I’ll see you soon.
I read Aunt Helen’s next letter before I started driving.
Lottie,
I did an interview with a magazine once, some foreign magazine I can’t remember now. The interviewer I remember, though; she was a petite girl with thick glasses and black, black hair, a bright-yellow shirt and bright-red lipstick and a bright-blue skirt. She was so bright, is what I’m saying, that it kind of hurt my eyes to look at her directly. But she was also very self-assured and not at all threatened by my intimidating artist demeanor (kidding). She looked me straight in the eye, point-blank, and said, in this beautiful accent I cannot now place, “What is the worst thing you have ever done?”
That was her opening question! My gosh, at the time it kind of ruffled my feathers, it annoyed me a bit. I didn’t know how to answer her, and I think I even felt embarrassed, a little accosted, like, wheredoes this little imp get off being so bold? I’m sure I must have given her a half-assed answer, a stock answer, something like “Well, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Now I’m hoping that expression translated to whatever her first language was, otherwise I might have come off as quite the murderer.
Now, many years and many interviews later, she is one of the only interviewers I can actually remember (I also remember Oprah and Ellen, but that’s to be expected). And that question stands out as the most interesting question I’ve ever been asked. So, for fun, I’d like to answer it now. There is no one left to keep it a secret from; I shall soon be gone, and maybe the one good thing about death is you no longer have to worry about maintaining your public image. You no longer, essentially, have to explain yourself.
The worst thing I have ever done is to walk away from a friend at the very moment he needed me the most. That’s as specific as I want to be, for now (if there weren’t some cliffhangers to these letters, how could I be sure you’d read them all the way through?). As a much younger person, I was faced with a very difficult decision, and I chose to protect myself and only myself, to put myself first in every respect of the phrase. To abandon completely one of my few true friends. I have never forgiven myself for that (nor should I), and it is something I think about often. Iwas a selfish person, once upon a time. I am thankful to have (mostly) grown out of it.
You, however, are not selfish at all, and I admire that about you so much. I wonder what answer you would give, if someday an interviewer asked you the same question. I’d like you to have something fun to tell them, a secret that hurts no one, and so that is where my next task comes from:
Do something you’re not supposed to do.
Do it with relish.
Enjoy the not-supposed-to-be-doingness of it.
Do it proudly. Break some rules. Hurt no one.
Love, H.
I opened the pinned address Sam had sent while I mentally calculated all the rules I was not prepared to break: stealing, vandalizing, murder. Obviously. I could run a stop sign on the way to New Canaan? But that didn’t seem like anything special; it just seemed dangerous and irresponsible.
The map routed me to somewhere called the Glass House. I spent the hour-and-a-half ride wondering both what I could do that I wasn’t supposed to, and whether it was literally a glass house.
It was literally a glass house.
Well—not at first.
The address Sam sent me took me to Elm Street, and alittle brick building with a sign that said The Glass House. Sam was already there.
“This is a brick house. This isn’t a glass house,” I said, instead of hello.
“You’ll see,” he said.
A few minutes later we were herded into vans, and a few minutes after that we pulled over and disembarked, and I followed our small group up a hill.
It emerged out of nowhere, past a skinny stone wall and just in front of a peaceful pond. A literal glass house. Our tour guide stopped the group outside and began to give a short history, but I hardly heard him. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“This is unreal,” I whispered to Sam.
All four sides of the rectangular house were pure glass. It was edged on one side by beautiful tall trees and the grass surrounding it was pristine and green. There was a circular column of bricks on the inside, a small room, whereas everything else was open and bright.
“I’ve just always liked it here,” Sam said as we followed the tour inside. “It’s so peaceful. So open.”
“It’s really beautiful.”
The house was small and felt cramped with everyone inside, but it was easy to imagine what it would be like without them, what it would be like by yourself or with a few friends. I imagined it in winter, surrounded by snow, and in fall—all the colors of the leaves. I imagined whatit would look like in different places—on the top of a mountain or in the desert or on the bottom of the ocean. I couldn’t stop spinning in circles. I wondered how often they had to clean all the glass, whether they used newspapers like my mom, and a blue-and-white can of glass cleaner.
There were other buildings on the property, another brick house, and an art gallery built right into the side of a small, grassy hill. The entrance, the tour guide said, was built to resemble Agamemnon’s Tomb. There was a Warhol there, a portrait of Philip Johnson, who had designed and built everything and lived here before he died.
The tour was an hour and a half long, and afterward the van was quiet as the tour guide drove us back to the visitors’ center. Sam and I wandered idly through the museum store, touching everything, buying only a single postcard each. In the parking lot, Sam searched for a park on his phone, and we found one called Waveny. We left my car at the visitors’ center (I guess that could technically be considered something I wasn’t supposed to do, but it didn’t feel like a big enough deviance) and went and got sandwiches at a deli close by.
We ate them in the park, under the shadow of a giant tree, on a blanket Sam removed from the trunk of his car. Not far from us a group of kids played a very unregulated game of soccer, using jackets to mark goalposts and a half-deflated ball that whistled and flopped when it was kicked.
