Sputterpub's Blog

“So do you gamble?” she asked, contemplating their pass through the casino to the buffet dinner that awaited them when they left their room.

“Not really. You?”

“I guess I don’t gamble for money. Never have.”

He proceeded to hold forth about odds and gaming strategies. Normally she liked his instruction. He spoke calmly and behaved gently when he taught, and he was always informative. Completely unlike his normal manic angry non-instructing self. But Nancy wasn’t interested in casino gambling.

She knew the big room would be loud with light and noise. Bells ringing and whistles blowing, bulbs igniting in cascades and bursts. Nancy remembered her brother’s words about how the Macy’s cosmetics area resembled a casino – eyecatching and out to grab your money – words she found witty and true except here over the state line, where casinos are way beyond any retail display.

Ted rubbed his short dark hair against its nap and smiled at her. His grin was open and reached all the way to his chocolate brown eyes. His heritage was Greek, and he had the golden-toned skin and deep brown hair and eye color one expected of a Hellene. Nancy knows from pictures that he was an adorable child. Now in his late 50s, his hair was thinning and his butt was beginning the old-man migration to his belly. His teeth were no longer white. Ted had grown into an average-looking old guy.

As usual, Nancy wasn’t sure why she was with him. They’d met a year ago and flamed with instant mutual attraction, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. Ted was rarely relaxed, at times barbaric, impulsive in a way that seemed almost affected to her. But he was decisive and passionate. He was interesting, and his repeated attempts to sing her praises were flattering and not yet tiresome. Nancy was an equally strong character, articulate and coherent and a specialist in indignation, all of which Ted found refreshing and attractive and often too serious. He made sudden moves toward her now and then, but he backed off just as forcefully. Nancy knew he was recovering from a rocky marriage, keeping company with a nice safe colleague named Anne, and she thought for most of their acquaintance that she might be the prize awaiting him after he finished rebounding. She was twice divorced herself, single four years; she was experienced at post-marital grief and ready to jump in again. But she was starting to have doubts about him.

“I’m not comfortable gambling for money,” she continued their conversation, “but I have a history of emotional gambling.” Ted didn’t respond. He sat in one of the room’s two orange vinyl chairs, clad in shirt, shorts, and winter boots. It was a cold January night in the mountains, so the boots made sense. But his sturdy furred legs looked incongruously tan. He tugged at his crotch and talked some more about odds.

Nancy licked the cigarette paper and sealed it around a galactic joint. Lump in the middle and tapered ends. Her thumbs had never learned the trick of compressing the pot evenly, maybe because she didn’t want them to learn. Her brother teased her about the shape of her joints, but she argued that the ends weren’t where the business was anyway; one got lit and the other got soggy. She lit and hit and passed to him.

“That’s enough for me; one does it” he croaked, maintaining his inhalation while talking. He rose and started pacing off whatever that one hit did to him. Nancy’s first husband had supplied all the pot and joined her in it. Her second husband tried to enjoy it with her but soon gave it up, and after awhile complained about her use. Now she met men who remembered how to smoke it, even kept some around, but couldn’t roll a joint, used very little, and acted more paranoid than the volume dealers of the past.

Ted put on some long pants and they walked to dinner. The streets were icy, the lights were bright, the air was crispy cold.

And the casino was what Nancy expected: glitzy, loud, mirrored and not fine. She wasn’t tempted to play. But Ted got four quarters for each of them, saying they’d test their systems. This was too absurd for response, so Nancy just dropped hers into the nearest slot machine. Not Ted.

“How many coins shall I play first?” he asked.

“Up to you. It’s your system.”

He led her through the maze of machines, looking for one that would take up to four coins. A bank of them were designed for one to five nickels, but the quarter slots wouldn’t take more than three. He settled on a machine and played two. Four quarters clunked out.

“Ah,” he said, holding six quarters in the broad palm of his left hand. “What’s my next play?”

Nancy looked at the quarters, looked at him. “Still your system.”

He played three and lost. Played his other three and lost again. “Now what have we learned?”

“That it’s time to find the buffet.”

Back in the motel after dinner, they talked. Neither had anything yet to say about their contemplated business venture, but they thought about partnership while they finished the joint. Each looked into the other’s face. Ted’s smile seemed contrived but his eyes were warm and loving. Nancy’s were flecked with a skepticism that modified her mobile mouth.

“I think we have to talk about sex,” she said. “I mean, even though we can’t really hold each other to anything we say, I don’t think we can contemplate going into business together without considering what happens if. Say we start a sexual relationship and then stop; how will that affect our business?”

“I’m comfortable with the way things are. Anyway, I can’t manage a sexual relationship with more than one woman at a time.”

Nancy recoiled inwardly. Dismay, grief, irritation. She hadn’t known till then that he and Anne were a couple. Ted had told her about his sad/mad divorce shortly after they met. His wife had been slim, blonde, and beautiful. He was a doctor and she was gorgeous, which worked for him in every way. Their relationship was passionate and tumultuous, and when she left him for a cabinet-maker he was devastated. He begged, he forgave, he raged, he compromised. In the end he hired an expensive lawyer and changed his nickname from Theo to Ted. Throughout the unraveling he received sympathy and cakes from a nurse in his hospital named Anne. She was unlike his wife in every way but coloring: patient, demure, loyal and compliant. She was restful. Time with her was not stimulating but it was comfortable. It appeared that her patience had paid off.

Nancy had known about friend Anne, but the way Ted talked, she thought it was trivial. Ted and Nancy hadn’t done it, but they weren’t platonic either. He reacted almost violently when she mentioned other men. He asserted that he wanted Nancy with him till and when he died. He characterized their interaction as gasoline and a match. He described Anne as “like a retriever… you know – real sweet but not very bright.”

“Look,” Ted said then, leaning forward and taking her right hand between both of his. “I promise that if we become lovers and then stop, we’ll still be friends.” He compressed her palm and looked in her face. “If you don’t hurt me.”

He took off his clothes and climbed into her bed. This wasn’t as suggestive as it sounds; they weren’t done talking and the TV was in her room. She planned to sleep clothed anyway. They did a crossword puzzle together and cuddled all night.

Those cuddles didn’t lead to kisses cause they weren’t having sex. The morning wasn’t leisurely for the same reason. They were traveling together for the first time, cooperative and cheerful, but they weren’t easy-going because they weren’t just friends, yet they couldn’t use caresses to smooth the rough spots.

They were in the mountains so he could ski and she could bask in the cold white weather. After a quick breakfast, he did the slopes while she filled her senses with winter. The hill looked like snow over ice to her, and the padded people waddled and sidled like colored penguins at its base. They acquired grace when they slid down the big slope, but many plopped over and rested on the way down.

Ted was ready to move ahead with a business partnership and Nancy wasn’t unwilling. But she wanted more time to consider. Twenty-four hours later, back at home, she knew what she wanted to say to him.

“I’ve got a problem. It isn’t easy to say this, but here it is. You and I should be having sex. I know this so absolutely that I can’t rationalize around it. For a year you’ve been wavering. It’s time for us to do it. Resisting doesn’t make our friendship better; the hypocrisy is killing it. I don’t think you’re trying to hurt me. I think you’re scared of something. I need more.”

“Okay, we’ll just quit.”

She’d expect that. She could accept it. To hell with whatever this was.

He’d stand, grimace, speak: “I could storm out of here, grieve for two weeks, and then say this. I’ll condense it. Are you saying I can fix this by fucking you?”

“You moron,” she’d retort. “I’m only willing to consider this love and business gamble if you’re willing to see what the gamble is!”

“You mean, like sex and love and work and fun and forever?”

“Those, and the fact that all odds are against us. That we’ll probably have to gulp back pain and disentangle us later.”

“Okay, partner,” he’d say. “Will you go away with me next weekend?”

“What?”

“Somewhere nice, with a big bed and coffee in the room.”

“And a good dinner, with cocktails and wine, to help me be less nervous?”

“You won’t need that.”

“Watch me.” She’d flush and hesitate. “Are you serious?”

Then he’d hold out a steady right hand. “Deal?”

That’s what she’d like to say and hear. She let herself have the fantasy, knowing that its price would be pain for its absence. As it was, when they had returned home she’d been eager to send him on his way. Especially when his enthusiasm for a joint business venture led him to monkey, uninvited and unauthorized, with her stationary bike.

“I don’t want to kick you out,” she’d begun.

“But you’re kicking me out.”

“I know how much you hate traffic. It’s after 4 and will only get worse.”

The next day Nancy had attempted a business plan. Blank page. She thought some more about it for another couple of days. She knew they couldn’t be partners. She didn’t trust his business sense, sincerity, reliability, sensitivity. She couldn’t see it working if he were involved with someone, or she were, or they were with each other.

She called him four days after their return.

“I have something to say that isn’t easy. I don’t think we can be business partners.”

“Okay.”

“I think you’re in love with someone and that devastates me. We can’t be partners. I wanted to let you know as soon as I could.”

“No problem.”

“Good.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

She knew exactly what words they’d said, and she knew they’d communicated much more than the words. At least, he’d heard more, and she really didn’t know what he’d do with it. Like bullets fired into rocky places, like lasers loosed in mirrored rooms, their words struck and echoed and rebounded into infinity, slicing away the bonding until the structure simply collapsed.

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.