Mirror Talk: A Memoir

By Barbara Alfaro

Winner of the 2012 IndieReader Discovery Award for Best Memoir Mirror Talk is a heartfelt and often hilarious memoir about a Catholic girlhood, working as a young actress in New York, and being a middle-aged poet in the burbs.

The Mirror Talk chapter entitled "Make Mine Cognac" about an experimental play Alfaro appeared in was the funniest story I've read in years - and had me laughing, and laughing, and laughing out loud. Alfaro's sharp, witty writing style is reminiscent of a wisecracking reporter Hildy Johnson in the Ben Hecht comedy His Girl Friday or even the ultimate wit - Miss Dorothy Parker herself. ~ Silver Birch Press

A wonderful reflection on the life of an artist and poet, Mirror Talk is both a comforting read for a rainy day and a journey of self-discovery not to be missed. Alfaro provides us with our own opportunity to remember how we became who we are today. Her robust memories are topped with a welcoming layer of nostalgia that allows the reader to feel the waves of Rockaway Beach lapping at our toes while we look back fondly on life's moments of hilarity. ~ IndieReader

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Alfaro
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310569333

Barbara Alfaro

Poet and playwright, Barbara Alfaro is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Playwriting and winner of the IndieReader Discovery Award for Best Memoir for Mirror Talk. Her poetry collection Catbird is published by Finishing Line Press. Barbara’s plays have been produced by Source Theatre, PlayZoomers and the Equity Library Theater of New York.

Book preview

Mirror Talk

A Memoir

Barbara Alfaro

Mirror Talk: A Memoir

by Barbara Alfaro

Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Alfaro

Smashwords Edition

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Publisher:

Barbara Alfaro

Cover art by Rayanda Arts

www.rayandaarts.com

In memory of Irene and Sheridan Smith

CONTENTS

Roll-ins

Summer Romance

The Last Ladies

Holy Pictures

Without Violins

Make Mine Cognac

The Snow Ball Incident

The Goddard Experience

Lovers, Funerals, and Terrorist Attacks

Extra, Extra, Read All About It

Happy Halloween

Making Peace

Recession Blues

Sisterhood

A Portrait of the Artist as an Older Woman

Mirror Talk

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other books by Barbara Alfaro

ROLL-IN’s

In television, the segment a program anchor introduces before it is played is called a roll-in. The footage of the tornado; the clip from the latest movie; public service announcements; and product commercials are all roll-ins. Memories, life’s roll-in’s, come unbidden, unplanned, unprogrammed. There is no technician in the control room to halt the remembering. It is as if our unconscious enjoys startling us with holograms from our past. I try to lasso truth, pull it into poems and stories but it is too big and bizarre to be captured. Dragnet detective Sergeant Joe Friday wisely asked for just the facts. You can’t tangle with the truth on a half-hour television show.

My entire childhood was shared with my brothers Bob and Rich. Long ago and far away, as some fairy tales begin, my brothers and I grew up in Little Neck, Long Island, New York. It was before heightened awareness of sexual predators and terrorists, CNN, and computer games. It was when children went outside to play. A five minute walk from our navy blue ranch house there was a thick, wooded area where my brothers and I picked wild blackberries, placed them in a pail and brought them home to our mother. We would pause to watch mallards, and catch toads by the side of a pond. In these same woods a neighborhood bully beat my older brother Bob with tree branches. And deep in them, I received my first kiss. But when I remember my childhood, it is the summers my family spent at Rockaway Beach, New York I remember most. And it seems always to be summers I remember, as if winters didn’t exist.

The Rockaway I recall isn’t the once exclusive retreat of the wealthy or the later one that fell into disarray but the Rockaway known as the Irish Riviera. Irish Americans whose parents or grandparents sailed from Ireland to America, usually by steerage, spent their summers in the shiny white bungalows between Beach 73rd and Beach 98th Streets. New and freshly painted, the bungalows had green shutters, window boxes filled with geraniums and a front porch with four green rocking chairs. American flags, varying in size and expense, hung outside the bungalows. Dark wood furniture inside the rooms seemed brutally polished, as if in preparation for the occasion of summer.

Rainy days Bob and I played cards or monopoly on that little porch, each of us hoping the sun would come out. Come out, as if the sun were in its own bungalow among the other heavenly bodies, waiting for a cloud door to open. When not shuffling cards or purchasing Park Place, I’d rock the baby carriage beside me occupied by my brother Rich. Bob and I played five hundred rummy, war, and a tough little game called knucks – the loser gets their knuckles hit with the edge of the playing cards. Evenings, Rockaway like Gaul, was divided into three parts – walkers, kite-fliers, and lovers. The beach belonged to these three. My mother liked to rent on Beach 99th Street because she thought those who rented there were a better class of people, not hooligans or riffraff.

Shaped like an enormous horseshoe, the 98th Street entrance to Playland opened to hawkers, a ferris wheel, a roller coaster and ride called the Whip. I went to sleep and woke to the sounds of the old roller coaster climbing and descending, riders screaming on both sides of its curves. Playland also held the dark and sinuous Tunnel of Love with its weird and scary wax tableaux. On both sides of Playland were the usual carnival games, roulette wheels, and rifle games. A quarter allowed three attempts to knock down a chubby cloth clown. Shelves of prizes displayed large, brown teddy bears on the top, other oddly colored stuffed animals – chartreuse elephants, pink pandas – on the middle shelf, and plastic, anorexic toys on the first. Half a block from the boardwalk, a game room opened on to the sidewalk like a vast monster mouth. It had pinball and skeet ball machines and enclosed in glass cases, dummy gypsies dispensing tiny, printed fortunes. Merry-go-round music and portable radios mixed with laughing adolescents, crying infants, and always, in the distance, the sound of the ocean. Everything smelled of cotton candy, popcorn, and summer.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Holy Mother of God, and Saints preserve us were frequent expressions of my mother. It was as if she couldn’t get through the day without pestering the Holy Family. She inherited these sayings from her Irish mother, Anna Langan Brautigan. Another favorite expression of my mother was a German one learned from her father Henry Brautigan. I can’t remember the exact German but it meant What is over is over. Of course, what is over is never really over; it’s always tucked somewhere in our psyche, ready to ambush our heart without warning. Sunday morning breakfast was fresh coffee, bacon, eggs and the bakery rolls my father bought after church. Everyone had names like Brady, Shea, Mahoney, Duffy or O’Reilly. Grandmothers said a cup of tay instead of tea and there was always a cousin or uncle who played the accordion and sang soft ballads.

Fast forward from the porch to three summers later. This sunless day we are playing another card game. On the front porch of the bungalow across from ours a brunette is shaking and hanging her pastel panties and bras on a makeshift line, looped from one end of the porch to the other. My brother is very aware of the brunette. I am very aware that he is aware. The girl, who is quite tall, is wearing tight shorts and a halter top (even today, the uniform of the hottie). Completing her laundry chore, she slides into a chair, tilts her head to one side and begins brushing her long black hair. Later, my mother points out that there is a clothesline in back of each bungalow and there is no need for riffraff to hang their unmentionables out front.

Always tadpoling after Bob, my swimming consisted of doing my best to imitate his riding the waves but instead, being swallowed by the ocean and tossed about, only to surface, sandy and sad at how far away my brother was from me. Still tadpoling after all these years, I consider moving to North Carolina to be near Bob and his beautiful family but wonder if the aging aunt receiving occasional and probably perfunctory visits is a role I want to play.

Tough Guy

for Henry Brautigan

The Brooklyn apartment on Fenimore Street

had high ceilings and arched doorways.

My brother Bob was the apple of your eye

but I was the one you taught how to draw

pictures of a tree, a man’s face,

a rowboat near a lake.

After supper, in her favorite chair,

Mama read the comics to Bob.

I was at the dining table, with you,

a sketchbook, charcoals and pastels.

Quiet as a lamb, I almost never spoke

when near you. Seven, skinny,

and sinless as a jellyfish,

I was silly with the mystery of childhood.

Still, Papa, somehow you conveyed to me

quiet is where you go to get soul things out.

There is a photograph of you, looking serious

in your soldier’s uniform. My mother said

you were a tough guy. You came home sailing

and told my grandmother, "I was gonna knock

his block off but I’d see your face, Annie."

Reviews for Mirror Talk

[rolando9garci-218130 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I can only compare reading Barbara's Mirror talk to appreciating a pointillist painting. When you begin to read it up close, the author lays down the colored dots of her life leaping from past to present and back. Sometimes you wonder what she is up to, but as you keep reading, and you step back, the dots form patterns, and patterns of patterns, until finally you get to the end and are able to see the whole; and it all makes sense. Anyone can live a life and write about it, but poets like Barbara have the best skill to examine said life, and place the right dots side by side to conjure up a gestalt that they can present to others in a way that is beautiful, meaningful, and entertaining.But this book is not one of the many self-serving memoirs you read out there. In this one Barbara deals honestly with the rough edges of family life, her religious upbringing, her faith, her life choices, and she does not shy away from expressing her opinions. She is curious about her journey and her destination, about who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be.There were many things that I particularly enjoyed. Chapters like "Make Mine Cognac" or "The Snowball Incident" were very funny, whereas other chapters like "The Goddard Experience" really soared. The metaphor of the three balloons was amazing and Thalia's request to Zeus was hilarious. Barbara also includes in this book a few fine poems of which "A Child's Poem" is truly riveting.All in all it was an enjoyable and thought-inspiring read, the sort of experience that enriches your life. I recommend that you buy her book and read it before facing that mirror on your wall.