Sputterpub's Blog

Charlie hasn’t cried since he was 12 years old. His tear ducts worked perfectly when he was a baby and a child, but junior high harassment put a stop to that. Or maybe something else. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care that much. He just knows he doesn’t cry.

Not when his father died. Not when he puts a pet down. Not when his marriage blew apart. His sister Zell has seen him “near-cry,” as she put it. She told him his features engorged and his face got red, his eyes glistened and his expression was grievous, but no salt water emerged.

Zell thinks it’s an issue. She recommends therapy for him. In her opinion, Charlie’s tearlessness is a clue which, if unraveled, will reveal things he needs to know.

But that’s Zell. Just ask Charlie about his big sister; he’ll tell you that she’s got an opinion about everything.

Charlie and Zell are fond siblings. They’re close friends, too. But that’s a different thing than agreeing.

He named her. Zell’s parents put Abigail Renée on her birth certificate. Abigail was for her mother’s mother, but Renée was her father’s selection. He loved everything French, from Paris and champagne and cognac to Moliere and Saint-Saëns, and he referred to his daughter as Mademoiselle. Little Charlie, eight years younger than his sister, used the last syllable for her. The parents soon went along with him: Zell.

Charlie and Zell live near one another and work together too. They see each other almost daily. When they travel for business, they’re a matched set. There’s never an argument. It’s like they read each other’s thoughts and their moods coincide perfectly.

More than once they’ve been stopped on the street when they go out to lunch. It’s usually a couple. “I just have to say,” one of the strangers will comment. “We’ve noticed you two before. You’re always talking to each other and laughing. You seem like the happiest couple in the world.”

Then Charlie or Zell will explain “We’re siblings.” The reaction is always the same: surprise; understanding; relief.

But that’s a different thing than agreeing. Charlie and Zell hail from a close-knit, argumentative family. Everyone was competitive. Members had to organize their thoughts and raise their voices to inject their views. Rarely do any of them admit incorrectness or praise another for getting something right. A number of fine characteristics were taught in that household, but self-deprecation was not one of them.

For some reason that Zell could never determine, she was the family member “assigned” the reputation for the most aggressive, least acceptable level of argumentativeness. Undoubtedly her mother had something to do with this – Zell was the first child and a female quite different from her mom. As far back as Zell can recall, her mother was accusing her of laziness, lack of common sense, pushiness, loudness, and poor sportsmanship. Zell’s father was not as hysterical, but he was busy with his career and, as the youngest from his own family of origin, an accomplished tease and baiter; the hyperbolic comments he so often made about Zell eventually achieved the quality of “there must be some truth in it, if it’s said so often.”

It wasn’t a fair rap. In truth, Zell argued so consistently when young that she’d lost a number of debates. She learned to soften her punch when she was ahead, and to admit defeat when she wasn’t. Charlie didn’t jump into the ring all his childhood the way his sister did – there was no need, because Zell had loosened the ropes for him already.

In truth, Charlie won’t even let his girlfriend know she’s right about airplane seats.

Terry is 17 years younger than Charlie. They met through work: Charlie and Zell are business partners, and he handles most customer-service type calls (actually, they have clients instead of customers, but ever-friendly Charlie didn’t start the consulting practice and in the decade he’s worked with Zell, he hasn’t made the transition from helpful clerical to knowledgeable pro). Terry is office manager for a client, so she and Charlie developed a congenial phone and email acquaintance. She is unhappily married to a boy-back-home (she spends half her time in the Bay Area, earning far more than she could in her native Oshkosh, where she spends the other half). When Charlie’s marriage failed, Terry was there to be friendlier. A relationship took off and flew passionately for several months before percolating into friendly affection.

Terry is not only younger than Charlie; she’s also less educated and far less sophisticated. But she flies a lot, and Charlie has a way of mocking her germaphobic fastidiousness. As he’s described it several times to Zell and others, Terry goes nowhere without anti-bacterial wipes. First thing she does when she boards a plane is swab down the armrests, the seat-back tray: the entire seat-back, for that matter. Recently Charlie described a news item to Zell, all about how unsanitary airplanes are. Now that meals aren’t served, passengers bring food aboard, and passengers don’t always take away their snack detritus. Now that airlines are cutting back on maintenance, plane cabins aren’t well-cleaned. The unsurprising result is a population explosion of bacteria (maggots even).

Zell pointed out to Charlie that Terry’s wipe-down protocol turns out to be wise. Charlie agreed. “Are you going to let Terry know she’s correct?” “Not on your life,” he replied with a smirk of satisfaction.

That was two weeks ago. Charlie isn’t feeling satisfied lately. There have been a flurry of minor misfortunes. He threw his lower back out while gardening. His dog escaped from the yard and ended up tracking mud onto newly steam-cleaned carpets. He hurt Zell’s feelings without meaning to, and she confronted him about it. His ex-wife was begging him to return to counseling and another attempt at reconciliation.

And his social life seems to have collapsed. He used to have so many friends. Now the few left were tired all the time. Rarely did they put together parties like they used to. And when they did, it seemed to Charlie like he was always asking others about themselves, but no one asked anything about him. Socializing just wasn’t like he remembered it.

He had to admit he was often bored. Sometimes he even bored himself.

His email pinged. He saw it was correspondence from his niece, and he opened it. Angela is a regular on social media but she rarely writes to Charlie. She’s nearly 40, strong like her mother, blonde instead of Zell-brunette, into punk over R&B.

Angela wrote that she’d been complaining about being described as a strong and intimidating woman (it was the latter adjective that bothered her), and Zell sent her a recent piece of prose, in empathy. It was called “The Egotist’s Complaint,” and Angela found it hard to read. Emotionally. Apparently Zell was surprised about that; she said it didn’t hurt that much, or it was a hurt she was used to, or something.

Then Angela asked her mother if Charlie or Dana had seen the piece. Zell said no: neither ever looked at her writing.

Both Angela and Zell are strong (and intimidating), but that doesn’t stop Angela from feeling protective. She attached “The Egotist’s Complaint” and advised her uncle to read it.

He did. Halfway through, he forgot it was composed by his sister. He got interested in the character. It was a perceptual shift like his first acid trip. Suddenly he saw Zell differently. Not so much as a sibling, let alone the torch-bearing oldest child from his family of origin. He comprehended her as a friend, as a work mentor.

He didn’t shed any tears over his revelation or the piece of prose. But along with his shifted view he acquired an awareness about eyes. He thought about his father’s – always shining, whether from drops or tears or health – until he died. Charlie became aware that his own eyes were wet. His view seemed sharpened and softened through saline.

Zell thinks no one she knows reads her blog, but that’s not exactly true. Dana has the site bookmarked on her home computer, and sometimes she checks it out. She never comments or even clicks “like.” She doesn’t have a WordPress account herself, and she’s not sure she wants Zell to know she’s reading.

Millenials would call Dana a WordPress stalker. They use “stalker” to describe a parent who reads their Facebook news but never responds online. Their parents, who are of Zell’s and Dana’s generation, think “stalker” isn’t apt. It’s not like they’re threatening. They’re not even spying. They’re just gathering from words and pictures that their offspring are okay.

Silly offspring. So self-centered they think their parents are always interested. They don’t understand how boring, how tiresome they can be. It’s often enough for the parents, to know the offspring are well. Interaction is not necessary.

Zell knows this. She’s a parent. Dana isn’t, so she doesn’t. Dana doesn’t even have a Facebook page (because she’s not a parent…parental FB accounts are always set up by offspring).

Dana read “The Egotist’s Complaint” and is still reeling from it. “Fiction,” she muttered when she finished the first read-through. “The only thing fictional are the names.” She recognized just about every detail in the blog narrative.

She feels busted. She’s still upset about Zell’s lecture but reading the episode makes her misstep seem worse. She’s sadly accustomed to ruing her own words and actions, less often now that she doesn’t drink, but still enough that the regret is like a familiar…feeling, she might say, except it’s almost like the noun “familiar:” a witch’s companion that haunts her and keeps trying to claw her lap. Zell’s an outgoing individual and she’s had plenty of experiences when her exuberance dented someone’s feelings and caused her the morning-after guilt that made her renew her never-kept resolution to keep her mouth shut. Reading the blog report focused the bad feelings like a magnifying glass before a sun beam.

Zell’s her best friend. Zell is her main support, through romantic, medical, financial, and familial issues. Zell is a hard-ass strong woman, but she never berates Dana. Until that phone call. About such a small thing – Dana’s casual encounter with Zell’s brother Charlie – no big deal no matter who is hearing it. At first she stepped up and defended herself, probably stridently as she recalls (“got up on her high horse,” is how her dad would have characterized her behavior). But Zell argued back. It scared Dana, alarmed her, and then made her pay attention. Shit. Why had she told Zell that Charlie said “I love her to pieces, but…”? Her immediate response was that she told because it was such a typically Charlie thing to say. Like she was providing character color. But of course Zell knows Charlie’s traits better than Dana does. That justification won’t wash. Was she trying to, in Zell’s words, take her BFF down a peg?

“Shit,” Dana thought then. “Now’s not even a good time to try to process this.” She’d had a bad night. She was still tired, and her blood sugar was seesawing. The usual issue: too high a reading a midnight, too many units, alarms all night about the low, most of her glucose tabs eaten (talk about chewing with no pleasure!) and then, of course, near 300 when she got out of bed.

Okay, okay. She knows she could improve the craziness if she’d be more regular. She should get up early, eat at consistent times, exercise daily. But she’s so fucking tired of the disease controlling her. All in all, she’s been good. Thirty years of it, and no major complication yet. Never a day off. She refuses to give up the last skirmish: she will sleep in when she’s tired; she will eat when she’s hungry. Dammit.

She starts a load of laundry. She does her sheets almost daily, because she sweats them into submission most nights. As she pushes the white linens into her front loader, she thinks, “Zell doesn’t advise me to get up early. She understands. She says we’re all entitled to make stupid decisions sometimes, especially about ourselves. At first I bristled when she used the word ‘stupid.’ But then she made it about her too. She’s clearly done damage to her respiratory system, with all the smoking. Even after she stopped buying tobacco, she stepped up the pot so she continued to put her pipes through a mess. She said it’s her stupid decision to continue to smoke and it’s mine to indulge in wrong food and rest.”

She’s smiling by the time she starts the washing machine. At herself. Because even though she told herself it’s not the time to process this, that appears to be what she’s doing. After a normal bad night, she’d stay in bed for another couple of hours at least. Then she’d make some coffee and look at the paper, and watch a cooking show, and maybe she’d get to this laundry in the afternoon. But it’s 8:30 am and the laundry tub is filling already. Her coffee is ready. She’s too restless for the paper. Dana’s about to go for a walk, by herself, before she usually has her morning shit. Is this the start of a new habit?

She takes a moment to get organized. She’s learned to leave most of the necessaries on the end of the kitchen bar top that is closest to her door. She puts ID, sugar, and cash in her little crossbody bag, inserts her sunglasses into the hair on the top of her head, and picks up her house key. She slips her feet into her knockaround sandals, throws a kiss to her aging cat, and walks out her door, through the vanilla-scented corridor, and down the concrete stairs to the locked front gate of her condominium development.

It’s a gorgeous morning. The sky is spanking blue, there’s a caressing breeze, and the drivers seem courteous. Dana strides along with an empty mind for half a block and then Zell enters it.

Her best friend. They met almost half a century ago. They’ve had spells of estrangement, but all in all they’ve never stopped talking to one another, loving each other, and marveling at their closeness, given how different their lives have been. Lately Dana has been trying to express her admiration to Zell. That’s part of her attempt to be less critical and grumpy and, to use the word Zell did (until Dana warned her that it was really hurtful): draconian. Just last month she’d taken the time to say to Zell, “You know, I’ve known you long and I’ve known you well, but it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize what a stand-up woman you are.”

It was said over the phone. Dana didn’t get to see Zell’s face or posture. She was surprised that Zell didn’t thank her, let alone find something good to say about Dana. Then it came out during the call about the Charlie encounter. That’s when Zell told her how shocked she was to hear Dana say she’d just come to realize it. Zell is a stand-up person (incidentally, a woman). She’s the fairest and most honest individual Dana has ever met. She’s got plenty of flaws, but she’s a loyal friend. She knows how to render a disinterested opinion.

Zell said she thought Dana knew that all along. She wonders now why Dana has loved her, if she didn’t realize till recently that Zell was worth loving.

Yeesh. Talk about a conversational recoil! Dana had fired a complimentary shot and hurt herself. At that moment, just as she almost trips on a curb a block away from her condo, Dana has a small epiphany. She hears herself in the car with her sister a week ago, on the way to the mall to look for a mother-of-the-groom dress for her nephew’s wedding, telling Laura how much she admired her mothering, her volunteer work with disadvantaged youth, and her ability to stay married. Then she turned the table: “So tell me what you like about me.” Laura was silent for half a minute and then gushed about how patient Dana is with their demented mother, how generous she is, financially and emotionally, with Laura’s three sons. Dana had sat back then, semi-satisfied.

Suddenly she sees the scene like she’s in the audience at a drama. Oh lord: she’d actually been fishing for a compliment! She thought at the time she was seeking some sort of positive clarity, but now she understands she put Laura on the spot. Her poor sister had to come up with something. Oh dear.

Dana doesn’t listen to Zell as much as Zell thinks. Sometimes she acts attentive, but she loses it while Zell wanders into an intellectual subject, or starts in about words, or makes one of her pronouncements about drivers. However, she has been paying attention to Zell about loneliness.

Zell used to say the only thing worse than boredom is depression. Now that she and Dana understand depression equals disease and not unhappiness, Zell has modified the choice; she says there’s nothing worse than boredom and she’ll take loneliness over it any day.

Dana disagrees. She suffers from loneliness. She doesn’t have the kids, career, or creative outlet that fill Zell’s time. Especially since she broke up with her chronically married boyfriend, Dana has little to occupy her. She has taken to accepting social invitations from boring women and mundane couples: she’s trying to be receptive; she’s willing to do just about anything.

Clearly she is choosing boredom over loneliness. She inserts her key into the front gate, enters the lobby, and starts up the concrete steps to the second floor. As she opens the door to her place, the second realization hits her. She pauses in the small foyer. Her choice isn’t about avoiding loneliness as much as it is about avoiding boredom. Like Zell! The truth is that Dana is most bored when she is alone. Zell is most bored when she’s with people.

Dana thinks she might be on to something. She’s sure Zell will be interested. Her mouth twists with a little chagrin.

The washing machine begins to fill for the rinse cycle as Dana shuts her door. She hangs onto her train of thought and heads for her phone.