Sputterpub's Blog

Once upon a time, in a cul-de-sac realm, not far from a freeway exchange and an outlet mall, there lived a monarch, his queen, and their three daughters.

Theirs was a normal, functional family, for its time: the monarch was a male in his 40s, the queen was a like-aged female at the end of her fertility, and the three princesses were teenagers. Their kingdom included a bearded collie, comical and rambunctious, and a yellow cat who was introduced as a kitten to a household with a mature dog, so Yanther thought he was a pooch. Yanther’s name came from “yellow panther,” an idea voiced by the youngest girl. The dog’s name was Magic, and her namer, the oldest daughter, meant it for mage-wisdom and not for the tricks she never managed to perfect.

The family was like an anti-myth: the father bold and insecure, the mother severely opinionated, the dog a spayed bitch and the cat a neutered male. The princesses all bore “L” names, to match the family handle, and no one was selfish or envious or as good as she was beautiful.

Linda, then almost 17, was intelligent, nervous, and attractive enough for all practical purposes. Lana was almost two years younger, better looking, graceful and friendly. She wasn’t as bright as Linda, and she was more affectionate. The baby Lola had just turned 14. Her hair was the prettiest in that brunette family: almost dark blonde, and curly. She seemed to have inherited her mother’s impatience. Yet she was the easiest-going of the daughters; offenses and insults just rolled off her back.

The girls were teenagers, so they had friends outside their home and they dieted most days. Each considered herself fat, and sister time seemed to reinforce their opinions. They got along fairly well together, compatible even when alone and not bothered by parents or teachers or other authorities, although they did argue about the diets. Linda was a classic calorie counter and scientist about the issue. Lana was the one who tried herbal supplements and OTC pills. Lola fasted about one day a week; absolute refusal to eat was more successful with her parents than trying to reduce what she ate from her plate.

The diets didn’t work. The girls put on normal adolescent female fat and also added a layer from the breaks they took in their diet routines, breaks which of course were saturated with salty-fatty-sweet treats until they forced themselves, again, into deprivation.

The princesses were full siblings but they had different traits. Some of their differences were genetic, but most were situational. They concerned birth order and geography.

For Linda was as serious as any first-born. It’s an overlooked trait, but the fact is that first-borns have rookie parents. No matter how much babysitting or aunt/uncling they’ve experienced, the mother and father of a first child are profoundly insecure. And the baby, especially if it’s female and thus programmed to read the emotions of others, picks up on the parental insecurity and steps up to take some of the parental load. A first daughter may be modest and can exhibit a sense of humor, but she’s deadly serious about most things.

Lana had the middle child position. She was the only one in the family with an older sibling and a younger one, and that encouraged two qualities in her: a cooperative ability to get along with others and an elusive ability to get away from the rest of the family. Even when Lana was physically present she was often emotionally not there.

Little Lola didn’t care. The family was formed when she arrived; she had to find a way to fit in. She was agreeable and she wanted those around her to be happy. She liked pairing people up and she was uncomfortable around disagreement. She was the daughter who gave the best hugs, but she also wore a pin that Linda gave her – I’m number 3 and I don’t try at all – and it was appropriate.

Then there was location. Some kingdoms are on islands, some are on cliffs, some are desert fortresses, some are walled municipalities. Theirs was suburban, with twisting streets and roads that went nowhere. It was built to be safe and peaceful. It was called a bedroom community.

And so it was. The Love kingdom was a quiet place to sleep in. That appealed to busy grownups. Its yards and playgrounds were built for children. But teenagers aren’t grownups or children. Adolescents are young enough for their time to move slowly but old enough to decide. They want their lives to matter. They burn for significance.

Teenagers need the bustle of the city or the freedom of rural or wilderness areas. At best, suburbs drive them to drive cars, and kill them off faster than any urban gangs. At worst suburbs drive them crazy.

Linda seemed to get this early on. By the time she was eight she knew she didn’t want a subordinate life like her mother’s. She decided when she was eleven that she wouldn’t be a virgin bride or even college student. At twelve she began modeling her future self on beloved characters in her favorite books, and she used those books to escape the boredom of her own suburban existence.

Lana and Lola were different. Neither minded life-at-home the way Linda did. The younger daughters were more cheerful. And they joined their parents in mocking Linda’s seriousness. They weren’t mean, and they didn’t intend any cruelty, but they followed the parental example of making light about Linda’s theories and proclamations, and then they outdid their parents in furthering the mockery when they saw how much it bothered Linda.

For it didn’t matter how wisely Linda’s father counseled her, once he understood her pain, to just ignore the sibling jibes – the more you react to their teasing, the more you’ll egg them on – because Linda didn’t see the harassment as teasing; she interpreted it as a failure to understand ideas that she thought were important.

The girls maintained their differences as they grew. Linda developed a successful sense of humor – often getting into trouble as the class clown – but everyone assessed her as serious anyway. School was easy for her (and boring); she had no trouble obtaining good grades without studying. She spent a lot of time alone, reading and writing and considering the world’s problems. She was something of a nerd magnet; she attracted the geeky marginal individuals in her class.

Lana was the good sport in the family. She had the best physical coordination, enjoyed team games, was almost as good at losing as winning, although she mostly won. She was capable of strong emotions but she hid that quality behind an easy-going attitude. She had numerous friends and attracted boys easily. Lana would end up being the one who left the family of origin, moving as soon as she was old enough to the other coast, but she was always considered the prettiest and most popular of the sisters.

Lola was a sweetheart. She wanted those around her to be happy. She had a ready smile and didn’t easily cry. She never matched Linda’s academic achievements or Lana’s athletic ones, but she got along with almost everyone (even Linda, although she was the most weary of the family with her big sister’s philosophy and theories). She had a comfortable group of friends from her own class but also befriended and often hung with Lana’s crowd.

So it was Linda who noticed Curtis. He was a quiet, hoodie-clad boy who shared most of her classes and always sat near the back of the room. That’s where Linda liked to be too; distance from the front of the class retarded her tendency to dominate the discussion.

Curtis was not cute. Stricken with acne and frizzy brown hair, he had prominent ears and a bony body. He was below average height and his pigeon-toed walk was one of the several qualities for which he was mocked. He appeared to have no friends. He usually wore his hood up over his bad hair, and he spent most of his class time drawing noir-ish cartoons in his textbook.

He was not stupid. The few times he participated in class revealed that he was bright and even well-read. Linda couldn’t say she liked him, but she found him interesting and thought he could be a model for a short story character she might someday write.

They became acquainted not in class, but in walking to and from school. They may have been the only seniors that year without cars. That’s one of the dangerous conditions about suburbs: all the cars. True, the houses are hermetically sealed, so the fire retardants in the upholstery and the other domestic toxins have an opportunity to accumulate and concentrate inside. And the extra money spent on playground safety just encourages kids to take more risks, so those without helicopter parents watching and playing with them are likely to break bones and heads. But the biggest problem, statistically, is all the cars. They are the only place a teen can have privacy, so adolescents spend extra time in them. That custom at worst increases the number of collisions; at the least it sends kids through drive-thru fast food concessions. Neither course will build well minds and bodies.

Lana and Lola weren’t old enough to drive, but they had driver friends. Each spent a normal amount of time in cars with other teens. Linda tended to walk. She encountered Curtis and sometimes they walked together a little, talked together a bit. When he first shared his violent fantasies with her, Linda viewed them as creative. They matched his class doodles. He seemed able to distinguish his fantasies from reality. But the fourth time he launched into a dark story about revenge, with surprising details about bomb making and assault weaponry, alarms rang in her head. She tried to make light of his words. He scowled at her and stopped speaking. More alarms.

Linda was no fan of authority. She didn’t feel comfortable talking about Curtis to a teacher. She surprised herself when she brought it up to her father. And he surprised Linda by taking her seriously and stepping up, with her, to visit Child Protective Services.

They didn’t know where else to go. And Curtis was not yet an adult.

No one lived happily ever after, but everyone lived. When Curtis was taken into custody, a cache of bought and built weaponry was found in his room. His private journals suggested that, without intervention, he and who knew how many students wouldn’t have made it.

Curtis’s prognosis is not rosy. But at least he got some mental health attention. The whole episode solidified Linda’s determination to get herself out of the suburbs as soon as possible.

Lately Jill hates her bff.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her, and it isn’t the first time, and maybe hate is too strong a word, but Jill is a writer, usually restrained, who occasionally indulges in gotcha words to express herself.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say Lucy irritates Jill so thoroughly now, that Jill is experiencing an exquisite toe-curling level of contempt for her friend of five decades.

She tells herself it’s because they’re getting old, but she knows that’s not really it. Or not exactly it. For it’s true that Lucy is becoming more LA now, finding the bay area weather too cold and choosing clothes the way she would if she were rich and back living there, apparently without an idea of her own.

Mostly it’s the surreal disconnect she sees between what Lucy claims she wants, and how she behaves.

For example: Lucy says she aims to live forever, or for as long as possible. Jill doesn’t share that goal; she says she has accomplished most of what she set out to do and can’t see staying around for more than another two decades. The friends are 66.

Jill is trying to do what she can to make the remaining time worth it. She exercises daily, chooses real food she has to digest, and actively manages stress. In fact, she lives carless so that she has to walk, and all the walking gives her the meditation time she needs to make stress stimulating instead of wearing.

Lucy, however, is currently in an exercise hiatus. She interrupted her twice a week custom of going to the gym when it closed for remodeling and then reopened without its pools. According to Lucy, the hot tub after exercise is such a vital workout component that she just won’t go without. But it’s been almost two years since the pool closed, and Lucy hasn’t joined a new gym. She hasn’t gotten around to trying the exercise tapes Jill gave her. She says she’ll increase walking, but she won’t do so in the rain, or if it’s cold or dark, which means she only walks when she gets together with Jill. Then she tells Jill about podcasts she’s been listening to, on the subject of exercise. “Do you know what calisthenic provides the biggest bang for your buck?” she asked over Chinese food the other night. “Squats!” was the answer she gave to Jill’s inquisitive look.

“Oh I don’t know,”Jill responded. “It kind of depends on what you’re after. A lot of folks would nominate crunches for the top spot. For that matter, any sort of core work…”

“Un-uh. With squats you’re working against gravity too. That’s why they’re best.”

Jill marveled. She chewed on her tongue instead of asking the obvious: so are you doing squats? Because she knew Lucy wasn’t. Lucy is listening to podcasts instead of getting to work.

But Jill was already disgusted. She didn’t want to be where she was. She needed a break.

They’d gotten together for an early dinner. Lucy wanted to shop first. Normally that would be a tolerable activity for Jill; she didn’t buy often so she usually found stores interesting when she tried them. Lucy was an avid shopper and most of the time the boutiques they visited had a few items worth Jill’s attention. But not the other afternoon. Since Lucy’s last trip to LA she’d fallen under the spell of her SoCal friends, upscaled her purchasing, and now she’d found love with a new shop in the neighborhood of their favorite restaurant. It was one of those small stores, with artistic racks and plenty of negative space. It only took Jill a few minutes to scope out the entire stock; she’d exhausted the inventory by the time Lucy ventured out of the dressing room the first time. Wearing fine knit trousers, too wide and too short, that would stretch out in a few minutes. Bias-cut, high-low hemmed, dry-clean only tops with three and four figure price tags. Lucy looked like an aging lumpy fool. She pranced around the multi-mirrored area outside the curtained cubbies, inviting compliments that Jill couldn’t bring herself to pronounce. Lucy has a certain style – a flamboyant outgoing personality and a tendency to flirt with anyone from babies to restaurant hostesses to strangers at adjacent tables – but her attractiveness is in spite of the clothes she wears, not because.

Jill is the more stylish of the two, regarding clothes. She never buys outfits or dresses; she finds them too limiting. She’s attracted to well-made wardrobe components. She likes to put her own outfits together from those components. She is the one who garners flattering comments from strangers. Even Lucy has commented about how often Jill is told that she’s rocking a look, or advised never to change her style.

And yet… Lucy acts like Jill has a shopping disability, and only needs her guidance to stop making fashion mistakes. Lucy often commented that something Jill had on was showing its wear, ready for the People’s Park box, needing replacement and improvement. As far as Jill was concerned, their pre-dinner activity, with Lucy’s ostentatious prancing and tiresome advice, was like a circle of hell.

She tried to rise above it. She loved and respected Lucy. She didn’t want to harbor ill-will. Yeah they were different. They’d always been different. One of the miracles of their half-century friendship was their keeping it together in the face of different life paths and attitudes. Lucy was single and challenged with chronic health conditions. She was brave about likely side effects and consequences and all the hours she had to spend in medical waiting rooms. Jill felt affection rising for her old friend even as the steam rose off their dragons-in-the-garden soup. Then Lucy started in on one of her policies and dashed Jill’s tender respect to the floor.

“That’s not the way I learn” Lucy pronounced, at the end of her report about the IT guy she hired to teach her about her computer. The man had come to her home, sat with her in the small office, and worked to customize her desktop and get her comfortable with word processing, spreadsheet applications, and email. She’d sat next to him while he leaned into the screen, hand busy on the controls and words blurted or fading as he attended to the problems in front of him. A few times she asked what he was doing as he opened small screens and navigated faster than her eyes could follow. “I’ll explain it when I’m done,” he’d then said to her.

According to Lucy, that was unacceptable. That’s not the way she learns. But Jill knows every techie behaves that way. It’s impossible to voice complicated syntax while manipulating a computer. Like trying to keep your eyes open when you sneeze. Jill wants Lucy to get over it, wait a bit and maybe discover ways to learn that she hasn’t yet claimed as exclusively hers. But she can’t figure out a way to suggest that without appearing to patronize. And the moment was gone already, replaced by an instance of Lucy’s purse disruption.

It’s another style thing. Lucy is into form over function. When the women were young, they argued about shoes. Lucy went for looks. Jill chose comfort. It wasn’t just an aesthetic conversation: Lucy was proud of her dainty extremities, and couldn’t resist new pairs of adorable shoes, especially since a bit of extra weight made clothing selections a challenge, while Jill was embarrassed about her big feet and even then using them for transportation, so her priorities in footwear were comfort, construction, and inconspicuous appearance.

Time had won the argument for Jill. Foot issues arose with age and now they both paid attention to fitness. But the bag argument was still an issue. Lucy loved a bag sack-like purse, formed from fine leather, into which she tossed stuff and out of which she seldom winnowed anything. Jill wanted a bag as small as possible, with different compartments so her gear stayed organized, made of material that is light when empty and undamaged by wet.

In Jill’s opinion, Lucy no longer has the luxury to choose a shapeless bag. She has to tote medical equipment everywhere she goes, and her inability to locate necessary items is worse than an inconvenience; it happens so often that it’s dangerous and stupid.

Right then, Lucy needed her test strips and meter. She rifled through stuff in her bag. She didn’t find them and her search became frantic, desperate, exasperated. She sat back in her chair, sighed, looked across the table at Jill, and then dumped the bag at the empty place setting adjacent to her seat. Items thunked and rolled. Jill reached across the table to contain cosmetics, pill bottles, old receipts, even loose crumpled cash. Then Lucy located what she sought. Set it aside and swept all other items back into her bag with the side of her hand. Even the litter.

At least she found her meter, Jill thought. Sometimes she wasn’t successful and they had to adjust their food choices accordingly, only to find out later that the missing item was in Lucy’s bag all along, eluding her search.

Lucy always apologized for the inconvenience. But she never listened to Jill’s suggestion to try a different sort of purse. “That’s not the way I roll,” she’d say, as she pulled out her credit card to acquire yet another Italian-leather, organically-dyed sack.

Jill told herself that she wasn’t being critical. She just wanted the best for Lucy, and she’s sure self-delusion isn’t the right path. What she hated most were the ways Lucy defined (limited) herself.

Take love, for example. Lucy hadn’t married. She didn’t have kids. Back when they first met, anyone would have predicted marriage and motherhood for her, and most wouldn’t have envisioned those states for Jill. But life is weirder than fiction: Lucy had never been invited to wed and always asserted she’d like kids but wasn’t cut out to be a single mother, while Jill had married twice and ended up raising two kids on her own.

Lately (for the last four years), Lucy had been seeing a married man, a guy she’d known for thirty years and had a little affair with when they were young. She said she was in love with Tom for life. She also said she probably wouldn’t have made a good mother anyway (this was patently, thoroughly untrue – Lucy is soft and bounteous and womanly, a lover of every baby she meets, yet vetted by camp counseling and employment counseling and troubled-youth counseling into a competent guide and disciplinarian). Just the other night, over the same dinner but during the entree course, Lucy asserted that maybe her life was appropriate. She said “You know, I really do make an excellent girlfriend: I’m much better at that than I would have been at wife.”

Jill protested. “What are you talking about? Where’s your teddy collection? Your garter and boots? Sexual adventure? You want to take Tom to the doctor, cook dinner for him, curl up at his feet every night and ask about his day. You’re into all these details about each other’s family, and not as amusing anecdotes. You’re far more wifely than I ever was.”

Lucy responded with a sweet smile. She pushed her empty glass to the part of the table on which she’d earlier dumped her bag, and signaled to the waiter for more wine.

The smile interrupted Jill’s rant. It sent her mind sideways and suddenly it was like her spirit hovered above their table, witnessing. She saw Lucy and herself as characters in a narrative, and didn’t admire the Jill-figure. “What the fuck?” her editor self asked her sitting self. “What’s it to you? Why can’t Lucy enjoy her own purse? Maybe you ought to turn your scope on yourself instead.”

She shut up. She didn’t like the appearance of her own character. The waiter arrived and she too accepted a refill.

At home the next day, Jill started writing the scene out. She had to admit that her persona was not admirable. As a reader she wanted to get closer to Lucy than to Jill. She knew her own good intentions, she was satisfied with her own coherence, but she just couldn’t get behind the way she appeared in the vignette she was trying to narrate.

That’s when she was hit by a bolt of old memory. Forty-nine years earlier, during some little argument she and Lucy were having (in their shared small living room, around dusk, wintertime), Lucy hurled at her the most hurtful phrase she’d ever had.

“Lighten up!”

Two little words. Nothing obscene or vulgar. But they stuck in Jill like poison darts: head and heart. They found their mark because she knew Lucy was correct.

Jill has no idea what the argument was about, but “lighten up” has replayed in her head a number of times since then. She has made decades of attempts to modulate herself, tone down the indignation, remember that bad feelings only last, somatically, for a minute and a half: wait ‘em out.

But she continues to come on more intensely and seriously than she means. Time and again she decides what’s wrong with Lucy. Lucy doesn’t do that to Jill. Lucy figured out Jill’s number long ago.