Sputterpub's Blog

Beware of Molly. She told the story of our June genesis in the present tense, because that seems to her more vivid and less decided. She says telling in the now encourages the hearer to have opinions. But present-tense narration bugs me. We have to admit it happened already. The hearers will just have to have opinions about history.

The earth rolled beneath our feet and the next thing I knew I was wrapped in a white embrace with the bounteous Linda. That’s one way to put it. Except the movement is only smooth in fancy. In fact, that big quake felt like a series of thudding falls, like an elevator slipping half a floor, or a plane hitting a wind sheer. Boom! and we dropped a foot. Doom! and we were slammed sideways and down. I remember watching the guys move off the small stage as I rose to join Linda and Molly at their table. Then Molly left and I hesitated. Thud. Bang. I was tangled in white nylon pulling tighter as I tried to twist and haul myself loose. I felt a big soft body against most of mine, round head tucked under my chin as we fell together, on my left side her right. The power was out but I knew the cloth was white. I saw dust sparkling so there must have been light coming from somewhere.

We lay still for a moment. My arms embraced her and my fingers at first grasped handfuls of her, corrugated back flesh, before they learned to open and touch rather than hold her surface. There was nothing erotic about the moment. I spent it coming to terms with the event. I admitted that we’d just had an earthquake. I began to allow it to be a big one.

“You okay?” I must have asked, because she mumbled enough of a response that I knew she was. She didn’t move much then; I had to untangle us, or try to, while she lay there like a manatee. If Molly and Paul hadn’t come back I don’t know how much material I would have had to tear to free us. As it was, they found us and unrolled us from our cocoon. We weren’t really wrapped in it – we didn’t even have to spin once to get out of the cloth – but our initial squirms had twisted it around our ankles, and Linda’s inert bulk was a weird impediment to escape. Every time I touched her it seemed a handful of flesh came away from her body.

No. Paul and Molly got us out of that tangle, and then Linda had some kind of a hissy fit, shaking her flabby arms and flailing her hands, squealing “Stay away from me! Get away! Oooooh!” through chattering teeth quivering lips. There was a smack of flesh on flesh. I figured Molly hit Linda because the next thing I heard was a calm “Linda. Linda. Come with me. We have to leave here. Come. Take… my… hand,” in Molly’s deep voice. We all moved toward the back door.

And found Linda’s brother Robert behind the place. Most of the other escapees had dispersed but he was hanging around looking disoriented. Pale faced, wide-eyed. His narrow shoulders slumped and he looked even skinnier than normal. We all gazed for a moment at one another. In the ambient light I saw a handprint on Linda’s right cheek: Molly’s mark like a burn on a big freckled face.

We five stayed together. We heard that the bridges were damaged; there would be no easy way for Linda and Robert to cross back to her place in the San Francisco marina. We thought at first to go to high ground, to Paul’s house in the hills, but our every attempt to travel north or east was blocked by floods of water or people, and we could see fire in Molly’s part of town, even from where we were. So we all headed to my place. That made for some interesting sociology.

I lived then with my wife in a two-bedroom, half-a-house duplex on the southern edge of town. We had the downstairs flat, with more room but less light. It wasn’t even a mile from the club; we walked there in twenty minutes. Cindy was home and freaked, although nothing had happened in our place and our two kids were safe in their own homes in Texas. But Cindy is easily freaked, by small irritations or big catastrophes, and I don’t take her anxieties too seriously any more. I introduced her to Molly and Paul and Linda and Robert, and we all started drinking in front of the TV, watching the same coverage over and over again, more thirsty for news than for the liquor we poured (I remember Cindy asked Molly what she’d like with her vodka and Molly said “vodka”).

We soon learned that Linda and Robert wouldn’t get to the city that night, and we couldn’t get any news about whether Molly or Paul still had homes. Everyone prepared to sleep at my place. Then the power went out and we resorted to a few candles and an old transistor radio.

Molly was in a state. Her son was taking a year off college – he and the family dog were trekking through the Olympic peninsula – so it wasn’t fear for them that got to her. No. It turned out that Molly has an unnatural attachment to her house. It was her third home as a buyer but her first as a single woman, and she treasured the place as if it were her beloved. It had diamond-paned casement windows. It had clinker brick chimneys. Best of all, it had unpainted hardware and undrilled walls, because most of the owners in the house’s eighty years just happened to be single women who, as I then learned, don’t paint window hardware or drill holes in walls.

For the remainder of that night Molly didn’t know whether she had a house or not, and to describe her as distracted is to understate her energies. She was a wreck.

It’s still amazing to me how things sorted themselves out. How people coalesced, separated, and then came together in odd pairs. God’s lava lamp.

At first Cindy and I acted like proper hosts. Funny the social habits one falls into during thirty-plus years of marriage. We both poured drinks and offered crackers. She sat with Linda and Robert, commiserating about their inability to cross the water to San Francisco. They made an interesting tableau: Cindy leaning forward with the affected helpful face I’ve come to despise, offering commiseration to a fat hysteric and her thin near-catatonic brother. I stayed with Molly and Paul, listening to her semi-hysterical and his deliberative conjectures about their houses, trying to calm her and agree with him.

But after awhile Cindy must have decided that Robert needed more attention from her. Linda was annoying/boring but Robert was near panic about something. At the same time I started focusing on Molly and pretty much ignoring Paul’s monotonous pronouncements. Linda and Paul eventually drifted away from the rest of us and toward each other, where they commingled their fastidious exasperation.

The night passed slowly. It was mid-June so it wasn’t a very long one, but I was living so vividly that it impressed me minutely; I’m filled with a thousand images from it, and that thickness makes it seem large. With the power outages and the various fires it was darker than usual and at the same time eerie-toned, and that difference in ambient light may have lengthened the night too.

I lost track of Linda and Paul. They weren’t doing anything interesting or making any noise, and they took themselves out of my line of sight. I think they left together the next morning. I’m sure they parted immediately after that. They both returned to intact homes and orderly lives, and they grew no closer to anyone from the night’s experience. In fact, Linda stopped talking to her brother for months after the event; she acted like he was a big insect on her windshield and only wanted someone else to remove him so she wouldn’t have to think about him. I’ve heard that Paul resumed his insulated existence without apparent reflection or resolution.

I paid a little attention to what was going on between Cindy and Robert. I couldn’t understand why he was so freaked out; I mean, we were all experiencing that adrenaline-dissipating, emergency-accepting exhausted dissonance, like shock-deafened witnesses to explosion. Robert was agitated beyond the catastrophe of the evening. He didn’t cry but seemed consumed with grief or some other serious emotion. Maybe he was just struck by the randomness of calamity.

I’m no longer romantically or possessively interested in my wife, but I have spent most of my life with her, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that she seemed to be providing non-maternal nurture, sex-type attention, to this kid who was about thirty years her junior. I noticed the way she embraced him, neck-caressing breast-intense. The look on her face was almost young.

Cindy and I were still together then because we couldn’t afford to break up. That’s what I thought, anyway. There must have been more to it, though, because I would have left her for love at least three times in the past, if I thought I could afford it, but she broke us up for good the day after the quake, when she realized (as she announced to me) that she was in love with Robert. There was a little meanness in her tone and on her face when she said that, but mostly I believed her. Mostly I saw a smile in her eyes I hadn’t seen since the first year, a renascent Cindy I almost wanted again. She used to be beautiful. She used to be sexy. She’s gotten fat over the years, and nasty/bitter to be around even as she blamed me for her fat. But that morning, after doing whatever she’d done with Robert, she looked young again, and like she wanted to be happy.

I said I almost wanted her again. But I’d been there. Done that. I don’t say that crudely; I just knew then and surely now that Cindy and I were not made for each other. We were far from soulmates. I think your soulmate is supposed to make you feel good about yourself, but Cindy and I had the other skill set: the one that hones the ability to bait and turns a tickle into torture.

Anyway. By then I was fully infatuated with Molly, difficult Molly. I didn’t have the stamina for Cindy too.

She’d been so worried about her house. Her rugs, her pictures, her writing, her windows. She was distraught with anxiety about her stuff. At first she talked to Paul about it. I tried to participate; all I could do was listen. I heard them discuss all her computer files, and it sounded like she wouldn’t be more than inconvenienced. She had duplicate work files at her office in San Francisco, and hard copies of all her writing there too. No, it was something other than that. And she was fitful with worry, unable to sit still. Her restlessness is what shifted her from Paul to me; he was irked at the way she kept rising and pacing and then sitting again only to shift back and forth in her chair. That bothered him, but it kept drawing my attention. I was fascinated with the way her hair flipped around her head; I could almost taste the taut curve where her neck met the slope of her shoulder, I could almost smell that dark red hair. I wanted to catch her moving wrists in my hands, softly cage her fingers’ birdlike flutters, slowly stroke her calm.

Sometime that night Paul turned talking to Linda, and I followed one of Molly’s nervous excursions. I caught up with her in the kitchen, where she turned to me emotional out of all proportion. Her tense shoulders felt like padded stones in my palms. She wouldn’t find out for hours that her house was destroyed, but somehow she knew it already. She realized her homelessness and her face crumpled inward with grievous distress. I couldn’t help but pull her to me. I could do nothing other than pat her back with ineffectual little circular motions as she wracked her slim body with sobs.

She quieted to spasmodic convulsions in minutes. When she raised her face toward mine she showed me hot cheeks streaked with tear trails, a reddened nose and swollen mouth. I couldn’t help it. I covered that mouth with my own. Took her smooth thick heat on my tongue. So salty. So open. I took her and filled her and held her till morning. Till news of her home gone. I’ll never let go.

Her parents had no clue how inappropriate it was to name her Penelope. It was her mother’s idea, because she liked the sound, and her father agreed. At first they called her their little Pen, then Penny-pen and even Penny Penelope, but by the time she was six she insisted on just Penny.

Pén-e-lope, was how her named looked to her. Three syllables. When she pronounced it correctly, Pen-él-o-pee, it reminded her of calliope, the rolling circus organ. She didn’t learn until she was fifteen that Calliope was the name of the Greek Muse of epic poetry. Then she looked into epic poetry, and first read the Odyssey, and met the original Penelope.

And discovered that she bore the name of a woman famed for patience. The first Penelope slept alone for more than a decade while her husband battled the Trojans, and then she waited another dozen years while he found his way home.

Not so young Penny. Born to an antsy mother, quick by nature, she had been impatient from birth. She cried louder for her bottle than other babies. She was readily fretful. She was a beautiful youngster, but not an easy one.

As she grew she continued to be attractive, and she learned to conceal some of her fretfulness. She tried to limit her regrets, which she came to see as backward fretfulness; she thought regret was not a fruitful emotion. As for forward fretfulness, she divided that into the positive (impatience) and the negative (worry), and then she justified the former as if it helped her avoid the latter. But she was always a compulsive responder – Penny couldn’t hear a question without voicing a reply.

Lovely, bright and personable, she was well socialized by the time she was twenty-two. She married her first husband then because she was impatient to get on with her life. The excitement and energy involved in the engagement, wedding, early homemaking, first-house buying, and child-birthing kept her interest for almost seven years, but then she got antsy. She felt old and bored and dismal. She had an affair.

Her paramour was named Patrick. He was a bit of a wild Irish boy who seemed younger than his thirty-five years. Pat matched Penny’s impatience with impulsiveness; the two of them took a lot of silly risks in their two years of trysting but some deity must have smiled on them (they were a pretty pair, and pretty erotic) because they never got caught.

They were both married throughout their affair. Pat had been chronically unfaithful to his wife Eileen, but it was the first time out for Penny. She looked at Pat as her professor on infidelity, which wasn’t wise on her part but was very flattering to his.

All of Pat’s prior playmates had been single. They just went to her apartment or condo whenever he felt like it. But the affair with Penny presented logistical problems. They neither had extra money, so renting a room wasn’t practical. Their first time was in a vacant lot near Penny’s house. Pat did the chivalrous thing – he spread his suit jacket on the ground for her – and then discovered smashed snails on the jacket back when he got home.

Occasionally a single friend of his or hers would lend them a key for a midday meeting, but mostly they had to be resourceful. He drove a roadster, and they were limber enough to manage several positions of conjunction in it. Penny took to wearing skirts and leaving her underwear in the car when they went for nighttime walks in parks that had private places, under pedestrian bridges or behind the band shell building.

Of course these machinations spiced their time together, in fact and especially in memory. Although their affair ended after a couple of years (his idea but neither of them then knew why), they each remembered it with fondness and a bit of fever, so when they heard about each other again twenty years later, they both sparked with interest.

Pat was still with Eileen. Their oldest child was grown and married and appeared to be the husband his father wasn’t. There were two younger girls, their twelve-year old daughter and the extra, now eleven, that Pat had fathered on a now-bankrupt girlfriend who, in her financial extremis, emerged a year earlier with the surprising child. Pat then had to admit to Eileen that he’d stepped out “that one time,” and Eileen accepted, forgave, and opened her heart to help raise the girl. Pat called his wife his ticket to heaven. He’d continued unfaithful to her until about three years earlier, when he hit the age of fifty-two and a lot of his restlessness faded like a person in a dim room behind a screen door, moving away more indistinct.

In the same time, Penny had divorced, married, divorced, married, and divorced again. She continued to be impatient. Western science had recently discovered an impulse gene; researchers asserted that individuals who rushed into relationships and activities often carried a genetic marker for it. Penny wondered if there was some sort of impatience/fretting gene too. The antsiness of her family almost resembled a disorder. But mostly, Penny had come to think that different people live at different rates, and that compatibility between individuals depended on finding partners of similar velocity.

Pat wasn’t exactly restless, but he was bored. In his recollection Penny had been the most memorable of his girlfriends; he called her. They met, and neither thought the other looked worse for the passage of time. They shared a bottle of champagne with an unnoticed lunch, and before dessert they were publicly displaying their affection, obviously seeing only each other in a rather crowded place. The meeting made each feel younger and sexier. They were bound to repeat it.

Penny was then single but the logistics were still not easy. Her youngest of four was living at home, a high school student with an unpredictable social life. Pat was sensitive about Penny’s son; he’d been raised by a beautiful single mother who nurtured him and even welcomed him into her bed when she didn’t have a boyfriend. She often had a boyfriend. Pat referred to his childhood self as Telemachus, and that name soon became his code for Penny’s son.

So Pat and Penny had a few lunches and wondered. They touched more often and kissed more deeply, and their hugs turned fully frontal. They were tempted to use the car, but they weren’t as agile as they used to be.

Penny had a woman friend, a lesbian named Patricia, the other Pat. They’d become acquainted in a quilting class at the local branch of the library, a fluke enrollment for each of them that never paid off in bedcovering but delivered much in friendship. They walked and talked and dined together regularly. They shared an interest in gardening; soon their walks became botanical, and they sometimes worked together with the plants in their yards. Penny took to calling her friend She-Pat now and then, to distinguish her from He-Pat, Penny’s love, but Patricia didn’t mind. The two women were close enough that they discussed their relationships in detail, and Pat was as interested in the reawakening eroticism of Penny-and-Pat, as Penny was in the cohabitational debates of Pat-and-Ellie.

She-Pat had been with her partner then for two and a half years. Ellie wanted them to live together but Pat was still hesitating. That was when she made the generous offer to Penny. “I’m at work all day, and I’m in class seven to ten every Thursday night,” she said, as she handed Penny a key to her townhouse. “There’s no reason why you and your Pat shouldn’t have the use of the place when I don’t need it.”

That made it hard for Penny to be objective about the cohabitation question. If Ellie moved in, Penny knew she and Pat would no longer be able to use the place. She tried to be fair (she really did think living together would strip away what little romance remained for those two), but she and her Pat wanted to continue to enjoy that bedroom and bathroom.

They were fastidious about their use. They kept their own linens and always took the time to remake the bed. They stocked the liquor cabinet and even bought music. They couldn’t do the laundry, but once they presented She-Pat with a set of beautiful plush towels.

The arrangement brought the three of them closer. Sometimes Penny and He-Pat lost track of the time and were still there when She-Pat came home. The mistake wouldn’t have continued if it hadn’t succeeded; from the first, they got along well and enjoyed one another. She-Pat was younger than Penny or her lover, and came from a badly broken home. She acted almost like a daughter to Penny and He-Pat, and they (being parents after all) naturally responded to her, with interest and advice.

She-Pat was always concerned about personal safety. If Penny’s impatience was a flaw (and she thought it was – she would have rather been more serene), and if He-Pat’s impulsiveness was a problem (he was raised to be a good Christian man, and he would have preferred a life of marital fidelity, or as he put it, he wished he had married a woman he loved enough to be true to all his life), then She-Pat’s physical insecurity was a defect too. It held her back from all adventure.

She once stayed in a hotel room that was burglarized, and she reacted by putting too many locks on the doors and windows of her home. She wouldn’t jaywalk. She filtered out all strange e-mail; no old acquaintances could use that medium to reach her. She took unnecessary short cab rides through safe neighborhoods. She overestimated the intelligence of government and the reach of technology. She deliberately paid extra to get a car with a passenger-side airbag because she wouldn’t drive her four-year-old niece around without one (and that was only three months before the news broke about how dangerous an airbag can be to a kid).

“Well, what’s wrong with taking a short cab ride?” She-Pat once asked Penny a little testily. They were planting impatiens in Penny’s front garden, and Pat was standing with the hose in her hand, ready to water the plants in, while Penny knelt on the moist groundcover-and-earth. “Maybe it’s unnecessary, but what harm does it do?”

“It’s inconsiderate of the cabbie, for one thing. I mean, what’s he going to get from the deal: three bucks and a smile?” Penny used the back of the trowel to press earth around one plant, and then the blade of it to dig a hole for another. “But the main problem is the subtle psychological message you give yourself. It feeds your insecurity when you act like a ten-minute financial district walk is dangerous. And calling a cab is just such an act.”

Penny shifted her weight onto her left leg and planted her right foot next to the impatiens as she stood. She picked mud off her knee and continued. “Same thing with all the locks on the door. They don’t hurt anything in themselves, except they delay movement in and out of your place, which, frankly, frustrates the hell out of me at times. But they keep reminding us, they keep implying: watch it, watch it, careful, beware, beware, be wary, wary, wary, cautious…”

Penny argued against oversecurity more effectively one night from She-Pat’s bed. It was one of those occasions when she answered a question that hadn’t been asked. She and He-Pat had fallen asleep there after some particularly sweet lovemaking; they woke up when She-Pat walked in after her class. The three of them got to talking, She-Pat in the bedside chair with a tall glass of water, Penny spooned up against her Pat’s warm middle-aged belly, sipping from his then-diluted vodka.

“You know,” Penny said as she snuggled pushing back against her lover and looking upward at her friend, “I was thinking about how you always hesitate before following me jaywalking. It hit me that your reluctance isn’t about whether it’s unsafe; maybe it’s about whether it’s against the rules. I think you may be a compulsive rule-follower rather than compulsively into safety. Isn’t that one of the symptoms of an adult child-of-alcoholics? I think I remember that…”

From behind her came “That’s it.” He-Pat, almost impulsive in his agreement. (No, thought Penny, not so much impulsive as quick: at the same pace as herself: which was why they were happy together). In front of her came a look of dawning comprehension on She-Pat’s face and in her posture: she sat up straighter and slightly back, at the same time inhaling, dropping her lower lip slightly, raising her eyebrows.

“You don’t want to draw attention to yourself. You don’t want to be noticed, except by your friends. You just want to pass quietly through this life, minding your own business, being left alone,” Penny said. She-Pat nodded to it all.

That was the night the three decided to ride the new roller coaster. It was an off-the-wall plan: a trio of middle-aged folks heading to the park for a thrill ride. Penny of course was impatient to go. He-Pat was silly about it; She-Pat was willing.

If only they hadn’t, Penny thought for months afterward. In time she stopped that and began accepting. But at first, she “if only’d” from morning till night. “Impatient,” she learned, doesn’t mean antsy. “Patient” is from “pati” meaning “ to suffer.” To be patient, really, is to endure suffering without complaint. Penny can’t do that. Penny complained.

The roller coaster was new and big. But they never made it to the park. They were heading there in She-Pat’s SUV, He-Pat riding shotgun and Penny in the middle back seat, teasing him, when She-Pat swerved to avoid what turned out to be a tattered couch cushion in the road. The top-heavy van spun three times and rolled.

The miracle was that no one died. Penny’s Pat sustained the worst injury; he was not belted in so he could twist back to face her, and when his air bag deployed it forced the twist tighter, and broke him.

His spine was wrecked. He will be forever paralyzed below the waist. His personality was destroyed by that catastrophe. His destiny now is to be the nursling of saintly Eileen.

Penny walked away from the accident uninjured. Patricia sustained a compound fracture of her right leg. She talks less now about safety issues but she thinks about them all the time. Ellie was a conscientious, affectionate care-provider while she mended. Ellie hasn’t moved out since.

After recovery, Penny and Pat resumed their gardening. Pat never got her full knee mobility back, so Penny took the kneeling part of their cooperative labor, and Pat did more of the hosing and raking.

They liked the impatiens in Penny’s front yard so much that they decided to try a different variety in her shady back yard. “Impatiens,” said Penny as she tamped down dirt and leaves around the bushy plant. “A quality to which I can definitely relate.”

“Pronounced differently, isn’t it? Don’t you say im-păt-i-ens?”

“Nope. Im-pā-shenz. And if you look it up, it says it’s from ‘not enduring, impatient.’ But I think the name may have to do with the way the genus bursts its pods, kind of impatient-like, to scatter its seeds. I think.”

“I can’t believe you looked it up.”

“Oh yeah. Sure. I was looking up me. You know: impatient. Which led me to patient. Which is where I learned it really means the ability to endure without complaint. Logical: that explains how we extend the word to the folks who see doctors. Anyway, that means impatient I am unable to endure without complaint. Which is true. And not, now that I think about it, so bad. I’ll take impatient.”

“You miss Pat. Don’t you?”

Penny didn’t answer.