Sputterpub's Blog

I was raised by a negative woman. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like her. I fought her tendency all my life. But of course I imbibed some of it. I was her oldest child and only daughter.

I see as I type an image of a literal negative woman. A dark delineation in bright surroundings. The image is not inaccurate.

Some of her negativism was cultural. She was born and spent most of her youth in Brooklyn. She was the last baby of a beloved compliant observant Jewish mother. Her post-school pre-maternal jobs were in Manhattan in the garment industry. “What?!? You don’t like the blintzes?” is her way of asking if you want seconds.

But it’s more than that. My friend Debbie is 60ish and Jewish and a doctor, a NY-to-CA immigrant thirty years ago and a sweetheart of a person, and she expresses herself similarly. We recently dined together in a local trattoria. She knows the owners – she delivered their grandchildren – and she’s a favored guest, which is one of the reasons we go there. We ordered a shared salad and stuffed mushrooms and baked rigatoni. When Tony brought us the mushrooms and pasta before the first course, did Debbie say “Gee, Tony, we asked for a salad too. Did that request make it to the kitchen?” or something like that? Noooo. She blurted “What?!? We get no salad?”

But Mom went beyond normal east-coast Jewish dialect. Mom was not just a fixer: she was an improver. Many of the people are fixers – rational and well-connected in medical and wholesale communities, they skip responses of sympathy and support in favor of offering a referral to some specialist who can repair whatever they deem needs mending. Improvers are a superset of fixers, in that all improvers are fixers but not all fixers are improvers. Fixers want to solve a problem. Improvers are into make-overs.

Mom was task-oriented and extremely impatient. She didn’t need to work after she married Dad, but she should have. She loved her buyer job and it got her out of the house every day. But working wouldn’t have been appropriate in the 1950s. Mom stayed home. With me.

She did what she could to keep busy. She washed towels daily. She ironed underwear. She learned recipes. She tried butchering and experimented with exotic cuisines. But she just couldn’t stay home. Every day she hauled me around to stores and to visit her friends. We bought things we didn’t need because the discounted price was irresistible. Then we found ways to use what we bought. We were forever redoing arrangements around the house. Mom talked to me regularly about how she would make over women and girls we saw in the malls. “That one really needs a haircut.” and “Can you imagine how much better she’d look if she didn’t choose separates that cut her in half like that?” or “Oh my God. I’d love to get my hands on that floozy. I’d start with scrubbing off all of that makeup. See how low class she looks?”

She also tried to improve me. She gave me home permanents to make my already wavy hair curlier. She put me on diets before I knew I was fat. Hanging around Mom, all I ever heard was what was wrong with whomever/whatever we examined.

It was contagious of course. Impossible not to catch. Especially once Dad started traveling for work.

This was forty years before nine eleven. TSA wasn’t even a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye. Dad made short flights around the west coast, and we met his plane every time he came home. That meant driving to the airport (hearing Mom make improvement suggestions on the road), parking, and coming all the way to the gate. We were always early. My younger brothers frolicked around the immediate area, but I was expected to sit next to Mom. She taught me to people-watch there. That would have been fun if she did it the way Dad did, on those infrequent occasions when he studied folks. He’d make up crazy stories about the faces and postures we saw. I loved that. But Mom was always up to her old comfortable tricks: pointing out who was fat, who was shoddy, who made bad clothing selections, and how she’d do it differently.

I didn’t like how she only noticed what was wrong. I tried to see things differently. I attempted to follow her advice that if I had nothing nice to say, it was better to say nothing at all. But she never followed that. And it was boring to be silent, tiresome to be smarmy.

I tried to modulate my ability to assemble negative judgments. As a teenager in the late 1960s it wasn’t hip to be down. My goal was to lighten up. I wasn’t very good at it though.

I married in my early 20s. I knew he was a hippie but I had no idea how incompatible our attitudes were. When we walked into a place we hadn’t been before, my husband zeroed in on what was good about it, and tried to partake of that. I was immediately struck with how the place could be made better.

We didn’t make it. Our ship of marriage foundered on the rocky shoals of familiar difference. My husband was attracted to me because he found me exotic, but the snappy negative comments that first amused him came to be tiresome, and he started suspecting that I harbored critical judgments of him too, and he modified his behavior to try to keep me happy, which accomplished the opposite.

He wasn’t alone in estrangement. His traits of joy and carefree attitude, his cowboy confidence that appealed to me so strongly when we first got together, faded and twisted over time. They seemed to be replaced by procrastination, and reactivity, and dullness.

We were amicable about our divorce. We stayed friendly for the kids if not for anything else (we differed in opinion about this too). But I heard the occasional grumbles from him about how depressing the last year had been, about how he was made to feel guilty all the time. I kind of get that now.

I guess my father was right. He warned me that marriage is a tough road. He said that there’s nothing more challenging in the emotional realm than trying to make a life with a stranger. And the more different the stranger’s background, he said, the more of a challenge it is. He didn’t object to me marrying out of our religion, but he commented that we each came from different family attitudes, and that the older one gets the more one reverts to those old attitudes, so a couple was piling on extra work when they tried to unite disparate childhoods.

But I didn’t heed him. I loved my father then and would now if he were alive, but I judged him to be old, and male, and not really hip to what I wanted.

I became a divorcee. I worked at reducing my negative comments. I probably should have worn a bag over my head – according to my kids’ complaints, my facial expressions broadcast my displeasure and disagreement no matter what words or tone I used.

I also became a single mom. Between my newly solo state and my mother’s advancing age (lack of other things to do), I had to endure her help more than I wanted. As Mom’s future shortened, her perspective narrowed. She grew more self-referential. She was still a dark shape amid the world, but she became petulant, fussy, smaller. She was still negative but she started snarling. She griped a lot.

She was a drag. I complained about her to my best friend. Often. A best friend is a complaint repository, and Annie was where I parked my irritation. She’d had her head filled with my marital dissatisfaction, just like I’d collected her relationship problems (stuck in love for decades with a depressive who never met her needs or even attended those social functions for which she, anyone, needed a companion). Annie had of course met my mother, but most of what she knew about Mom she heard from me. That’s the way I knew her mother too, and I never approved of Angela (too narcissistic, really). As my kids grew (and Mom was correct when she said “little kids, little problems – big kids, big problems”), it was Annie to whom I turned to second my ideas or divert me from them. She’s the one who coached me when I worried about where my teenage daughter was. She was my counselor, much more than the therapists, about my impulsive son. After my daughter married and moved away, it was into Annie’s ear that I poured all my disapproval about my son-in-law.

Annie and I took a little vacation together recently. We went away for a week, shared a big room and every meal, had lots of time to talk. Characters we discussed included my now-late mother, my taciturn ex-husband, my daughter’s crass mate. I was struck with the enmity Annie seemed to have for all three. It was so vehement that I found myself defending them, qualifying the disapproval, uttering “yeah, but…”

That’s when I realized that of course Annie hated them. She had never experienced their positive qualities, because all I ever talked about to her was what bothered me about them.

Of course. It wouldn’t have been an interesting or useful conversation for me to be mentioning how energetic Mom was about accomplishing tasks, how her fix-it attitude sometimes helped others. Who wants to hear a married woman describe what she likes about her man (except her man)? It would have been Pollyanna-ish and not believable if I’d praised Larry’s laid-back attitude (even though I have to admit he’s helped my girl worry less, and see things more optimistically).

I learned on that little trip that Annie thinks I’m a negative person. She loves me, but she encourages me to, as she says, nurture and express my gentle side. She even advised me to “Shine on the shit, and let yourself shine instead.”

I still have work to do.

Edie and Frankie have been BFFs for 50 years. Since college. Among their other traits in common, both like white walls. Or any shade of off-white. They’re colorful characters, unafraid of tint or tone, but each opts for uncolored walls. For that matter, Edie won’t even wear beige – she says it’s for interior decor.

They’ve gone through many changes during their five decades of friendship. Frankie now answers to Francesca, from everyone except Edie, a name modification she took up ten years ago, when she got involved with Ralph and appreciated his heritage so much that she went along with his idea and they switched their handles to Francesca and Rafael. Edie is still Edie but her uncolored hair is just that: uncolored. She’s gone from salt-and-pepper to almost pure silvery white, which ages her in general even while it makes her facial features seem contrastingly young, and which has forced her to undergo a tidal shift in opinion, from a person who accepted her dark curls and even found beauty in the hair/skin contrast to an older individual who now sees crazy-white hair whenever she looks in a mirror or shop glass.

But their mutual aversion to colored walls dates back almost to the beginning of their friendship.

They met at the end of their freshman year, in the dormitory elevator. Edie lived on the third floor and Frankie’s room was next to the kitchen on seven. Their attachment was fast and ferocious. They wanted to room together the following year, but Edie’s parents decided she wasn’t ready for an apartment, and Frankie wasn’t willing to follow her to the co-op (an improvement in freedom over the dorm, but not enough). So Frankie went to a modern apartment with her dormmate Judy, and Edie took up residence in a triple room on the second floor of a northside coed co-op, and they nurtured their cohabitational goals while enjoying their second terms away from home.

They moved in together that summer. They spent three months subletting a friend’s flat, and then they found their place.

It was a ground floor apartment about six blocks from campus. The shingled building (probably once the traditional brown but long ago painted a gloppy gray) housed eight one-bedroom residences on two floors. Theirs was on the lower right side as you faced the south entrance (the building was on a southeast corner, with half of the units opening to each street side). The layout was consecutive, from circular bedroom on the street side, through livingroom and kitchen and finally the small bath (with no tub), at the north end of the apartment. The floors were old pine, the walls were old paint, the windows were original and double-hung, most of which had lost some rope. The apartment entrance was into the living room, so you turned right for the turret-like bedroom or left for the kitchen/pantry/bath. The building was a century old. The window glass had the ripples of long life.

As soon as Edie and Frankie moved in, they set about improving. They bought bent white rods and stitched up cheap curtains for the windows (bedroom first, of course). They acquired some used furniture and placed it. They assembled bookshelves out of planks and cinder blocks and loaded them.

Then they addressed the kitchen.

Of course it was funky. The appliances were a noisy refrigerator and an uneven stove/oven. There was no garbage disposal and only two outlets. The cabinetry didn’t deserve the term: drawers had no glides, doors were chipped, hinges were not true. There were decades of paint on the woodwork – in one place where a wall phone had hung and a divot had been gouged, they counted seven layers of bad color.

They added to it. Neither knew where to shop for paint, so they went to Montgomery Wards. This was in the days when the big box stores were Sears and Wards (no one said “Sears Roebuck;” everyone said “Monkey Wards”). Families could be classified by which one they frequented, just as accurately as they could be sorted as Republican or Democrat, Chevy or Ford.

Frankie hailed from a Wards/Ford/Republican clan. Edie’s heritage was Sears/Chevy/ Democrat. Wards was within walk/bus range of the apartment, so Frankie acted as their guide.

They did not buy good paint. It’s possible that Wards didn’t stock good paint. They selected oil-based stuff – you had to go that way then, or you wouldn’t be able to scrub the painted surfaces – in two colors. The yellow was closer to lemon than sunshine. The orange reminded them of creamsicles: milkier than bright.

They didn’t prepare the surfaces. Oh, they washed drawer and cabinet fronts, and wiped down walls, but they didn’t invite any sandpaper or putty to their party. Edie would eventually learn that prep is what painting is all about (she’d also acquire a taste for applying oil-based paint while smoking cigarettes – so much so that she never really warmed to water-based kitchen paint), but for this first project, neither had a clue. They shook the cans, pried them open, dipped in their brushes, and painted.

Of course their application was uneven. They painted old drippy paint rather than actual wood. But far worse than their technique was their taste.

For they were consistent in hideousness. They agreed to the alternating scheme. The project took them three days, but Frankie and Edie ended up with a thoroughly bi-colored kitchen – three yellow walls and one orange one, all as backdrops for the alternating cabinet and drawer fronts. They even went to the trouble of painting the old wooden knobs, so that yellow-knobbed orange drawers abutted those with yellow paint and orange knobs, and cabinets featured the same style.

It could only have been uglier if they’d done the windows.

They lived together in that apartment for one full year. Then Edie moved to a studio. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along and enjoy one another – in fact, they’ve been close and compatible for half a century, they’ve traveled well together, and they are now considering the same retirement home, perhaps as roommates but more likely as neighbors. Edie moved out of their first apartment because they’d both acquired boyfriends, and it got to where the boyfriends were over so often that they were pretty much living there, and the apartment simply wasn’t big enough for four. Even after they established a sleeping area for Edie and mate in the living room, the schedules were off; Frankie and her guy were up almost all night and asleep till noon every day, while Edie and Ted kept farm hours.

Edie moved out but Frankie stayed for another year. The kitchen remained yellow and orange.

Surely it has been repainted since, but Frankie and Edie don’t know that. The building still sits, apparently unimproved. The exterior color has been changed from gloppy gray to dead dark brown but there’s no other visible alteration.

Edie went on to experience three other apartments, three different houses, and now her small condo. Frankie dwelled in three apartments after theirs, bought and enjoyed one house, and now occupies a condo slightly bigger than Edie’s.

Edie learned how to paint. She enjoys it. She spends whatever time it takes to clean, sand, scrape, repair, and tape a room before she opens the can. Her work looks professional. But it’s always white.

Frankie doesn’t do home improvements. She has learned to hire people for those tasks. She says if she never holds a paintbrush again she’ll be just fine. She tends to pick arty furniture in vivid colors. She likes to hang pictures on her walls and she views window “treatments” (she’d never say “curtains”) as a vibrant manner of self-expression. There’s no lack of color in her environment. But the walls are white.