Sputterpub's Blog

There’s a old-fashioned grocery store in my extended neighborhood. It’s so vintage they stock fresh fruit and use cash registers. If you don’t want to pay with cash or a card, they’ll let you sign a tab and they’ll send you a bill now and then. They make frequent checkout errors, and the adjustments are usually fast and approximate.

But even they now have to accept the chipped debit and credit cards.

I shopped there today. I got to interact with my favorite checker, Russ. Like most of the employees, he has good social attitude and bad math aptitude. He’s tall and has dark tight curly hair. He rides a bike to work and we exchange our experiences of temperature and relative humidity. He’s the only checker I’ve ever allowed to comment on my purchases, but that’s because I owe him a few, for outstanding recommendations about new combinations of dark chocolate, coconut and almonds.

An hour ago he took my credit card and shoved it into the new chip reader. His look was halfway chagrined – like he was about to administer an enema or something. He lifted the card reader up so I could see it and pointed out its tangle of bent black cords.

“Whatta mess,” he exhaled, and body-signaled that he was about to unsnarl the cords.

“My father would caution you not to force the wires,” I commented.

“Your father would be correct.”

“I know. So do my siblings. We’re unfit for human relationships because we’re such assholes about stuff like that.”

Russ is quick but gave a delayed reaction. Then he chuckled into his beard. He handed me my receipt. For a moment he forgot my card. He pulled it out of the contraption and gave it to me.

I picked up my purchases as he started separating the cords.

“I wish you gratification,” I said. “It’s like cleaning up after a spaghetti dinner. You’re really going to be able to perceive progress.”

I left him cord-busy and grinning.

This is a tidbit about me. I’m a 55 year old woman with a 52 year old brother (Mark), and an ex friend/sister-in-law (Linda).

Facebook just reminded me that it’s Linda’s birthday. I’m unsure what to do about that. Here’s the backstory.

My mother lacks a filter. She thinks she’s normal, but she blurts whatever comes into her mind and sometimes what she says is inane. Imagine this. It’s last Thanksgiving at Mark and Linda’s house, shortly after I’ve gone home. Mom’s spending the night there. She tells my brother and sister-in-law, “Watch out what you say to your sister. Whatever you tell her gets back to me.”

At first I couldn’t believe it when Mark told me. Why on earth did Mom say it, even if it were true? All it could accomplish would be to divide Mark and me. Then again, I know Mom.

The point is, when Mom made the false statement about me, she got no argument. I wouldn’t expect one from Mark, who was dumbfounded and so accustomed to Momspeech that he reported it to me immediately – another example of her crazytalk. (Mark lacks a filter too.) But Linda? She just smiled and nodded. Even though she’s the one, more than any other, who knows how well and many secrets I can keep. They’re hers.

It’s true that I’m disclosive about herself. I like to talk, I like to listen, and I decided when I was eight that if I didn’t keep secrets then nobody could blackmail me (that strategy worked until I was made vulnerable, devastated in truth, by having kids). But just because I tell my own secrets doesn’t mean I spill others’.

I try to limit the vault confidences. It’s a chore to confine them and I don’t want to have to regard them often, so I keep the vault small. But it’s a strong vault. And like the purloined letter, obvious in front of seekers and not found, my disclosiveness masks a most trustworthy recipient of confidences.

When I was 21, for example, I met J, in Israel. We had an intense and creative affair. He told a lot of stories, and as far as I could determine, they were not true. He claimed he had been adopted into the Apache tribe. He gave me a tomahawk charm and a collection of beads and feathers he called his scalplock and one night, maybe on the wall of the Old City and perhaps under the influence of some Tel Aviv-manufactured PCP, he told me secrets about his Apache self and warned me that if I ever divulged them I’d wreck his soul.

Well I didn’t believe that for a moment, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t even remember which stories about J I’m not supposed to tell. I don’t take chances with anyone’s soul; I’m telling nothing about him.

I want to limit the things I can’t talk about. I’ve refused several offers of confidential information since then. But Linda’s were forced on me.

When we met, Linda was new to the city, new to the office, placed there by my best friend. She was 22, blonde and buxom and cute, and heavily promiscuous. They call it hypersexuality now, and prescribe pharmaceuticals to treat it; they said nyphomania with a snigger back then. To make a tawdry story short, her suicide attempt interrupted her career as slutty party girl. She came to stay with Tim and me for about a month, and that’s how she met my brother Mark. She was into an asexual phase; they founded a relationship on friendship. Unfortunately, each had a different definition of friendship.

They married in 1985. Linda and I remained friends till Linda walked off the job and tried to extort a settlement from me in 1999. Since then we’ve been in-laws and nothing more.

We were still close back in the early 1990s, when Linda and Mark bought their house. So unfortunately I know more than I want to about the torrid little affair Linda had with their contractor while the house was being refurbished.

And even though we weren’t speaking much in 2000, Linda was there for my birthday dinner of course, as family, and she took me into the bathroom with her that evening and filled my ears with uninvited and graphic descriptions of the sex she was then having with an elderly accountant.

Before all those, before she even married Mark but when she was living with him, was the tackiest event. One night in one February Linda hooked up with my recently ex-husband, they drank to the point that sex seemed like a good idea, took it to Tim’s apartment, and proceeded to call me about once an hour and tell me how much fun they were having. While they were cavorting, Mark was calling also, asking if I had any idea where Linda was. And as if that weren’t sleazy enough, Linda told Mark something about that event, some unnecessary falsehood. Because Mark has mentioned to me, more than once, that although he used to think of Tim as an older brother, even after the divorce, he could never forgive Tim for “coming after my woman.”

These memories and others about Linda I have kept to myself. And Linda knows it. But did she speak when my mother said I can’t keep secrets? No. She smiled and nodded her agreement and told herself she wasn’t betraying me; she was just being polite to her mother-in-law and reacting as lightly as possible.

Now that Linda and Mark have imploded and divorced, people are making negative comments about her. And I keep piping up with objections. I say it’s more complicated than that. I don’t exactly defend Linda, but I try to be fair.

Fair yes.

Phony no.

I’ve decided not to acknowledge Linda’s birthday.