harvard. I say this smugly, knowing it will hurt Freddy, who, if I let him be, would still be where I found him: renting a two bedroom house with three disabled cats and a gay pothead who filled said house with Sesame Street-themed knick knacks discovered at garage sales. Plastic statuettes of Bert and Ernie over the door jams, sticky with cat hair and dander, Elmo and Cookie monster hanging out under a ficus plant whose leaves are also fogged over with cat hair and cat dust. A velvet painting of Bert next to the front door, a Sesame Street lunch box on the kitchen counter blighted by both rust and mouse poop (remember, the cats are disabled.)

Was he drinking then? Yes. Every day? Yes. Was he painting then? No. Was he happier? Yes. Then I should have left him alone.