Sputterpub's Blog

The only other time Del was affronted by a callous-male personal comment, she was still called Adele. She was fourteen. The occasion was a party in her friend Annie’s garage.

That was fifty-three years ago. Good as Del’s memory is, there aren’t many images from that night. She remembers the record-player: one of those old suitcase-portables, with a short near its stylus. Anyone who touched the business end of the arm risked a little shock, which seemed perilous because of the punch spilled beneath the table on which it played.

“Don’t stand in the puddle or you’ll get electrocuted,” some of the guests warned.

The garage was crowded and not well lit. Most of the kids weren’t dancing.

Adele had a crush on a boy named Steve. Maybe “crush” is too big a word; she just recalls him as the possibility who was most likely at the time. Steve was tall and cute enough. He was more athletic than smart. They’d been saying “hi” a lot lately. Mutual friends had conveyed unsubtle hints of attraction to each of them about the other.

It took an hour before Steve asked her to dance. They jiggled around facing one another for the length of a Beatles song, and then each retreated to the area where close friends lurked. Adele was feeling rather confident when Annie, making the rounds of the garage, approached and confided.

“Wow. I just overheard Steve talking about you to Doug.”

“What did he say?” Adele asked.

“Ech. I never heard it before. ‘If she’s old enough to bleed she’s old enough to breed.’”

Talk about a turnoff! Adele’s first reaction was shame. She felt humiliated. She’d thought Steve liked her as a person. She assumed they were at least friendly acquaintances, each about to discover if there was more for them. It rocked her world to receive evidence that he considered her just a body. And Adele was a late bloomer (her mother’s phrase). She’d skipped third grade so she was younger than her classmates. She’d begged her mother for a (training) bra, but she didn’t yet need it. In fact, she wasn’t old enough to bleed; her first period was still months away. As offensive as the rhyme was, she wasn’t even eligible to have it refer to her yet.

She lost interest in Steve. She didn’t feel rejected or disapproving, so much as genuinely alienated. She remembered his words long after she forgot what he looked or sounded like. That stupid rhyme. And she did think it literally stupid. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t wise. And it wasn’t true.

Now she’s Del. Now she’s 67. She has been married and divorced, she raised two children and enjoys four grandkids. She worked as a business consultant for almost 45 years before starting her recent retirement process. She had post-marital relationships in her 40s and early 50s. It’s been a lot of living, but it’s also been over a decade since Del had sex.

She figured it was not likely to happen again. She tried Internet dating a few years ago, but the men she attracted were nondescript, life-humbled, age-whipped gentle souls who were nice enough but terribly boring, and toward whom she felt not one quiver of chemistry. Del knows most available men her age are either looking for a nurse or a younger mate. She hears from her girlfriends, those few who are still with men, that the sex is either rare to the level of nonexistence, or pharmaceutically-enabled.

A month ago, she met a man. It happened “organically,” she has told friends. She boarded the train back to her office after a Tuesday lunch in the city. There were no seats, and she stood by the sideways bench near a door. She was quite content to hang from the strap; she was in comfortable boots and only going a few stops.

The men on the bench offered her a seat. First the youngish buff black man nearer the door, and then the older pale behatted white guy beside him. She refused each, with thanks. Two stops before her own, the black man exited. The only thing that made sense was for Del to take his seat.

The white guy started talking to her. He apologized for not offering her a seat sooner and said he’d had a rotten weekend. Del was feeling particularly outgoing and responded with a sympathetic comment. They rode two stops before she exited, and exchanged names and an enormous amount of information in that time. He briefly described the business he was trying to launch, which effort apparently accounted for the bad weekend. She took his proffered card when she stood, and said she’d look him up. She smiled at him as she left the train and noticed the way he smiled back. She had to admit that flirting had occurred.

His name was Orson. Four days later she looked at his website and sent him a bland email. She wrote that it was a pleasure meeting him, said his business looked interesting, and wished him luck. There was nothing coy about her delay; she was busy with an old friend visiting from the east coast, and she didn’t want to be distracted looking for Orson’s response (Del doesn’t know how she’ll respond to romantic possibility now, if it were to occur, but she has a nervous history with a tendency to over-irrigate a sprouting passion).

Orson answered with a long midnight email. He sent her pictures of his Russian Hill garden (one of the subjects covered in their fast acquaintance was the coincidence that each lived in a tiny apartment with access to outdoors). He told her he’d be in her area the next week and suggested they meet.

That didn’t work (Del had to go to the office that day). Nor did their subsequent plan to rendezvous in the city, where she’d be the day after – Orson had to deal with a new business emergency. Their third plan was the one that took: the afternoon tryst at the campus bell tower close to Del’s place.

By then two weeks had passed since their initial meeting. Their email correspondence hadn’t deepened; each was nervous and uncertain the other would be recognizable. As it happened, they had no trouble with that identification.

It wasn’t love at second sight for Del. But the conversation was almost as easy as it had been on the train. She didn’t find Orson repulsive. She thought he was rather interesting. Certainly more so than the Internet dates.

They talked about her marital history and his childless bachelorhood, about her self-employment and his enterprises (he was on his second start up, having made enough from the first to acquire a bit of rural rental property), about his California legacy family and her descent from recent immigrants. Orson explained the vision injury he’d sustained as a teenager: how it limited his future plans but expanded his empathy.

Del asked him how old he was, and learned she was born over ten years before him. He was breezy about it; clearly he didn’t mind. She wondered briefly if she cared, and found she didn’t. She felt at least as youthful and fit as Orson, and more attractive.

Then he touched her. Del was startled when he reached over and caressed her left upper arm, but she didn’t flinch. It just seemed odd to her – so soon, in bright daylight, what for?

She scooted a little away from him, naturally, conversationally, and he retracted his hand. But a few minutes later he did it again. As if she’d said something that delighted him (she hadn’t). She murmured, “You touched me.”

He smiled sideways at her and said, “Well yeah.”

“It’s okay, I guess. It just seems odd, here, now, already.”

“Hey,” Orson blurted. “Grannies need cock, too.”

What a conversation stopper! He apologized immediately. “Oh jeez,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I said that.”

Del indicated, non-verbally, that he was forgiven. But that wasn’t true. Her real reaction was suppression of the retort, “Oh yeah? What for? You wanna explain this need?”

But she wasn’t there to argue with him. In fact, a few minutes later, instead of lambasting him for his stupid words, she leaned forward and planted a kiss on his mouth.

He was surprised but responsive. Del is pretty sure she did it to discover if there was any possibility of a physical future between them. She thought that kissing him was not repulsive, but it didn’t curl her toes either.

Their date concluded with a casual agreement to see one another again. Del was going away for a long weekend visit to her descendants and she agreed to send him an email when she returned. Orson asked for a hug before he left her, and that embrace felt better to Del than most of their time together.

As with their first encounter, it was up to her to initiate further communication. She liked that. She thought about him now and then in the ensuing five days, while flying to Portland, while trying to fall asleep on the old futon in her daughter’s house, while attempting to pay attention to grandsons’ minute narrations about the latest video game. At no time did she want, nor could she imagine, Orson accompanying her on such a trip.

Del almost always does what she says she will. She had agreed to send Orson an email on her return and she did so. The morning after she arrived home, she transmitted another bland message: “I’m back. Portland was good. The weather was better than I expected. I hope your weekend was nice.”

She was lukewarm about seeing him again. No lust had been awakened in her. She was a bit interested in hearing more details about his troubled youth, but she knew she could make them up if necessary. She decided she’d leave it to him, to charm her if possible.

She expected a response the next day. Orson’s emails to her had all been sent in the middle of the night, and this one was no exception. So she wasn’t surprised to see his name in her inbox the next morning. But she was at the brevity of his message: “I got stuff done.”

“Wow,” she thought. “Pretty cold. And unnecessary. I didn’t ask. Oh, I guess he wants to keep the door open or something. Maybe his four words are passive-aggressive crap. Whatever.”

She decided to forget about him. So she was again surprised to see an email from him, the next morning, sent not in the middle of the night but at 9 a.m. He included a video of his dog. He asked permission to visit her the following week, and to bring his pet along.

Del likes dogs. She was not charmed but she was slightly warmed. She wrote back that she’d like to meet his dog but that the following week didn’t work. This was not a device; she really didn’t have a day without at least two business, medical or social appointments. She offered the week after and he took the first available day, typing “All good things are worth waiting for.”

She still wasn’t charmed. But she smiled a little. She agreed to the date. She knows she has time to cancel it if she wishes. For now she’s letting the subject sift. She isn’t looking for a significant other. She won’t have one. She isn’t looking for sex, but she might be open to that. She doesn’t mind getting to know a new person.

But that phrase! Even grannies need cock? Said in a wheedling tone that reminds her of her grandsons?

How stupid. How unfunny, unwise, and untrue. As if the penis is what women want or need from men. Weird. It’s like the beginning and end of Del’s sex life has been bracketed by nonsense.

The light just after sunset was magical. That sounded corny even in her mind, but it was true. The colors at the horizon were varied but muted. The ocean seemed to sway against it. Torches had been lit long enough that their carbon had flared off; the flames danced clean against darkening sky. And the music seemed to surround her. The bass line was so enchanting, she couldn’t keep her hips still. She danced deeper within all of it, envisioning the men at prayer on the western rocks.

She felt anchored. She was where she belonged. She had to leave the next morning, but she knew she’d be back. She could feel a change coming on.

They named her Sarah when she was born thirty-seven years ago, but the family called her Sadie. There was a brief shift to Sarah when she was ten – her eight year old brothers began playing with backwards-talk and liked to say HARAS because they claimed she bothered everyone – but for most of her childhood, she was Sadie to family and close friends.

She didn’t feel like she belonged in her own family. She couldn’t remember a time without her brothers, and it seemed to her that her parents made a pair and so did the twins. Sadie was always the odd one out.

And she was odd. All the rest of her family enjoyed gardening. Sadie liked plants but she was uncomfortable when she got dirt on her hands. She didn’t like dirt elsewhere either (she bathed before bed because she couldn’t fall asleep if the backs of her knees felt sticky), but having marks or smells on her hands really bothered her. She always washed after handling a newspaper or petting the dog.

All the rest of her family liked roast beef dinners and barbecues and Jewish holiday meals. Not Sadie. She preferred vegetables and potatoes and salads to meat. She didn’t like sauces, so barbecue to her was just meat cooked outside. She never acquired a taste for brisket or kugels, gefilte fish, chicken soup.

Many kids come to suspect they were adopted or are somehow unrelated to the family with whom they live. For most of her twelfth year Sadie was close to believing she was some sort of cuckoo placed in her parents’ nest. But then she underwent a growth spurt and started resembling her father’s sister too closely for her to continue to cherish the fantasy.

No. Sadie was Sarah, one hundred percent Jewish, of the Ashkenazi variety.

She didn’t just resemble her aunt. She looked Jewish. As a child she had the typical Yiddische punim (big eyes and chubby cheeks with dark brown hair and hazel eyes); when she entered adolescence her nose and feet grew before the rest of her. Her wavy hair kinked into humidity-reactive frizz, and her myopia had her nagging her parents for contact lenses.

By then the family had moved from New York to southern California. Sadie felt like a fish out of water before that relocation, but she really stood out in the warm land of small-nosed blonde-haired barefoot kids. Her new suburban community was just north of the border to Baja California; the only students with Sadie’s coloring were Latino (then called Mexican). There were fewer Jewish kids in her junior high than there would be black kids in the Marin county high school she was going to attend.

She tried to fit in. She exposed her feet even though they seemed ugly to her. She swam so much that her skin tanned. When she went to her first slumber party at almost fourteen, she used the same peroxide as the other girls, streaking her hair with an old toothbrush as instructed. But no matter how long she let the bleach do its work, she never achieved blonde. Her hair went from dark brown to coppery red, and then broke off before getting any lighter.

Her mother took her to a beauty college for hair straightening. The chemicals worked at first – she had stick-like hair even though some of it tended to poke out perpendicularly from her scalp. A week and a half after the treatment her bangs detached. She was brushing her hair up and away from her brow when the sink received a sprinkling of stiff dark hairs. Initially it didn’t look awful, but as the hair grew in again, stubbly and drawing an unmistakable dark boundary at her hairline, Sadie’s self-consciousness only increased.

She made some friends, but she didn’t find a fellow traveler. She was fascinated about existence, and even got herself kicked out of Sunday school at ten for asking who created God. She found a few Catholic kids willing to at least debate questions with her, but most of her milieu was Protestant and apparently without existential passion. She turned to books – mythology, folklore, fiction and fantasy – and developed her aspirations from printed pages rather than from family, friends, or school.

Her family moved again when she was sixteen. They left the warmth and pale blue sky of southern California for the natural air conditioning and fog-wreathed azure atmosphere of the San Francisco area. She was halfway through her junior year then, and as she entered her new school she introduced herself as Sarah.

That made no difference. After the shift she realized that she’d had some amorphous hope that changing her moniker would alter the way she was perceived and the nature of her future relationships. But no. Everyone called her Sarah with too long an initial “a,” as if it were “Sayra” instead of “Sarra,” but nobody acted smarter or more original around her.

And life went on. Sarah went to college. She found more congenial friends there, but still no one she’d describe as soul mate (platonic or other). She married the man she considered her best friend, after they’d worked out what she thought of as their contract. She was very Jewish, that way – she considered the institution something of an emotional business deal between aliens. Her husband-to-be was raised Protestant, however, and had more romantic notions of what they were about. He agreed to Sarah’s conditions, which were all about complete honesty and really knowing one another – but subsequent events indicated that he consented with his penis instead of his brain.

They grew apart. She became resentful and he responded with angry insecurity. By the time they divorced, she was convinced he had reneged and he concluded that she was a guilt-bestowing, overcontrolling bitch.

Sarah had some boyfriends after that, but nothing that tempted her to cohabitate, let alone try marriage again. She made the trip to Jamaica with the most significant other she had at age thirty-seven, which trip was the beginning of the end of that relationship, and felt like the beginning of the beginning of something new for Sarah.

They traveled to the island because one of Sarah’s brothers lived there. She and Lloyd went to Miami on business of his, and the additional airfare to Kingston and time in Negril were doable because of that trip. They stayed one night in the capital (they arrived too late for Sarah to find out if the water was drinkable, which made for a thirsty evening). The next day they journeyed across the little country with Sarah’s brother and sister-in-law, and checked into a resort for a four-night stay.

First they went shopping for marijuana. Sarah’s sister-in-law had established the connection; they left the men at home and drove into the surrounding hills to an idyllic little garden abode. It was Sarah’s first exposure to a Rastafarian family. She’d heard some reggae music by then, and loved its dancing bass line, but she didn’t know anything about the culture.

She and her sister-in-law were greeted by a beautiful brown woman. Jamaicans in general are comely and colorful, but this woman was perfectly formed, with dark caramel skin, green eyes, and auburn curls. She was soft-spoken and hospitable. She offered no personal details, but the ganja transaction was straightforward and clean.

With her consciousness raised a little, Sarah then took in western Jamaica with attention. She learned that Rastafarians are vegetarian, entrepreneurial, family-oriented folks. That felt right and familiar. They’re so into individualism that they say “I and I” instead of “we.” When things are good, they’re “Irie,” derived from the first person pronoun. They view themselves as the lost tribe of Israel. Rastafarian men tended to assemble on the cliffs facing the setting sun each afternoon, bobbing and chant/singing. It looked to Sarah like the dovening she’d seen in temple, and it sounded somewhat like the Hebrew of familiar prayers.

Her attention was grabbed. She started down a new path and she didn’t take Lloyd with her (not that he exhibited any inclination to accompany her; he was busy drinking as much booze as he could acquire and avoiding the sun). Sarah soaked in ultraviolet rays during the day, and danced as much as she could in the evening. By the time that trip was over, so were she and Lloyd, though it took a few months of tiptoeing around before they actually broke up.

Sarah was not adopted into the Rastafarian culture. In fact, she was made to feel her outsider status the night before they left Negril. They’d exhausted their ganja purchase. At least three of the four of them wanted to smoke a little more, to seal the trip (Lloyd wasn’t partaking of anything but Jack Daniels by then).

Sarah and her brother and sister-in-law cruised the beach. They stopped to chat with a woman who had been selling aloe and was packing up for the evening. She directed Sarah behind her, to an attractive young man who could supply her with a fat spliff. She traded money for the joint and returned to her party.

It wasn’t good smoke. Most of the burning material was tobacco instead of pot. Sarah’s brother is an ex-smoker and he immediately recognized the nicotine.

Sarah was humbled. For all her Rastafarian feeling, for all her reggae dancing (she’d won an amateur contest the night before), she was treated as any rich stupid American tourist.

Even so, she concluded that the Rastafarians were more her tribe than any culture she’d met before. She figured she could be that way (she was!) even if she wasn’t. She decided that, from then on, she’d answer to the name “Rah.”