My five-year-old gives me questions that are more interesting than any adult’s.

Everything is a word, when actually, things are not their words. The words are these groups of letters; the roses are the roses are the roses. Nouns spoken pull up images first, unless you are blind, in which case the rose would be the smell of a rose.

People who are fluent in only one language (me) are limited in their understanding of observable objects because they can describe them only in words, and only in English words. A mathematician, bilingual speaker, or artist can render by other methods, and therefore will have a stronger connection to what is observed.

Music, in my experience of it, doesn’t describe observable objects, so it is a language whose semantics are unrelated to words. CAT. I see a black cat. What color is your cat?
CAT. Do you suddenly hear a diminished seventh chord? Only if you’re insane.

When teaching ear-training, I tried to stay away from describing major chords as happy and minor chords as sad, asking instead that students identify “bright sounds” and “dark sounds” so that they wouldn’t be stuck with only one emotion per tonality. However, the idea of “happy and sad” chords is grasped more quickly than colored chords. It’s conditioned very early in our Western brains that major=happy and minor =sad, but this is not universal. Although, because of how technology is assimilating all of our ears, I think the complexity of other musical structures from Asia and Africa will be lost as they are appropriated into Western tonalities, and major and minor will hem us all into happy or sad.

Why do humans like to disassociate from other humans and then start wars to justify killing each other? Because it feels so good to do it. Why does it feel good?

I am a very competitive person, which is a tragedy because I am not particularly skilled at any sports or games. I refuse to accept what is patently obvious to everyone who knows me: that I am a klutz and a mathematical moron, and I am always going to lose any game that requires focus, strategy, or planning.

In grade school they used to have Rubic’s Cube competitions, and I entered one after my pen pal in Hong Kong mailed me the algorithms for a quick solution. I memorized the algorithms and was confident that I’d be able to solve a cube in about five minutes, which would assure me a triumphant victory and convince my classmates and teachers that I was genius. To my knowledge the other fifth graders didn’t know about the sequences. (Now you can watch on Youtube these funny bug-eyed four year olds solving the cube in under a minute.)

Liam Chang, sitting next to me, started maneuvering his Rubic’s cube before the teacher gave the go ahead, and I tried to call him out for cheating. I was so furious at him for playing unfairly that I couldn’t focus on my own cube, and after he solved his, he shouted at me. What’s your problem, slow-poke, he yelled.

I started crying. We used to be friends, but now you don’t like me any more, and I don’t know why, I said.

A few months ago we’d waited for each other after school once a week to walk together to our violin lessons. He’d valiantly shared his umbrella with me in the pouring rain.

When I went home with my demoralizing second place ribbon, I sat in my room and imagined a rebuttal for Liam, to make him suffer for making me cry in front of everybody. But at school I didn’t have the courage to confront him. Instead, a week later, I wrote him a note and left it on his desk. “You think you are so smart, but you’re not. Solving puzzles and and being good at math do not mean that you are intelligent. You have no idea what is going on in your own head. You are psychologically retarded.” Or something like that but less concise. I can’t remember what fifth graders write like. Watching him as he opened up my note, I felt like I’d won.

The one tall lady at six feet has a hard time finding a match among the shorter men who are doctors, lawyers, and IT nerds, and whose wives, bless their hearts, dress like Nancy Pelosi. Eddy gets all the flirt from tall women. Eddy woke up that morning with a bloody-looking eye (like a burst vessel or haemorrhage) and it was pin-the-diagnosis-on-the-donkey as the drunk urologist and plastic surgeon discussed the possible causes. I wanted to tell them that I’d ridden my donkey too hard the night before, but you know, I didn’t say it. I’m too scared. The drunk urologist was a woman: the only hot chick there : if she hadn’t been hot, I’d have said it.

My mother was there too, with big scabs all over her legs from her rough time with the bugs in the garden. She is oblivious, and that has always embarrassed me. She showed up with a 16 oz spray bottle of insect repellent and asked Eddy to carry this in the pocket of his linen pants. When he refused, she chased him around the lawn like a hag on a broomstick. When I was little, I thought she was cuckoo because she was Japanese. Now I have learned that by Japanese standards, she is unfit for society. This is a scary thing, living in the same state, sorry, Commonwealth, as my weirdo mother. It is scary for many people. She is quixotic in her frugality, being full of good intentions but expending her mental energy on finding big rocks for her garden (in the car, on the highway, as I am trying to remember which exit to take (23A, 23B, or 23C?) she sighs “Look at the big rock over there. I wish I could have that rock”.) She cuts my dryer sheets into quarters when she comes over.

So having my mother there, amongst all these nice Americans, forced me to drink glass after glass of champagne. I started scratching all the mosquito bites I was getting and tugging my underwear out of my ass and saying fuck this and fuck that. That guy was there, you know, Mr. Simon of Simon and Simon and Simon Capital with his wife who looks and speaks like Katharine Hepburn without the shakes. I like her. I like him. I like the tomatoes out of their garden even if they call them to-mah-toes.

Inside, someone else had found the bathroom first and was occupying it for a long time. The drummer from the jazz-band-for-hire was waiting in line with me, and we decided to look for another bathroom. He grabbed my ass in the hall so we made out a bit, but I needed to pee too badly to get into him. Oh right, where’s Eddy, and would he care? I guess I will find out when he reads this.

I don’t know why it was decided that I drive us home. Eddy dropped trou’ and peed where the cars were parked, so of the two of us maybe I was slightly less drunk. We got lost on narrow highways with odd-numbered names: twenty-seven, sixty-three, one-seventeen. Wait. I’m a mother. Where did I leave my daughter? With the babysitter who expected us back by midnight but now it’s almost two a.m. My poor little baby! Call the babysitter and try not to slobber. We are lost. The last sign said highway forty-three. That’s between Worcestershire and Ketchup, right? Do you know where we are?

I paid the babysitter a hundred bucks out of drunken guilt, and I would have paid her more if there’d been more cash in my purse. Zums would not look at me she hated me so, and she wouldn’t look at her father because his bloody eye scared her.

Painting and drawing were private pursuits that I controlled without input from my mother or from teachers. Two-year-olds like to color where they are not supposed to, on the walls, on their bed sheets, all over their board books. That feeling of joyous rebellion probably never leaves a painter.

When I was in pre-school, I painted a yellow chicken with so much yellow paint that the entire newsprint sheet was caked and cracking. I didn’t have any paint at home. Believe it or not, I didn’t even have crayons. I had a box of colored pencils, but my mother kept them out of reach. I took my painting of the yellow chick home and cut it up and dropped pieces of it into a cup of water. Then I had enough yellow paint to cover a whole wall of my bedroom with a truly giant yellow chick.

My mother went after it with a sponge and soapy water, and it washed right off, but she wouldn’t know where I got the yellow paint. I held onto my secret, stored in a private arsenal that she couldn’t touch or wash away.

I had a friend across the street, Christina, who was chubby and dark-haired, and a year older than me. We went swimming together at the country club where our fathers played golf. Why I remember this: one of the lifeguards was also named Zulieka. How was it possible for us to have the same strange name and be so utterly dissimilar.

Christina was running around the perimeter of the pool, and Zulieka the lifeguard yelled at her to stop. Christina’s mother, who was consistently on the low end of drunk, slowly rose out of her lounge chair to catch her. Christina thought this was funny, and she giggled and ran faster. In the sun, a screaming mother and dark blood on the concrete when Christina tumbled and broke her crown.

Christina proudly showed me her six stitches. I knew why she had them, because my mother told me. Christina was a bad girl who did not listen to her mother or the lifeguard.

Which brings me to the deer I hit yesterday. But not yet.

I remember one more incident involving Christina. We were playing in front of my house, and she waited until the last second to go inside and pee. In our house, all the toilet lids were kept closed, but this was not the case in Christina’s home, so when she pulled down her pants, she sat and peed without thinking, on top of the lid and all over the bathroom floor. She called for my help and asked me to get her some towels. I pulled towels out of the bathroom cupboard, and watched her wipe up the mess and stuff the soiled towels back into the cupboard.

Christina made me promise not to tell my mother. Even my friends were a little bit afraid of her.

When my mother noticed the bunched up towels, she called me to an interrogation. At first, I maintained that I didn’t know what had happened. Then as she broke me down, I let on that Christina had had an accident and had made me promise not to tell. But my mother believed that I was lying still, and tried to hammer into my four-year-old head that the only thing worse than lying to your parents was blaming a friend for your mistake.

It wasn’t a turning point, but it set in motion the pathological lying. What does that mean, please. Not the American Academy of Psychiatry’s description, please. Pathos and Logic.

I lied about all events big and little. I just told everyone what they wanted to hear. There wasn’t any point in telling the truth if the truth was not going to be believed. However, I felt ashamed as I lied, and I believed that all disasters and traumas that I witnessed were my fault.

Which could bring us back to the deer, the second deer I have killed in six years, but let’s not just yet.

(I know how to make you love because I know you. You should figure me out, and soon.)

I believed that my father should be president of the United States. Should we allow our children to think so highly of their fathers while the mothers change diapers and cook chicken and rice?

(Why do you think I learned to take it all in three glides, when on your own it takes 56 minutes? Wouldn’t you like to reciprocate?)

I had dreams about the man I would marry. He was waiting for me by a brick house across a river that was filled with dead people. He was tall and fair-haired, and even when he helped me cross, he didn’t seem to see me.

I showed a crayon drawing of the face of my future husband to my father, and watched scorn rise from the folds of his facial muscles. The proportion is wrong, he told me. The eyes are too high on the head, and too far apart. No one’s hair is actually sunshine yellow. Go look up Leonardo Da Vinci, we have the translations of his notebooks.

I didn’t show any drawings to my father again, but the humiliation and anger of being told that something I’d created was worse than laughable was motivation. (To be the best ever! That’ll show them!) It happened fairly quickly, with one drawing that I spent every waking hour erasing and redoing for three days.

I still work this way, without stopping or sleeping much, but I can only sustain energy for a week or less. I don’t have the stamina or patience for anything bigger. I’ve started forty short stories in the last year, actually forty-four unfinished three page short stories. It’s disgusting. I stay up until three or four in the morning, and then realize how stupid my writing is, and then go to bed and wake up a foul bitch.

That first accurate portrait was of Vladimir Horowitz. Then I drew Ivo Pogorelich and Bernard Shaw. I can’t explain why Bernard Shaw–I’ve never read any of his plays–but maybe he was in National Geographic that year. Then into puberty the subject matter devolved to women out of Vogue with pouting lips and pop stars. I drew hundreds of them, fast. I stuck all these drawings into my Czerny piano studies, so that my piano teacher would see them and understand why I didn’t have time to play the same scale fifteen hundred times in a row.

Running down, and that deer still waiting–is my daughter going to hate me?

I won an art scholarship and a music scholarship. For my music audition, I played the piano and the violin and I sang. This is why I didn’t have any friends.

I turned away from painting because I just couldn’t do it all, and painting didn’t carry me emotionally like sound did. I was only good at mimicking other painters. My understanding was limited to cartoon-expression: for instance, a freshman-year self-portrait with a needle and thread puncturing a cheek. It’s not beautiful or creative (which is what I thought it was at the time), it’s just needy and whiny. I didn’t have an instinctive feel for line or composition. I’ve never seen a painting that takes my breathe away. I’ve seen paintings that stay with me, but I’ve never been taken to God by a painting, and music does that to me, almost every time.

I want men who are better than me at some kind of art form so that I can learn from them. I like to be critiqued and I like to get pissed off. You can have this kind of relationship with a man because, even if he is feels threatened, there is no question of a hundred-pound woman physically overpowering him. You cannot have this kind of relationship with a heterosexual woman because after she hates you, out of jealousy, or because you really are an egotistical shit, sex is not there to repair the damages. Sex heals so much.

Freddy is an incredible painter. His paintings are luminescent and tender and distant. However, because I am not giving him love, because I am a nasty selfish creature, on the same night I hit the deer and wrecked my car, the kitchen floor was moving with maggots. They popped underfoot like white lies. I didn’t stop for the deer.

I can’t go to LA. Our fights are pathetic. We turn into hairy, violent creatures.

It’s not LA that I want to go to–I want to just go. I become pathological, whatever that means. Selfish mostly. A nasty bitch is his favorite moniker. He becomes the man I consciously have ousted from my life: jealous, possessive, childish, desperate for maternal affirmation, and worst of all, whiny.

He held me down by the wrists and talked directly with my nipples. I can see that they are the biggest problem between us. If it weren’t for them, none of this would have happened. He is talking to them, asking them if they are enjoying the power play and is that why they look hard? as I watch the wall and make note of where the wallpaper isn’t lined up exactly. Then I bend my knees and kick both my feet out against the plane of his chest, and when he falls back, I pound into him with my fists. I have some light bruising around the wrists (I was really hoping for more) whereas he has black/blue footprints on his pecs. He always trumps my victimhood, dammit. The damage to his soul, he says, is irreversible. My student Genia, who feels music instinctively, points to her head and says “There’s no such thing as soul, it’s all up here.” Good god do I need a break. Why doesn’t he?

Okay. So there was this man. He lived all by himself in a hut at the top of the mountain.

But why was he all by himself? Where were his parents?

His parents were dead. He was a very old man. He smoked a pipe. To keep himself busy, he carved little animals out of blocks of wood. One day he carved a horse with a beak. The next day he carved a rabbit with three ears. The next day he carved a fish with a full head of hair and a bow in its tail fin. He carved one creature every day. After a week, he had 7. After a year, he had 365. After ten years, he had 3,652. He had little animals on six shelves in his hut. Then they were all over his floor. Then he started lining them up around his garden.