Sputterpub's Blog

“I’m telling you, Kimmy: I think I spoke too loud. As usual. Linda’s been acting weird ever since you and I talked yesterday. She must have overheard. Gawd: she’s only here for two days, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

“Oh hell, maybe it’s just as well. Maybe she needs to hear it. But I have got to learn to modulate my voice! Sure it’s handy when I want it, but jeez – how many times do I have to experience this after-regret? I get too excited, and then I get loud…

“Still, I think I’m right about her church. Or just about any church. I suppose I should look into the statistics to back this up, but it seems so obvious to me: churches and other behavior-controlling institutions are designed to attract the weak, the fallen, the sinners, the troubled – oh, you know – whatever words the institution uses to describe those it wants to help. And like the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day…the institution is bound to succeed with some, in spite of itself. So the institution succeeds occasionally, and pulls a weak individual into social remission. That individual is very likely to remain with the institution. Talk about a magic feather!

“We both know that recidivism is rampant. Most recovering alkies drink again. Most philanderers cheat again. Gamblers return to their games and maniacs to whatever mania is theirs. It’s so common I wonder if there isn’t an element of nostalgia to the backsliding: a sweet familiarity and a reminder of youth? Anyway, if the individual has been institution-helped and is still institution-adjacent, guess who gets hurt when she or he falls off the wagon?

“I never thought about it till Linda’s daughter was molested. I remember how shocked I was when it all came out. I mean, sure I know most girls experience some sort of sexual insult from older people some time while growing up, but usually it’s not more than an uncle exposing himself, or a neighbor asking to see panties, or (in my case) older male cousins trying to strip you. I’d never known anyone who was photographed, let alone probed. So when Linda told me about what happened to Beth in her church afterschool, I was plenty shocked. And then it came out that the teacher or whatever she was had been the perp…shock started morphing into horror, you know? But the final straw was when Linda told me that no one ran any kind of background check on the woman. It was a volunteer job, and she got it because the folks in the church knew her personally, or thought they did. Probably all they would have had to do is talk to her former church…”

That’s what I overheard Sue saying to Kim last week, and I only wish I had the nerve to confront her. But no…as usual, she’s the one with the nerve. I’m only nervous. I wish I was more assertive, but what do you expect? I was raised to be a lady.

Okay so my mom was eccentric. So she insisted on that bicycle and kept making meals that weren’t what my friends ate. That was mostly about her health problems, and she died young enough to prove it. How many other teetotalers get cirrhosis? None I know of. She was probably right to try what she did. And in other ways she was the kind of lady I want to be: a good wife, a good mom, a good Christian.

If I was more assertive I’d speak up to Sue. But in that case I’d probably speak up to Jim, too. Like in college. Like I still did a little after we were married. Face it, if the kids had come easily we might have remained in Pinole and kept our old friends, and we might still be like we were.

It wasn’t the move to Visalia that changed us. That was about Jim’s consulting. But after we joined the church here, it kind of created our social life.

When you’re young you don’t want to be bored. It’s important to have friends but you try to pick interesting ones. But then when you’re a little older, especially when you’re new in town and newish to marriage and trying to start a family, then it doesn’t matter so much if the people you meet tend to bore you. They’re good people, they help you settle, they’re there for you through four miscarriages, they celebrate it when you finally have your daughter and then two years later your son, they help you, and they become your folks.

So yeah, I’m not the old Linda any more. I wouldn’t even think of stepping out on Jim. I’m not very strong. I’m probably boring. But I’m a good wife, a good mom, a good Christian. I take care of my home, I work part-time, I try to do good. And there’s nothing wrong with my church.

I probably should have confronted her. Maybe I could have prevented her from posting her little fantasy/op-ed:

Annabelle Miller was a Hammond woman. And thus abused.

Don’t look for sexual penetration from her father, her uncle, her grandpa. This woman’s abuse was severe and emotional, grounded in religion. Her indoctrination began at birth; she had no more chance of escaping it than a Dravidian or polygamous Mormon.

“Give me a child till 7,” used to intone the priests. Annabelle was born into a family of crazies who medicated themselves with their insular inland church.

Her crime was horrific and overpublicized. The audience read, viewed, diagnosed and tried her long before she was arraigned. It took no time at all for the memorials to sprout; Walmart made thousands on all the stuffed animals and balloons. Bloggers held forth about how impossible it was for a woman to kidnap-molest-kill. “She’s covering for some man,” they said, and “She had to have an accomplice.”

No. That wasn’t it.

Annabelle and most of the Hammond clan have borderline personalities or worse. They all medicate themselves with their church services and busy themselves with their church activities and, except for the continuing religious abuse that they visit on their offspring, they mostly stay out of trouble. But people slip. The best meds fail sometimes. And Annabelle was sicker than most. She lapsed.

She meant to kill Leah. She had watched the child interact with her own daughter, and she saw evil. It was probably because Leah was three years older than Tiffany. There’s a big difference between 8 and 5, and when she eavesdropped on the girls and peered through the screen door, she witnessed Leah telling little Tiffany about sex. Leah had seen her aunt and uncle in bed and tried to reenact what she’d observed with the dolls the girls had. Annabelle concluded that Leah’s skipping high spirits were the mark of Satan.

She meant to kill, but she had to jack herself up for it. Even after she grabbed Leah she wasn’t quite ready to strangle. So she began to punish the child. For evil, she said. “For evil, for evil, evil, evil,” she began to chant, and then she had to cross a bigger line to kill. She penetrated the child’s body with the tool she had at hand. She used the handle of an X-Acto blade holder, thrusting and chanting “evil, evil, evil,” until Leah passed out and Annabelle had gone too far to come back. She looked at the blood and the unconscious child, and finally felt strong enough to end that life.

Please don’t think it was about sex. Stop looking for a man. I’ve spent most of my career studying these characters. Think about how this nation was settled. About what it took to come here. We are a melting pot of cognitive disorders, and some of us find in religion explanations for the voices in our heads.

Annabelle did what she did to send Leah innocent to death before the evil growing in her could take full hold.

Then she reversed the X-Acto holder and removed its blade, and swallowed. And another. Another. Sick, cowardly, ineffective: she ran too soon out of blades.

Her name wasn’t really Cedar. If she’d been younger anyone in Berkeley would believe it, but she was a Boomer, and her parents had never been eccentric. Her birth names were Sharon Elizabeth, and she took on the tree name Cedar when she was 19. She always loved trees, especially evergreens.

When I met her we were both in our 40s. I moved into the house next door, just north of hers, across the creek. I was a newly single mother (raw and reluctant from divorce) and she was a happily-married mother of one. My two kids were years older and younger than her daughter so they didn’t play together. But Cedar seemed to derive pleasure and solace and other positive effects from hand-hosing her garden, so she was often outside, and we naturally got to talking.

Cedar and Carl were an attractive couple, and their daughter Autumn, coltish and platinum blonde even at nine, was eye-catching. Cedar was well-shaped and about 5’9.” She had thick wavy shoulder-length hair in the usual array of blonde streaks. Carl wasn’t much taller than his wife. He was slender and blonder. He did some sort of business consulting, out of the house. Cedar wove, knitted, crocheted, and quilted items for home and body, mostly forest-inspired, mostly marketed online.

Except for the winter months, every morning I could hear her hose on greenery even before I got out of bed (my head aimed south when I slept, and my headboard was two casement windows, one of which was open every night). It was a relaxing sound, and I could imagine the accessory sensation of the cool, almost vibrating hose in hand, so I understood Cedar’s irrigation pleasure even though I didn’t get the regularity – behavior that appeared to be compulsive.

I don’t think I would have paid so much attention to Cedar and family if coincidence hadn’t occurred. But I had a commute friend named Terry, and one day she got off the bus at my stop and came to my place for an afterwork glass of wine, and when I walked her to the sidewalk to say goodbye, Cedar and Autumn were passing by. It turned out that Terry knew Cedar from before she and Carl bought the house. Terry had been in the apartment next to theirs before Autumn was born.

The next day Terry talked about that old apartment. She said her bedroom was adjacent to theirs. She used to hear the sound of their lovemaking through the wall. The remarkable memorable quality was the amount of laughter she heard. Terry said she’d never been close to such a healthy, happy couple.

Terry was an oddball. She was rail-thin and always cold, and she wore layers of scarf-like clothing around her body. Her face makeup was applied like paint: red circles on her cheekbones and iridescent blue on her lids all the way to her brows. She tended to writhe a bit when she sat. Cat-like. In fact, the only times I ever saw her genuinely smile were when she fondled her cats and when she reminisced about Cedar and Carl.

Terry told me she’d been a heroin addict. She said she used to drive a cab, nights in New York City. She claimed to have been a nude model, and she’s the only person I ever knew who festooned her refrigerator door with black-and-white pictures of her unclothed younger self, in ostentatiously “artistic” poses.

She described herself as bisexual in orientation, but with a relationship history populated largely by men, largely by passionate large men, largely by men who were sexually aggressive with Terry in ways that abutted abuse but amounted to provocative gymnastics, at least the way she told them.

I let the friendship with Terry peter out after my visit to her place and my viewing of her refrigerator. Not that I was offended (or aroused) by the pictures. More because I found Terry boring and superficial and affected. And also because I got the strange but undeniable feeling, while we were looking at that refrigerator door, that Terry was waiting for me to make a move on her. I believe she was giving me what I’ve heard guys call a “come hither” look.

As if. I’m incurably straight. And I’m never the sexual initiator. Terry had to know those facts about me, if she was paying any attention.

She wasn’t paying attention. And I stopped regarding her. But I kept noticing Cedar. We often encountered one another over the creek, while she watered her trees and I moved leaves around. The first time I conversed with her after hearing Terry’s memories, of course I mentioned them.

“It was just a lovely recollection,” I announced. “Hearing how often you guys laughed. Terry seemed to really enjoy those neighbor sounds.”

“Oh yeah,” Cedar agreed. “And I remember Terry’s cats.” She directed her water away from the oak tree between us and toward a big bay laurel. “Carl and I were new then. But I feel a little weird now about our laughter. It was all about his wife.”

I’m sure I looked questioning; I hope I didn’t drop my jaw or anything.

“Carl was really unhappy in his marriage. I worked for him then, and I knew all about it. What can I say? An office relationship grew into a friendship and that developed into more than either of us intended. Meanwhile Mary got more and more demanding, and Carl moved in with me. Mary used to call us at all hours, haranguing Carl or threatening to kill herself if he didn’t come back. She even made some aggressive comments about me. We had to get a restraining order.”

I would have expressed sympathy, but Cedar was smiling wide as she reminisced. “Uh huh” is what I said. “So your background is in the same sort of work Carl does?”

“Oh not really. I mean, he’s the one with the advanced degree. My job was clerical, and business management consulting never grabbed me. He had ten more years in it than I by then. And I quit as soon as we got pregnant.”

It was hard for me to imagine Carl as any sort of player. He wasn’t bad looking, but he was slight, quiet, kind of shy. Not very masculine. Cedar was such a take-charge person, so energetic in her art and her nonprofit tree-planting work, that she seemed to be the dominant personality in their household.

I noticed Carl a little more after that. I even joined them for wine one winter evening (I’m friendly but a bit of a hermit, and I don’t want to be so close to my neighbors that anyone feels comfortable dropping in). I tried to converse with Carl that time. He responded to my questions but didn’t ask anything in return. He struck me as monotonous: as pale in conversation as in complexion and eyelashes. He was more attentive to Autumn than to Cedar or me. I thought it was a little weird, the amount of time Autumn spent on his lap.

A few months later, about a week after springtime watering noise had commenced next door, I woke to the unmistakable sounds of marital argument. Cedar’s voice carried better than Carl’s but I could tell from tone that they were really going at it. I heard “skinny-assed bitch” and several “fuck YOUs” from Cedar, followed by the sound of what must have been a newspaper on asphalt, finished by the abrupt ignition and acceleration of Carl’s Honda.

I’ll admit it: I found a reason to go outside even before the coffee was ready.

It was very bad news. Carl was leaving Cedar. He was now in love with the young woman who’d been working with him in his office. He planned to marry this Jennifer person. He told Cedar that Jennifer was eager to have a baby and he was looking forward to “doing it right this time.” That drove the blade deeper. Cedar had wanted another child after Autumn, but Carl insisted their family was perfect and complete as it was. Cedar had finally given up just a year ago; I remember the conversation we had when she hosted a yard sale that featured (mostly) baby gear.

It only got worse after that. Carl returned that day but moved out about a week later. Cedar grew progressively more agitated and angry. I’m sure I’m not the only neighbor who heard the yelling, the door-slamming, and sometimes shrieks from Autumn. And that was when Carl wasn’t around; the times he stopped by to pick up or drop off Autumn tended to be even louder.

I could tell from the lamplight that Cedar wasn’t sleeping much at night. Or not regularly. Often there was a glow from her house in the eerie pre-dawn hours. That’s probably when she used the phone.

We had our last conversation shortly before she moved out. She was no longer watering the garden; she accosted me from her front yard when I was returning from the market with a bag of produce.

She looked at least ten pounds thinner. Her hair needed cut and color; it straggled around her newly-narrow face. “You won’t believe it!” she started as she approached me. I had no choice but to stop. “That fucker served me with a TRO! Me! A restraining order!”

I murmured some sympathy. It was sincere. “Were you going by his place?”

“Never! I’m not even allowed to phone him!”

“I’m sorry, Cedar.”

“I just can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s like my whole life is coming apart, layer by layer.”

“Do you want to grab some dinner with me?”

“Oh. Uh, no thanks. I mean, thanks really, but my appetite’s been off lately, and I can’t settle down. Let’s do it soon though.” Her smile was habitual and didn’t even push her cheeks up.

Within another two weeks she came completely apart. I understand the catalyst was when Autumn called her father and asked if she could live with him and Jennifer. Cedar went ballistic. Someone in the neighborhood called the police, and the police called Social Services. Autumn went with her father and Cedar was taken to a rehab-type facility.

She may have improved, but not in time to prevent the house being sold. My new neighbors are delightful people – friendly and private. They have an only son named Jason who is currently fascinating me. He’s 15, probably on the spectrum, and liable to act out in weird ways. His parents bought him a trombone because making music seems to calm him; they’ve plastered his bedroom door and windows with soundproofing strips, but I can hear him anyway. Just last week he tossed a match out of his room and started a little conflagration. With all the trees on that property, less watered now that Cedar isn’t around and we’re so drought-aware, someone needs to keep an eye out.