"How will it end?" you ask. "You can't leave us here like this 
without an ending!"
      Why not? I answer.
      I was left. Or I left. I don't even remember.
      Okay. I'll give you an ending. A happy one.
      Do you want the Captain to crawl back?
      To row back?
      To sail back?
      To propose?
      Well, he doesn't crawl back. He doesn't row back. He doesn't 
even sail back.
      But he does propose.
      Only not to me.
      Don't you think he's more clever than that? More 
self-righteous? More enraged?
      You know, I even put the voodoo doll away. No more pluckings, 
no more heart massages, I decided. The power will only bend and turn 
the corner. It will backfire, misfire. I stop. And I am kinder. 
Gentler. Healing. I wish him well. A repair job on his soul and angry 
loveless heart. I rub the doll with warm hands.
        
      I wish him well.
      And he does even better than that.
      He gets married.
      To a sailing seaworthy-woman.
      And sails off into the sunset with her clutching his tanned arm.
      And he makes sure I know this.        
      Only he doesn't write a book. He doesn't have to.   	
		
He uses the telephone. He calls and tells everyone he's met the love 
of his life. That he is engaged. That they are getting married once 
her divorce goes through. That she's granola-crunchy. And earthy.
And she's not the Cambridge Ornithologist. (He moves her out against her will).
He calls everyone with the happy news - his ex-assistants, his sons, 
his accountant (who is also my accountant), his doctor (who is also 
my doctor).
      He doesn't call me.
      He doesn't have to. Everyone else calls for him.
      "He kept saying over and over, "I love her. I'm in love. I love her," 
his former assistant chatters nervously on to me. "So I said, "Okay, 
so you love her. Okay. I get it. You love her. I believe you."
And I hear how his accountant (my accountant) stuffs his hands into 
his pockets, circles the room like an awkward stork bearing an 
unwanted baby, pulls his hands out of his pocket, runs the flat palm 
over the four stripes of black hair covering up the empty nest on his 
head and says, "Okay! So you love her. Fine. That doesn't mean you 
have to marry her.  At least not without a PreNup!"
      And his thirty-year-old son, the fifth child, who once held my hand 
in the hospital recovery room ten years earlier, says, "So when do I 
get to meet my new mother?"
      And my doctor (his doctor) advises me to get on with my life and 
writes me a prescription for high blood pressure medicine.
      And my mother tells me to go forward with dignity.
      And my thirty-eight year-old gynocologist says, "You don't look too 
bad for fifty."
      And I think as I sit on the tissue papered stirrup seat behind the 
white curtain of the examining room, tears trickling down my cheeks, 
maybe not too bad for fifty. But definitely too bad for forty. 
Thirty. Twenty.
But first, let's back up a few pages.
      How am I going to make a sequel out of this mess?
Do you really care what happened from the day I found the Cambridge 
Ornithologist's feet in my boiled green wool slippers under the 
kitchen table at the house on the Cape?
      Is that where I left off?
      And what about all the chapters I still need to write?
      What about my own life?
      What about the future?

I get a call from a reader who is still upset.
      "Is your daughter okay?" she asks.
      "What's wrong with my daughter?" I answer, confused.
      "You know. The trouble."
The reader tells me she stays up until two in the morning reading the 
book and is still worrying about what happens.
      I think for a minute. Trouble? What kind of trouble? Does 
the reader know something about my daughter I don't?
I hang up and immediately dial my daughter long-distance.
She's in Tel Aviv studying to be a vet. Her cell-phone is attached to her ear.
      "Are you in some kind of trouble?" I ask her with a worried voice.
      "What are you talking about?" 
       Her voice answers with a one-second delayed echo.
      "Someone I don't know asked if you are in trouble," I repeat.
"Well, let's see," she takes inventory. "I ran out of milk right 
before Shabbat."
      My daughter and I do not discuss suicide bombers, territory closures, 
civil unrest, the two-year old Intifada, the Sharon government, the 
PLO's bombed out offices in Ramallah, the explosion at Sbarro 
Pizzeria, the nightly drive-by shootings in Jerusalem. Supermarket 
specials on hand grenades, unsettled settlements. The Extreme Right. 
The Extreme Left. The casualty lists. Ceaseless cease-fire agreements.
"Oh," I sigh in relief. "I just wanted to make sure you are okay."
"Mom, I'm on a break at work. I'm late and the battery is running 
low. Call me later. I love you." And she hangs up.

      Sometimes I forget.
      That it is three years later.
That the book left off in a bad spot. That the reader doesn't know 
that time marches on, despite the type set on the page forever 
damning my child and me to repeat the lessons of our history over and 
over, as long as there is someone willing to read the story again, 
from the beginning.
      It is three years later. And by the time anyone reads this book, it 
will even be two years more than that.  Time waits for no publisher.
Frankly, I would have liked to stop aging at forty-eight. But my 
mother likes to remind me to "remember the alternative."
My daughter, on the other hand, couldn't have been more delighted to 
leap from the ages of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, to the age of 
nineteen and twenty.
      While you were reading the first book when she was shipped off to a 
kibbutz for a year to get her halo back, she kind of grew up. She 
graduated high school even with A's in chemistry. And today is 
determined to become a vet.
      Okay, her dirty underwear is still stuffed under the bed. Her 
sentences in English don't always add up. We fight and pick on each 
other in between sighs and hugs.
      But you've got to give my daughter credit - she gets herself to class 
every morning, to work every afternoon, to the clubs every night. 
All in Hebrew. Clomping on uncomfortable shoes, skinny jeans, juicy 
lips that sometimes inhale, undershirt T's, long half-blonde hair 
with ends brittle from too much Israeli sun. Books and loose papers 
stuffed inside a one shoulder-strapped knapsack jumbled between a 
half-smoked pack of cigarettes, clear plastic citrus lemon shaped 
makeup bag bulging with concealer, lip gloss, coated rubber bands, 
tweezers, eyebrow pencil, broken lip crayons and a compact of neutral 
face powder with a broken mirror.
Her face has matured from round unsqueaky clean adolescent to 
strikingly smooth, prominent cheekbones with laughing lips filled 
with the same chicklet-sized teeth, a little less white, narrow 
darting eyes that grow moon round and cobalt blue if the subject 
under discussion is her. Funny thumbs still chewed to the quick, 
manicured nails on the other eight digits. Half honey-colored hair 
that twists into long pigtails, a French braid, a ponytail knot, or 
hangs down below her shoulders in straight, hand cut layers. A little 
uneven.
      Remember - this is Israel.
Driven, ambitious, determined, dramatic, strong busy hands stroking 
an orphaned duck, a one-eyed cat, a pelican filled with buckshot, 
sewing up emptied dog uteruses, repositioning dangling cats eyes, 
swabbing out stalls and cages, carrying twenty pound sacks of kibble.
      My daughter is not exactly a Jewish American princess, even 
though she uses my credit card like one.

*

I am in bed, three thousand miles away from my daughter, scribbling 
memories into this smaller wiro-black notebook, wondering how to make 
a book jump off the pages... how to arc a story that already reached its 
peak and is well past its prime. Should I leave well enough alone?
      "But what happened?" The chorus demands.
Go back to the beginning of the end and don't be so miserly - share 
everything, tell everything, every pimple and mole.  "We want to know 
about the chapters you didn't write!"
      Know what?
I don't want to write about him anymore. He already ate up 13 years 
plus three counting the last book's birth and delivery.
I don't know if I can make a new story stand on its own merit, 
without love and betrayal.
The fact is that even while I lay in bed writing a book about the 
past, I wasn't lying still. Maybe it looked that way from the 
headboard down. Maybe I didn't pick up the phone when it rang, 
because it was probably my mother. Maybe I ate midnight snacks of raw 
sesame seeds, raisins and uncooked oatmeal. Anything is possible. I 
don't exactly remember the details except for the words adding up 
from spare change into a useful currency.
My editor, Dana, says I have to be driven to write the next book.
I'm not.
      She says I shouldn't bite off anything too ambitious.
      I won't.
Because the critics won't be as kind and generous of spirit on a second book.
I know that.
      "That being said, never mind, write anyway," she tells me.
Okay. Because I can't help it.
      "Later I'll tell you stories that will raise your hair about the 
acquisition phase of your first book!"
      I don't want to know the dirty details, anyway.
My agent says, "Never greet guests with your hair curlers on."
But that's the meaty part, I say. How it's done. The tricks. The 
sweat. The rejections. The flat hair days.
      "Don't," he advises.

Let me tell you about my agent.
He reminds me (sort of) the Captain - image, image image.  A 
clean-shaven Captain stiffly downing martinis between paragraphs. 
Lean, precise, concise, a by-the-book kind of guy, handsome, boyish, 
athletic. Think of red v-neck sweaters and gray flannel slacks, 
tassle-toed Cole Haan loafers carried in a canvas tote monogrammed 
brief case, while he hikes through the slush in Abercrombie and Fitch 
high top snow walkers. Think of neat. A one-sentence-at-a-time kind 
of guy who would never spill soup on his bow tie, or speak unless 
there was a complete pause in the conversation. A guy who finishes a 
complete thought, even if you've jumped the salt shaker in between 
commas.
He is a classic, my agent. He looks the part - tidy in tweeds, a 
manuscript-driven desk littered with red editing pencils, although he 
flourishes a fountain pen that lets his authors down easily - that 
gives hope with a two-sentence dismissal.
      He is clubby.
      He is North Shore.
      He is a WASP.
      He hangs up without saying goodbye.
      He follows a script.
Eventually he even invites you once to lunch at the oldest Brahmin 
club on Beacon Hill because, "It's time you were seen."
      But I like him.
He tells you, "Don't bring work to lunch", and entertains you at a 
small two person mahogany dining table with tales of glee club 
performances, ancient society club rites, introducing you slightly to 
other Boston scions still following the rhymes of the ancient 
mariner, bellowing in harmony from inside the dark brown church-like 
hall, a choir of club members peaked under the rafters. A club so 
rarified, the age floats like humidored cigar ash over generations of 
time and memories and framed playbills rising one decade after 
another up creaky wood staircases.
I think the boys never recovered from the shock of their Harvard 
graduation. So instead, they dragged their clubs, initiations, and 
playbills with them, in effect, truly bringing their work to lunch. 
My mother says Harvard College is like a meat grinder -- you keep 
feeding the funnel with filet mignon and specks of fat into one side, 
and voila, out the other end comes identical fresh ground hamburger 
patties mixed and ready to line up  in single formation on long 
sheets of wax paper.
      My agent says, "Nothing of the kind."
I accuse him of being a Republican. Worse yet, a North Shore Republican.
He says, "Wrong on both accounts."
When I look at him, I see Junior League luncheons, Flower Shows, polo 
matches, glee clubs, debating teams, prep school newspapers, 
three-martini lunches, English mahogany sideboards, silver spoons and 
horsey women with thick ankles.
He tells me he's a Democrat born in Manhattan.
"Upper Manhattan?" I frame the territory.
He murmurs something I don't quite catch about a prominent 
editor-mother, about being thrown out of a New England prep school. 
About wanderlust skiing challenges, about still current tennis 
tournaments, and a once upon a time US intelligence tour of duty in 
Germany in the 50's.
"What do you think the Captain will do when he sees this book?" I 
interrupt to jump ahead. We are now discussing lawsuits, slander and 
invasion of privacy.
      "I just watch the ball go back and forth over the net," he smiles, 
      "like judging a tennis match."
      "Don't you take sides?" I am flabbergasted.
      "That's not my job."

Be careful what you tell me.
      Nothing is safe.
My sisters know this and watch their tongues. My mother couldn't care 
less. She'll nose up the goods and tell me first, expecting the news 
to be broadcast. My father has to listen to all of us women and says 
nothing. My daughter has a bigger mouth than even I do, and I can 
prove it, I pay her phone bills.
Our news moves not just within the family, but clear across continents.
Why do I know that the Israeli Prime Minister is up all night 
wretching in the "bet-shemoosh" with a stomach flu?
Because my daughter's handsome Ramat Aviv roommate is the prime 
minister's personal body guard and stands guarding the WC door at the 
prime minister's home the whole night.
How do I know that?
Because before my daughter's roommate crawls into his own bed in the 
early morning hours after his shift, he pours my daughter a cup of 
coffee at the kitchen table, and she asks where he's been. He tells 
her. She tells me. I write it down.
And why does the Israeli Prime Minister  probably now know that The 
Chairman of the PLO's wife's sister is finally pregnant?
Because I just had lunch with the Chairman's sister-in-law in Boston 
and we went maternity clothes shopping after jointly negotiating a 
solution to the Middle East crisis.  All of this over lasagna and 
chicken parmesian at a local Italian cafe in the Brookline Arcade 
building. And when I get back to the studio, my daughter checks in 
from her cell phone on a Tel Aviv street corner to ask, "Where have 
you been?"
      And I tell her.
      And she tells him.
      There are no secrets in our family.
It's not that I'm a rat. It's just that the stories are so 
interesting that I feel the need to share. I have hundreds of them. I 
always share - if only to keep my mother's spirits up. I collect 
stories like the tooth fairy collects teeth with gold inlays. There's 
a hole. I've got to fill it.

      So think sequel. And think of something to write that reads like a 
book - with a happy ending this time.

      To be continued...