Sputterpub's Blog

Susan is a practical Western woman. She lives in Berkeley California but she doesn’t believe in astrology or the power of crystals or pyramids. She has never been drawn to meditation or Eastern philosophy. But everyone knows what goes around comes around. She was a little concerned that she’d pay for whatever she did to that cat. By the time she pulled her car into her steep driveway she’d decided to stop driving. She didn’t enjoy it anyway. She wasn’t good at it. With the money she could get for her three-year old sedan she’d have enough for years of cab rides to the grocery store, the doctors, and her parents.

She intended to walk to dinner anyway. Her friends’ house was only four blocks from hers and their neighborhood wasn’t threatening. She stepped out of her door at 6:20 that night, in clean jeans, a nice sweater and fresh makeup.

Her first impression of Siggy went both ways. He was in the kitchen when she arrived, slouched against a counter and turning away from a chat with Denise to look at Susan and Chuck as they entered the room. Susan was impressed with his height but not with his posture, with his abundant steel-and-black hair but not with its lack of style. She liked Siggy’s slimness but she couldn’t admire the way his corduroy pants sagged from his hips, showing the elastic of cheap boxers. At about 55, Susan thought he was too old for that look. She liked his blue eyes, his direct gaze. Some things about him reminded her of a man she’d known, briefly, 32 years ago. Siggy’s conversation was directed at her but not brilliant; Susan was able to reminisce while she participated in their formulaic dialogue.

She answered Siggy’s question about her work and sipped her wine while he started in about his. She thought about Alan.

When she started at Cal certain courses were famous among the students. There was the Folklore class; Professor Dundes collected little family traditions and superstitions and those were all he sought from his students. Harry Edwards ran his Education course then. He refused to use letter grades and passed all students, no matter what. And there was Oriental Languages 38A. It was the only one-credit course outside the PE department, met once a week (optional), and the grade depended on a book report, on any book. It had nothing to do with Oriental Languages. It was the perfect low-pressure way to round out a credit-short quarter. Susan enrolled in OL 38A. She went to the first two classes. She chose Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which she had with her at the second class.

“That’s a great book,” was Alan’s opening line. She stopped gathering her things together and shook her then-long hair out of her eyes to look up at him. He was tall, thin, Jewish-looking, warm-eyed, good-humored, attractive. “I’m hardly into it yet, but I like it so far,” she said to him.

That was all she had to say. He must have been very experienced, because she wasn’t, and without knowing how it happened she walked with him all around South Berkeley and then to the big house where he was staying, talking about Heinlein and sci-fi and life in general while glancing at each other’s faces with increasing wonder at how good those faces looked.

He introduced her to some of the people in the house and then he took her to his room, where he kissed her deliciously. He took her breath away. He was 25 and not a student. He had a BA from Columbia. He was just passing through. He politely asked if he could eat her. She knew she blushed; she must have stared. He laughed delightedly and took her by the shoulders and kissed her again. “I don’t want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” he murmured. She was a virgin then, and she thought his request was exciting, but there was no way she could consent without mortification. Not then. Then she had to get back to the dorm before lockout. Alan walked her home and kissed her once more, long and hungrily, in the stairwell near the entrance. They arranged to meet the next day. Susan went to her bed besotted.

There was a message the next morning. Alan had to go to LA sooner than he expected. But he’d be back, he said. He’d be in touch. Susan got a postcard three weeks later and never heard from the man again. She didn’t grieve – she was meeting so many and doing so much – but she never forgot him. And right then, Siggy reminded her of him.

Maybe it was his long lanky body. More likely his direct gaze, slow but intelligent. Or perhaps there was a resonance in the pattern of Susan’s need; it had been a long time since she received a satisfying hug or a deep enough caress. For some or all or more reasons, she found Siggy a bit attractive. She talked to him.

The creek ran murky the day Susan met Siggy, and she hit a cat near the elementary school. Those were probably omens, and they shouldn’t have been ignored.

Like all omens, the circumstances were not in Susan’s control. Her house is situated in the biggest bend of a year-round Berkeley creek, about midway between the eastern hills and the tidal flatlands at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. It is masonry-lined where the stone still stands and it wends most of its western course underground, but it is available to pedestrian eyes and ears in Codornices Park, the Rose Garden, Live Oak Park, and along select yards in a few pocket neighborhoods, like Susan’s. It rises quickly under hard rain, swelling with the runoff from the streets. Its course from the hills to the shore is so steep that it subsides just as readily. But most of the time the creek runs shallow and burbling. Most of the time the water is clear. Now and then it appears cloudy, like someone upstream dumped a load of white paint in it or spilled a quantity of milk. It takes then the colors of mud and slime. It gives opaquely all the hues of army camouflage.

On the day she met Siggy the creek was grayish brown. Susan noticed its opacity when she got into her car to visit her parents. The sight of that burbling murk muddied her spirits. She wanted to stay home. She didn’t want to see her folks. She didn’t want to drive. She certainly didn’t want to go to her friends’ house that night for dinner, to meet some newly-divorced man they thought she’d like. But she felt like she didn’t have the strength to fight the agenda. She got in her car.

She was about a mile north of her house when she hit the cat. She couldn’t have avoided it. She was driving by a school and the creature darted in front of her rear wheel from between parked cars. She felt the impact like a flat tire. Her mirror showed her the gray-black cat scurrying lopsidedly across the street and out of sight. It made no sound.

Susan figured there was no point in stopping. There was no place to park and the street wasn’t wide enough for her to pull over. She wouldn’t be able to find the animal. She continued to drive. But she thought about cats. How beautiful and mysterious they are. How their faces are too small. She had a horrifying dream once, when she was about eleven years old. For some reason she was bathing a small kitten in the bathroom sink, and she accidentally pushed the lever that opened the drain. The kitten was so small it started to be sucked down, so Susan pulled the drain up. In that dream her action decapitated the kitten, so its body was swallowed by the plumbing and only its face remained, flattening and becoming the chrome disk of that retractable drain.

Murk and mangle. Susan was not in a good mood when she pulled into her parents’ driveway. She made her visit as short as she could. She has a good relationship with them, although she’s quick to despise her mother’s impatience and her father’s pomposity. She’s usually chatty around them, talking about her day, her thoughts and feelings, but she didn’t discuss the cat. She didn’t mention the blind-date dinner. She didn’t want to hear (and hear again) what they had to say.

Returning home two hours later, she kept thinking about the cat. Susan tries not to hurt animals. She hesitates even to kill insects, and she apologizes to snails as she steps on them. She spent a few months on a kibbutz when she was 22, and it’s true that she despised the chickens (she found them stupider than plants; she thinks folks who choose what they eat based on kindness-to-the-eaten ought to ingest lots of chicken and spare the lovely green things). She hated those bigoted birds so much that she relished eating fresh-slaughtered chicken after working with the crew to ship the beasts (alive, pecking and defecating) to market. But she was never deliberately cruel or harsh in the way she handled the birds while they were alive.

And she has never been injured by an animal. She has fallen off a horse or two, but she wasn’t damaged. She once had a thumbnail smashed by a new-born calf as she was training him to take milk from a bucket, but it was her own fault for letting her thumb move to his molar area instead of keeping it at the front of his velvety snout. Even the one time she was stung by a bee was her own doing; she was about six years old then and sitting in her back yard on a bench, and it was her idea to try to capture the bug so she could examine it. Unfortunately she trapped it with a wrinkled white paper napkin, against her own bare thigh. The poor bee died without even leaving its stinger in her flesh.

Melanie masturbates every other day. It’s not an item on her calendar, and she’ll often let it slide for half a week, but she considers self-love to be necessary maintenance.

It doesn’t matter whether she’s in a sexual relationship or not. Phil is a wonderful lover, sometimes too considerate, and his lovemaking is always complete, but still Melanie strokes herself at least twice a week, and she expects she always will. It’s a way to check in.

She’s done it in bed, with her husband or significant other asleep beside her. She’s done it on a dark commuter bus, alone on the wide rear bench. She’s even done it in the back row of a concert, Chicago it was (the band, not the place), under her London Fog raincoat.

She loves the risk a little. That probably stems from when she was five years old and her mother caught her fondling herself behind the living room chair; she can’t remember her mom’s words but the shocked reaction excited her. Or the time their mother caught nine-year-old Melanie and her six-year-old brother Will, standing naked on their parents’ big bed, comparing crotches in the mirror that hung above the wide bureau; her mom doesn’t remember that event either, but Melanie does. She’s not an exhibitionist – no way – but she fantasizes about it.

Maybe Melanie and most of her class are destined to frisk away their futures with the naughtinesses of their youths. Nostalgically. She’s a white middle-class post-war baby. She’s a suburbanite. She snuck whiskey from her father’s cabinet and now she sneaks cognac so her kids won’t know. She swiped her mother’s Bel-Air cigarettes and now rolls her own by the hot tub, where the kids won’t see. She’s into the sneaking more than the snooked (?) And then there’s the pot.

She first smoked marijuana in 1967, when she was sixteen. She liked it. It made peanut butter and TV better, and it wasn’t as scary as LSD or PCP or the other affordable substances for sale all around. Her main supplier was her good friend and future first husband Kent.

In time, substances became more expensive. Everything did. Kent got to where he could take or leave the regular joints as long as he had his Jack Daniels, but marijuana was the drug of choice for Melanie, and keeping Melanie content was Kent’s first priority. He took to casual dealing as a way to increase supply and defray expense, but after losing a friend’s money on a stupid bad deal, he gave that up. Melanie was so embarrassed by the burn that she despised Kent a little. That was when she started to fall out of love with him. She proposed they grow their own.

They cleared a six by twelve foot patch in their small back yard. They germinated seeds in moist plastic-wrapped paper towels, and they planted them when the wormy white roots had burst the seed pods apart and begun to tangle like bad embroidery in the fibers of the towel.

By the time the plants had been topped and the males began to exhibit their sex, Melanie was pregnant. She became a queen of fertility; she hates to get dirt under her fingernails and she left most of the work to Kent, but she felt like she helped the plants thrive simply by being with them. Maybe she was right. That first crop was far and away the finest they grew. But it was also the crop that went longest; the fact is that ripe marijuana plans become very obvious and sticky, and after that first season, Melanie’s paranoia overrode their lust for maximum buds.

They also took their agriculture inside. When Brian was two and insistently curious about everything, Kent and Melanie agreed that their days of outdoor cultivation were over. Their funky big house had two vacant bedrooms, one with a walk-in closet, so they converted that closet to a lab-like garden. They installed growlux bulbs and layered the walls with aluminum foil. They put the lights on timers. They bought litmus strips to test the soil, and they administered regular feedings of nutrients.

It was harder to grow plants under artificial sunlight, but Melanie enjoyed the project. It was more like lab work than gardening, and she’d always liked science projects. She became the primary cultivator, and she produced reasonable crops for the six years before the divorce. They never compared with the first harvest, but the second indoor year, when she was pregnant with Timothy, wasn’t bad at all.

Kent and Melanie did divorce. It’s never fair for even a participant to generalize about a marriage, but his uxoriousness wore her out. She continued to have sex with him (two to three times a week, as basic marital maintenance) until the end, and she thinks she remained friends with him, but meeting, kissing and screwing Henry convinced her that (a) she wouldn’t be alone after Kent and (b) it was possible to have more than she and Kent had.

Henry moved into Melanie’s house. In time they married. Henry doesn’t smoke marijuana. He didn’t mind Melanie using it, at least at first, but he did not want felony cultivation occurring where he lived. She disagreed but respected his wishes. She reentered the world of “now you have it, now you don’t,” which is insecure territory for an addict.

Of course she kept masturbating. She’s probably addicted to that too. Basic maintenance. Actually, she suspected Henry did the same; they were similar deliberate rational people that way. But she noticed that her orgasms weren’t as good as they used to be. And she simply never had the patience or energy to push herself to a second coming. She had to take a lot of time and use some concentrated fantasies to get it right the first time.

In retrospect, neither she nor Henry were surprised that their relationship-to-end-all-relationships didn’t work. Both of them came to see their union as a way out of their first marriages. And each of them ultimately understood that the guilt carried from abruptly ending those first marriages spoiled any shot they had at something lasting. He went on to a bleak and quietly-desperate third marriage, and she has had a series of marginally interesting affairs.

Melanie didn’t masturbate any more often after Henry left, but she did smoke more pot. Although she and Henry had moved from her old four-bedroom house to a smaller place across town (as far as Melanie can tell, Kent must have pissed in all the corners of the old house, because Henry hated living there), once Henry moved out, she was able to use his lockable small study to start a crop of cannabis sativa (actually, she had two indica plants going that year as well).

Brian was nearly fourteen then, and Timmy-becoming-Tim was ten. They were observant kids but Melanie took care. She managed to eke out a small crop of strong ganja without any suspicion from the boys. She also managed to have a semi-torrid affair with macho Steve without any suspicion from him that she gave herself sex as good as he did (Steve didn’t want her doing herself unless she did so in front of him, and Melanie wasn’t into that).

She grew another scanty crop the next year, the year of Robert, Wayne and then finally Phil. Melanie thinks Phil is a keeper. He’s the first man she has known who lets her feel present in the relationship. The only fly in the ointment for her has been her continued habit of masturbation. In the same way that she had hoped marriage would improve her sexual satisfaction (after all, she reasoned in those early days of is-this-all-there-is-to-it fucking, maybe her mother’s pro-virginity campaign really did manage to disable her ability to achieve satisfying premarital sex), she’s always dreamed that the right partner would render self-love unnecessary.

Two weeks ago, Melanie got busted on both fronts. Phil caught her fooling around alone, and the boys found the plants. In each case, a little bit of greed was her undoing.

It started Saturday morning. She woke at 9:20 and as usual Phil was already out of bed. She heard him moving around in the kitchen downstairs as her right hand found herself. In a short time she brought herself to a disappointing climax. She felt it approach, crest, subside, but none of it brought any thrill to her. This was happening too often. She decided to go for it again.

Phil’s custom was to move from kitchen to back porch on Saturday mornings. He liked his coffee outside, and he loved tending the garden. But he decided he wanted to read an article in the Forbes he’d brought home the night before. The magazine was upstairs. He thought he might as well bring Melanie a mug of coffee; he figured she’d be waking about then.

Melanie’s surprise was not the coffee. There she was straining for it, eyes squeezed, toes clenched, muscle at the right side of her groin threatening to cramp, when Phil opened the bedroom door. She had the covers up but her activity was obvious.

Phil was chill. Surprised but not bothered, he saluted her with the coffee mug, offered assistance, and exited. Melanie laughed then and appreciated him beyond what she believed possible.

The marijuana mishap didn’t go as smoothly. Melanie had continued her indoor cultivation activities but had become dissatisfied with the amount of herb she was able to produce. Phil liked to smoke too, so consumption was up, but the price of indoor had always been scantier growth and weaker bloom. So she decided to try to force two crops.

She only had room for so many plants. Instead of harvesting by chopping and hanging, she pruned, pruned, and pruned again, drying all cuttings until they were smokable. She encouraged the plants to produce a second growth in the same season. And because she could control the light, she pushed the season a couple of extra months.

The problem was the decreasing daylight. Earlier nights made the glow from the plant bulbs noticeable. It took some time for the impression to sink into her sons’ heads, but that Saturday sent them investigating together.

Another problem was that Melanie had hidden her habit from her kids. She lied to them about using drugs when she was younger, and she encouraged Brian when he got involved in the anti-drug and peer counseling programs at school. Brian spoke enough about it to his brother that Tim too became a zealot. They reminded Melanie of her own brothers; Will and Perry had been so against their mother’s smoking that they’d inserted cigar loads into her cigarettes (they laughed like maniacs when the lit end of a Bel-Air sparked into a tiny explosion, but each took up tobacco himself before graduating from high school).

Brian and Tim recognized the plants immediately. They wanted to assume the crop was Phil’s but something about the sight resonated in Brian, and he knew (but knew not how he knew) the situation predated Phil. He was upset. Angry. He almost called the cops.

Tim held him back. The boys decided to involve Phil. They found him in the garage, building a set of shelves for gardening equipment. The result of that conversation was a full-bore sit-down with Melanie. The four of them skipped dinner to hash it out.

Melanie offered to stop smoking. Maybe her sons are co-dependent, but they decided that wasn’t necessary. They all considered giving up the cultivation, but the alternative seemed less palatable and the study wasn’t needed for any other purpose.

Melanie still smokes. She could do it in front of her sons (Tim even asked why she doesn’t), but she’s not comfortable with that. She tells them it’s illegal, after all, and she needs to be discreet. She reminds them of how pungent and conspicuous the odor is. She says she doesn’t want to embarrass them with their friends. But mostly she thinks smoking around or with her kids would be like having sex around them. She’s not into that.

She still masturbates about every other day. The orgasms are generally disappointing but it is a way of checking in with herself. She and Phil don’t discuss it.

For now, Melanie is in the center of her life and loved ones. She’s old enough to understand that things are sure to get worse, get better, be more or less “interesting” than they are at present. It’s not that she’s counting her blessings, but she’s aware that she’s dwelling in the eye of a storm (too dramatic: it’s more like the calm interlude between hassles). Right now, Melanie is enjoying right now.