Sputterpub's Blog

Renee tries not to recall that January night nine years ago, but she is determined to remember her life, so the scene replays in her. That was when she sent her husband away from home and family, into the cold rain with hot tears on his cheeks. She can see Doug forever, mouth twisted in an ugly grimace as the reluctant tears brimmed from his pale eyes. Grief displaced anger in him; he was too wounded then to hate her. He shrug-stiffened his shoulders as he turned away, and the rain made seeping circles on the yoke of his blue shirt as he walked, stooped slightly forward, down the front steps.

She’s sorry. Doug had been her best friend before marriage. He’s the father of her twins. He’s a good man. Renee is sorry every time she recollects that going.

This afternoon the memory is triggered by a simple weather forecast. The kids are trying to make a kite, from scratch, planning to fly it in the schoolyard wind three blocks away. Both the radio and the sky forebode. Renee passes into the kitchen with the idea of rain in her mind, and sees their father in the faces of her children. Eleven years old now, the twins have lost enough baby fat that their cheekbones have taken on Doug’s edge, and their noses have arched from buttons to bows. Renee sees and regrets. She doesn’t wish to be married again to Doug, but she hates the memory of sending him crying into the cold rain.

The twins are making their kite the hard way. They found crumpled tissue paper in old shoeboxes and flattened it as well as they could. They built a frame of wooden strips and string, prepared a tail of knotted rags. Now they are cooking flour and water to make paste. They plan to glue the tissue paper to itself around the string frame, and they need a paste that’s thin and smooth. Jake and Janie are both trying the stir the stuff, wooden spoons clunking like miniature oars.

The flour cannister sits open on the counter. Renee almost tells the twins to cover it and push it back into its place. Just before she speaks she feels a strong impulse arise in her. She wants to make bread. She has the ingredients of course. She has the time.

So she sets yeast to feast on warm water and scant sugar. She measures flour into the big metal bowl. She never sifts; she’s a post-war suburban baby and she doesn’t believe in vermin. She fists a well in the flour as if she were making challah, just because the flour feels cool and satiny against her knuckles, and she pours some water and the foaming yeast into the well.

She mixes the dough with her right hand. She learned long ago that it makes no sense to engoop both hands when one will serve the purpose, and there’s no point in messing up a spoon. She pulls the dough through her fingers and into an irregular lump in the middle of the bowl.

She flours the wooden board now, and plops the dough onto it. A small cloud rises around it. As the twins decide their glue is ready and take it off the flame, Renee begins to knead: heel pushing in, fingers curving around the dough and pulling it back toward her, hand poised above for a moment and then heel plunging in again. Renee is not a meditative person, but she always thinks about her body heat as she kneads. She visualizes her warmth entering the flour-and-water mess to release gluten, blending glue into food. That’s magic, she always thinks. Alchemy.

“Ey-yhunh!” Jake grunts unpronounceable anger. Renee looks at him over her shoulder, right fist in dough on the board, and sees that the kite isn’t taking the glue well. Wasn’t taking the glue well. The tissue paper is torn from Jake’s fury. He starts to fling his arms with exasperation but Janie as usual stops him. “We never shoulda tried tissue, Jake,” she says, and he scowls but attends her. “The book says newspaper.” Janie’s favorite book is a biography of Clara Barton. She’s read it at least twice a year since she was seven. She doesn’t care much about Barton as an adult, founder of the American Red Cross. But Jane loves the stories of little Clara’s rural childhood: homemade kites, ice-skating on a neighbor’s pond, horses for everyone. “It’s practically the right shape without cutting,” she says as she fetches a section of the paper and brings it to the table.

An-ger. An-ger. The syllables pound through Renee’s mind in time with the heel of her palm into dough. Did Jake inherit his temper from Doug? or learn it? Unwillingly she recalls her son pulling at his own face, in frustration about something, at the age of two or three. If she hadn’t kept his nails short he would have torn his sweet baby cheeks. She never understood that. Or the way he so often arched his body away from her in his infancy; that scary almost-startle reflex that carried his head back, chin up.

Did that mean he was born angry? Or was that something else, and does the anger come from Doug’s brutality?

Renee did all the right things when she discovered (witnessed) Doug had been hitting Jake, wrenching him, imprisoning him in a dark room. She spoke firmly to Doug and reassuringly to Jake. She offered to call the cops. She didn’t let Jake or Janie spend another night with their father until they and she felt sure they would be safe. But she still feels a bit of shame that she hadn’t anticipated the problem. After all, she’s known Doug since high school.

She thought he was chivalrous, protective, and friendly then, when he pushed the boys’ Vice Principal who tried to stop Renee from leaving school to attend a protest march. And she thought he was maybe excessive but mostly appropriate, when they were bike commuting to their first jobs after college, and Doug tore the mirror off the van of a driver who had rudely, startlingly, honked his horn at Renee.

She realized there was something wrong with Doug’s anger when he spanked the neighborhood kid. They’d been married about two years, and had just bought their house. It had a picket fence around its small front yard, but the pickets were put on backwards, inside the frame, so energetic boys could karate kick at them as they passed by, either knocking them inward or breaking them. The vandalism frustrated them both (especially since the pickets were odd-sized and hard to replace), but Doug let Renee’s irritation fuel his own, so he lost it when he caught the little boy. The kid couldn’t have been more than eight, and he probably wasn’t the only neighborhood mini-vandal, but Doug turned that child over his knee and starting spanking his bottom with the broken picket. Renee had to stop him. That event blew her away. Looking back on it, she realizes that was when she began to stop loving him. Slowly. She stayed with him another five years.

She oils the ball of dough and puts it back in the bowl. She pulls out the other cutting board and places the bowl on it, towel-covered, where it will catch some of the heat from the floor vent. She looks at her now-quiet twins. They’ve about finished the newspaper kite, and it isn’t bad.

Renee washes the dough from between her fingers and walks over to them drying her hands. “You guys want some help with that?” They tell her no, eager to get outside with their kite, willing to wear their jackets in the November chill, jealous of the leaves riding the wind. But they let her tie the rag tail on their kite, and they let her kiss them before they barrel out the door.

Renee smiles at their backs and then frowns at the clouds. The sky has lowered while the kite was made; it looks to her like the kids won’t have much flight time before the rain starts.

Her thoughts return to Doug as she begins to clean the wooden board. She didn’t sprinkle enough flour on it – she never does – so thin ribbons of gummy dough cling to the old wood in half a dozen spots. She pulls the board out of its slot above her kitchen drawers, carries it to the sink, and begins scraping at the dough with a sink rag, under a trickle of warm water.

It’s funny, she thinks, but even after the picket incident, she didn’t worry about Doug being violent. Even when he hit her…

She told herself then that she had provoked him. And she had. They were having one of their awful arguments, he started to walk out, she tried to stop him (with a fistful of the back of his shirt), and he swung around, open-handed, and struck her across the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t a punch. It was a slap. (But it was hard enough to make the blood pour from her nose, and the internal jar gave her a black eye for three weeks.)

And even with all of that, she was surprised four years ago when she watched Doug lash out at Jake with impulsive anger. Because Doug doesn’t seem like a violent man. He is the last guy anyone would call angry.

Doug’s parents hadn’t hit him. He did well in school and he always had at least one friend. He wasn’t a jock but he was six feet tall, fit, and active. He didn’t even experience the ickiness of an older deviant male in his neighborhood to teach him about ejaculation. If everyone has a weird sexual experience, Doug’s was to be initiated into the mysteries at the tender age of fourteen, by a wise old sixteen year old with a healthy attitude. So what, Renee, wonders, does he have to be angry about?

She has just finished cleaning the cutting board when she notices the pot the kids used to make their paste. The unused glue has cooled into a semi-solid mess in the bottom of the saucepan. She runs warm water into it, squirts in some dishwashing liquid. She rubs at the paste with the sink rag.

She tries to imagine what it would be like to still be married to Doug. She can’t. She couldn’t have gotten enough space. Doug suffocated her; he was so into them as a couple. “We think… We want… We feel…” That kind of speech gave her the creeps. He blew kisses at her all the time, said “I love you” a dozen times a day. When he spoke in company, he only looked at her. She hated it.

And he, sensing her hating it, became more uxorious, more tip-toey. And of course more angry?

She rinses the saucepan and refills it with soapy water. A clump of shiny bubbles skates on the surface. The wind kicks up and flings the first fat drops of rain against her kitchen window.

The fact is, Doug survived the expulsion. He lived to learn the deeper meaning of loss, when he buried first his brother and then his parents, and he lived to mate again, to a woman who wanted uxoriousness.

Renee spots her children through the splattered window. Something has made them happy; they’re running toward the house with the kite between them, laughing mouths open to the rain. She can almost see the rain drops shining like soap bubbles on their blue jackets. She glances at the metal bowl of bread dough as she walks to open the door.

Gretchen thinks Madeleine and Carol might as well be gay. “Jeez, you’d make a great dyke,” she’s said more than once to Madeleine, after listening to one of her anecdotes of independence or watching her in a feisty feminist moment. Madeleine always calls Gretchen on that – she hates the way lesbians try to co-opt strength and feminism – but she also jokes that she’s a lesbian trapped in a straight body. She admits that homosexuality would be convenient for her. Men her age still fantasize about sex, but they dream of fucking twenty year-olds. Gay women on the other hand, attractive gay women, lately seek Madeleine out.

As for Carol, Gretchen and Madeleine more or less agree that she’s mostly asexual. Sure she’s married, to a very nice man whose 74 years is the antidote for her 47; no one believes they have sex. And while it’s true that Wayne is supportive and loving and too tired to compete with Carol intellectually, so he’s no bother at all as a husband, it’s also true that Carol would go farther in academia if she were gay. There’s a network.

The inconvenient fact is that both Madeleine and Carol are straight. They’ve each been married twice, and Carol is set to stay married. Madeleine is happily divorced but starting to look around; now that her nest is emptying she can see loneliness ahead, lurking in ambush around a not-distant corner. She’s still not ready to subscribe to a matchmaking service but she’s no longer waiting to be found by someone perfect enough to seek her. Tonight she is going to dinner and opera with her friend James, and she’s inclined to try viewing him through fresh unassuming eyes. He’s single, she’s single, they’re at least conversationally compatible – why not?

The three of them sit around Madeleine’s kitchen table now, but Gretchen is about to leave to make dinner for her partner, and Madeleine is expecting James in an hour. Carol is staying the week with Madeleine, on a brief hiatus from husband and Harvard, and she’ll have the house to herself soon.

Madeleine and Carol go all the way back to high school together, and they know Gretchen from college; the dynamics between the three friends are now hard-wired. Gretchen is graceful and physically modest, with fingernails that keep breaking because she cleans them so often. She can’t abide the sight of any darkness under them. She discovered her sexual orientation late in college, after a few catastrophic attempts with guys, and she believes since she was actually gay all that time, all women must be. Even as she’s getting her things together to leave now, she’s advising Madeleine to forget this James guy and try Susan, perfect for her, who just joined Gretchen’s church.

Carol is dark, petite, lovely, and brilliant. She’s completely intellectual; she seems to have no sense of her body. She can’t ride a bicycle. She is thrifty and efficient and cannot tolerate a bad taste in her mouth. Gretchen and Madeleine each attempted to room with her when they were young, and each was driven to a studio apartment by Carol’s incessant tooth-brushing and admirable, irritating tidiness. Right now Carol is preparing her own dinner. She’s chosen to make polenta with a mixed mushroom ragout on top, and there’s a third of a cup of the ragout left after she spreads an even layer on the corn meal. Anyone else would either add the remaining ragout to the dish, or eat it as cook’s treat; only Carol seeks out the perfect container to preserve the stuff in the refrigerator. When she finger-digs the detergent scum out of the sink dish to clean the pot, Madeleine can’t stand it any more. “Good grief, Carol.  I have scouring pads.” Her tone of voice is all out of proportion to the event, because she’s letting off a bit of repressed exasperation and there’s still plenty more in her, but Carol and Gretchen are accustomed to Madeleine’s passion; they no longer look for extra meaning in her expressive face.

Madeleine is the most libertine and liberal of the three. She’s a woman who knows how to get her hands dirty. Actually, she can’t stand newsprint stains on her fingers; she appreciates the non-smearing ink most publishers are now using. And much as she loves dogs, she really can’t put up with their smell on her fingers. But she’s always been the one of them to roll up her sleeves and get a necessary but unpalatable job done.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Madeleine now apologizes to Carol. “I don’t know where that came from,” she adds, leaning back in her chair, the last of the three to be done picking at the snacks they’ve been munching with their tea. One plate has half a stuffed grape leaf on it. Another has two partially-torn pita. A third supports maybe a quarter cup of hummus, and the last has four olives and eight pits. “I must be nervous about tonight or something. But no,” she continues with a lifting voice to Gretchen, “I am not interested in trying out Susan or any other woman. The jury is out about whether I even want a man…”

“Okay, okay, I’m going,” Gretchen says. Before she gets to the door she turns around. “I’ll back off on the Susan thing, but it’s high time you had someone.  A little romance can be a good thing, you know.” Gretchen and June have just come back from a long weekend at Disneyland. Gretchen had never visited the magic kingdom before, and she was enchanted. “We certainly had a great time. I wish every place were as tidy and well-organized.”

“Yecchh. I can’t believe you said that! Don’t get me wrong,” Madeleine declares, “because Disneyland is a bit of wonder, but after a few hours the place gives me the creeps. Wherever I go I feel subtly manipulated and directed. Once I made the trip there with Anne and my mother – I think Annie was around ten so it was a dozen years ago now – and my mom, who’s been addicted to gum ever since she gave up cigarettes, went searching for some Trident. She never found any, because the Disney folks don’t permit gum to be sold anywhere in the park or hotel grounds. You guessed it: too hard to clean up.”

“But that’s exactly what I like about it. No gum on the pavement. No litter. No weeds. Nothing out of repair.” Gretchen glances at Carol as if looking to her for arbitration, but both Gretchen and Madeleine can see that Carol has no opinion. She’s never been to Disneyland and she isn’t likely to go. She may not know who the President is, and she certainly doesn’t know the current TV lineup. She’s completely historical, classical, devoted to a life of study and contemplation. She’s also irritating Gretchen and Madeleine now that they notice her, because she’s taking meticulous care to wrap up each item they haven’t eaten. They can understand her packing away the pita pieces and the four uneaten olives. But they get antsy when they see her try to scrape the tiny lump of hummus back into its plastic container, and they grow impatient when Carol starts to wrap the piece of dolma in a scrap of used foil. Who’s going to eat it? their facial expressions seem to ask. And they both know the possible answer is Carol, for breakfast, along with two teaspoons, perhaps, of the leftover mushroom ragout, which she’ll then recover to eat more of later.

“Have I mentioned the latest with my office toilets?” Madeleine tries to divert them from watching Carol. “You know how they work, or don’t?” she asks Gretchen. Carol has never visited Madeleine’s office. She continues to tidy the table.

Gretchen understands the question. She’s sensitive and observant about toilets, especially public ones. If a restaurant ladies’ room doesn’t look right to her she’ll avoid the restaurant. She knows that the toilets in Madeleine’s office ladies’ room won’t flush unless pressure is maintained on the handle. They’re the type with the metal lever sticking off the big pipe – the kind you use your foot to flush – and in Madeleine’s ladies’ room you have to stand over the toilet bowl, left foot on the lever, until the flush is completed.

Gretchen doesn’t like that. She doesn’t boycott Madeleine’s office but she tries not to use the toilets there. She once read that the unhealthiest place to be is right over a flushing toilet. She learned that the whirling water goes down while the whirling germs fly up. She’s heard of more than one person who couldn’t get rid of an intestinal problem until she started closing the toilet before flushing, and storing her toothbrush inside a cabinet. She keeps telling Madeleine to demand toilet covers of her building management.

“Well, you know how some of the ladies fail to complete their flush?” Madeleine continues her anecdote. “I guess someone on the floor got annoyed about the yellow or pink or brown that we sometimes find our toilet water, but last week a hand-lettered sign was taped up next to the paper towel dispenser, announcing that we all work there and have to use the same facility, and firmly requesting that flushes be completed.

“If anything, that sign triggered an increased tendency not to flush. So yesterday a batch of signs went up. One behind each stall door, one near the towels, one on the mirror. All of them computer-generated and printed in red ink. The representative of the building management threw a minor fit (‘It’s an office bathroom, not a bulletin board, for heaven’s sake,’ she grumbled as she removed the signs), but I managed to get one before she arrived. Wait a minute; let me quote it correctly…” Madeline takes three long steps to where she left her briefcase, and returns unfolding a half-sheet of paper, printed in all caps.  “INSTRUCTIONS FOR FLUSHING TOILET” is its title, followed by its three points:

1. PRESS LEVER DOWN – HOLD DOWN FOR 1 MINUTE.
2. BEFORE LEAVING THE STALL MAKE SURE THE CONTENTS IN THE BOWL HAVE FLUSHED.
3. EXIT BATHROOM.”

She’s laughing by the time she finishes reading the list. Gretchen says “A full minute? Does she have any idea how long a minute is?” at the same time that Carol suggests item two point five might involve hand-washing. “Do I have to exit immediately after flushing for a minute?”

Now all three are laughing. They look younger like this; their faces broaden, and their eyes are delight-shut, tears of merriment squeezing out at the corners.

“So Madeleine, is there going to be a thing with this James?” Gretchen continues to postpone her departure.

“I think not. I keep trying to talk myself into him – he’s extremely appropriate for me – but there’s just no spark.”

“How so, appropriate?”

“Oh, our age, widowed, childless, moneyed, cultured, not unattractive, streetable… but somehow to me not masculine. I don’t know… there’s no chemistry.”

“And when exactly was the last time you felt chemistry with a man?”  Gretchen’s tone is a bit snide.

“I know. I know. It’s been nearly ten years. But it’s not like I feel it for a woman either.” Madeleine twists in her seat to face Gretchen. Carol has finished putting the food away and is watching both of her friends. “What can I say?” Madeleine continues. “His fingers are shorter than mine. His shoulders slope down, and they’re too narrow. He has a beard but it’s sparse. The arms of his rimless eyeglasses press into the sides of his head. All of this gives me the creeps.”

“Maybe you’re overly fastidious,” Carol comments as she steps momentarily out of the room.

“This from the one married to a 74 year-old,” says Madeleine to Gretchen. She raises her voice to Carol: “Maybe I am, but what can we do about it?” and finishes by commenting to Gretchen, “I just can’t imagine his pale narrow butt pumping between my thighs. No way.”

Gretchen is about to respond when Carol walks back into the room, brushing her teeth. One look in her direction and Gretchen leaves with a “…talk to you two later.” As the door closes behind her Madeleine heads for her bedroom and notices me on the porch.

“Anne! What are you doing tucked in there? I thought you left an hour ago.”

“I was going to, Mom. But as I was getting my stuff together I had an idea for this paper I’m supposed to write. So I’ve been sitting here jotting notes.”

“It’s fine, honey; I was just surprised. This is the writing assignment for your seminar?”

“Yeah. I still don’t get why we have to write and take math for an MFA… But whatever. I’m off now. Have a good date.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine, thanks. But nothing’s happening. James has old man fingernails and nightly heartburn.”

We kiss/hug and I leave. Gretchen may be right. Things probably would go better for Mom if she were gay.

I met Carol in college. I was a sophomore. I already had an impressive reputation; I’d cut a swath through the hearts of coeds my first year, ensnaring them myself or manipulating them into infatuations with my friends. I’d learned a lot at my mother’s rounded knee, lapped in her silvery laughter. She taught me the pleasure of touch when she cuddled me young, the skill of questions when she teased me toddling, the art of pleasing her as I grew up. If he who laughs last laughs best, then I laugh better than any other man my mother has known.

I spent my freshman year fulfilling general requirements and seducing girls. I summered with Mother as usual on the island. My mother is always beautiful, memorably lovely like Loren or Taylor, and she’s never more ravishing than in her summer silks and silky tan. But I swear, Carol outshone her. Of middle height, athletically formed, Carol has pink and white skin creamy as a lily, a direct gaze out of leaf-green eyes, plum lips, soft, abundant dark hair. And she has that additional quality of charisma, or magnetism, or charm: she attracts people.

I probably would have gone after her immediately, but she roomed with two intolerable females. Both of them were named Patricia, but one went by Patsy and the other used Trish. The three clustered together at the orientation mixer, the way women always do, and I guess I tarred Carol with her friends’ brush. Patsy and Trish rated the guys like meat, and I was particularly offended at the remarks I overheard from them concerning me. I know I’m attractive, but I am not a hunk of anything.

So I didn’t approach them. My buddies gave me shit about that. They said even I couldn’t get a woman as spectacular as Carol. They ragged me about it that first night, and they continued all through the next week. I was just about to bet I could hook Carol, when Mother paid her first visit to my new apartment. She scoffed at my intention. “Not enough,” I remember she said to me. “Sure, you can enchant her with yourself, darling. But to really prove your skill, you need to make her love someone unattractive.”

She had a point, and I’ll admit I warmed to the project. It isn’t that difficult to make people start to love one another, provided they’re young enough or lonely enough. You just implant in each the idea that he or she is found attractive by the other. Immediately each is more receptive. Immediately their pupils dilate when looking at each other. Our species finds dilated pupils to be inviting, vulnerable, open – babies have dilated eyes, and that’s one of their qualities that adults find compelling. If one is lonely, or teenaged and ready for romance, that’s all it takes to start something.

I picked a guy named George Arkin to be Carol’s first college love. I’d met George in my dorm the year before, and he hung on the periphery of my crowd. He was actually a nice guy and not stupid, but he had a cleft palate with its consequent speech impediment, and he walked with a limp. I guess George had had a rough gestation. He wasn’t fat but he wasn’t muscled, and he was shorter than Carol. They’d make an absurd couple.

My little scheme backfired about every way it could.

I got them to like each other all right, but not that way. My intimations made them notice one another, and they became friends. Carol immediately knew George was gay, and George recognized Carol for the rare individual she is. I personally was blown away to discover his orientation; he didn’t come on to me, so why would I assume he wanted guys?

In addition to starting a strong friendship, my own machinations ensnared me. The more I talked to Carol the deeper I fell. But it had never happened to me before, so it took me awhile to realize it. By the time she and George decided to study Greek together, I was smitten.

Worst of all, my manipulative conversations earned me George’s contempt and Carol’s deafness. I think he saw through me. And she never even noticed me.

I was miserable. For the first time in my life I was depressed. Mother didn’t make it any easier, calling me every other day to ask whether Carol and George were an item, filling each call with her irritation about Carol’s increasing reputation for beauty.

Meanwhile, Carol wasn’t getting any dates. Part of the problem was she was just too beautiful; most of the guys assumed she’d be grabbed up each weekend early and by the most popular. The few men who had the nerve to approach her also knew how hung up on her I was, and they weren’t going to go against my anger.

I soon learned that she was getting lonely. Her friends Trish and Patsy were dating non-stop (they were skanks, those two), and even George was getting some now and then, but Carol was dateless. Trish and Patsy egged her on until one night when they were all together, they called some “psychic friends” network. As I overheard it (George told his then boyfriend about it at a table next to mine in the dining commons), all Carol gave the tele-psychic was her first name and date of birth, and she got back generally accurate comments about her past and some prediction that she was destined to hook up with a powerful monster. There was even a playful instruction to get herself to the “convocation on the heights.” The psychic didn’t explain that phrase, but Trish and Patsy interpreted it as the party my building was hosting that weekend; after all, my place did sit on top of the highest hill around campus.

By that time I was out of control with desire for her. I fantasized about her continually. I wasn’t able to enjoy other women; hell, it got to the point where I couldn’t even perform unless I imagined it was her body. I vacillated from tender thoughts of her, with the sweetest, slowest sex imaginable, to extreme anger and jealousy, when my mind actually went to images of kidnap, bondage, rape.

I had it so bad that I made the mistake of telling Mother. Her reaction was appalling. Time has given me perspective about that night; to put it in a few words, my mother tried to seduce me. She’d gone over the top in jealousy; all her life she’d been the beauty in any room, until Carol arrived on the scene, and when I revealed my obsession with her rival she just put on her wiles and went for me.

The horrible thing was that it almost worked. I came to my senses in the middle of a deep kiss, but I had been responding, no doubt about that. Mother kind of woke up immediately after, and we were both horrified, embarrassed and confused.

That was the moment I realized there was something wrong about the way Mother and I related. I started a journal and as I wrote I knew I’d have to deal with it. But right then I was focused on the upcoming party; I went back to my apartment and tabled the subject of Mother and me.

The evening was successful. I was gentle, and careful, respectful and attentive, and the result was that Carol and I began a relationship. For the first time in my life I was genuinely involved with someone, and I showed her a tender side of me not even I knew I had. I didn’t reveal anything about Mother – it was all too raw for me to talk about – but other than that I gave Carol all of me. As for my issues with Mother, I talked to my journal in solitary moments, and I hid the text well.

I think Trish and Patsy couldn’t stand it that Carol was happy with me. They always tended to resent her for (as usual) her astounding good looks, but I guess they’d taken some solace from her loneliness. As soon as she and I were an acknowledged couple, Patsy and Trish began working on her about my privacy: What did I do in that room of mine? What did I put in my desk? What did I write in that book Carol told them she saw, that first time she opened my door without knocking?

Maybe unconsciously she wanted to be caught. Carol is honorable, and although her friends finally worked her up to invading my privacy, she may have felt bad enough about it that she was incautious. Anyway, I caught her at it right out, and my sense of violation can’t be described. I threw her out of my place, yelling about trust and betrayal. I devastated us both.

Right after we broke up, along came first Patsy and then Trish trying for me in their graceless ways. Bitches… I still feel perfectly justified in the way I led each on and then shattered her little self with my acid comments about how ugly her pussy looked, or how gross she smelled.

It didn’t take long for me to come to my senses. There I was, ranting about how Carol violated my trust, when maybe she was just trying to learn something about me that I was hiding from her. Who wasn’t trusting whom? I started seeing her motivation as adorable curiosity rather than betrayal. I wanted her more than ever.

But before I could get to her, Carol went to visit my mother.

At the time I wished she hadn’t. I was ready to forgive and move on. But as I learned later, Carol was desperate to talk to me. She knew I was close to Mother and she was ready to do whatever was necessary to make Mother like her and help her.

Mother received Carol with a lot of surprise and a minimum of warmth. She said “I see” to everything Carol explained, and she didn’t make the visit easy. When Carol stopped speaking, Mother considered in silence for a few moments. Then she told Carol that before she’d promote a reunion between us, she needed to see how good a mate Carol would be.

She told Carol to clean the kitchen. And Mother’s kitchen was a mess. In addition to the usual dust and grime, she’d spilled four different types of grain and five different varieties of beans, and she wanted all that silage sorted by nightfall.

Carol’s no fool. She knows a number of tweaker students who engage in meticulous crafts, like Rapidograph pen art. She herded up nine of them, got them high, and gave them the sorting challenge. While they picked, she did the normal cleaning. The kitchen was spotless and orderly an hour ahead of deadline.

Mother acknowledged that Carol had accomplished that task, but said she hadn’t intended Carol to have help. She gave her a job to do on her own. Mother’s an excellent seamstress and wanted some new miracle fabric that wasn’t yet in stores; she sent Carol to fetch a usable swatch of a new viscose made from waste cotton stems.

That was easy. George was majoring in textiles, and he had access to all the latest fabrics. Within an hour Carol had two yards of the desired stuff in an awesome shade of olive green.

“Okay,” Mother said to that. “I have just one more task for you; if you accomplish this, I’ll help you.” Then she told Carol that all the recent stress had produced imperfections in the skin around her eyes and nose, and she sent Carol into the back alleys of nighttime Chinatown for some curative face powder that none of us had ever heard of or seen.

Carol followed the circuitous directions. She found the shop and haggled with the proprietor until she had the desired jar of loose white powder. As the proprietor handed over the jar, he warned her not to open the stuff before giving it to Mother.

She almost made it home. But her curiosity got to her. She rationalized her action by telling herself she had been stressed too, and she was about to be with me again, and she could use a little help to be beautiful for me. She opened the jar.

Mother is a party woman. She’s too attractive to be alone and she’s too spoiled to be faithful. Mother likes admiration and romance, and pleasure in all forms. So Mother knows drugs.

The heroin in that jar was so pure that Carol got ripped by inhaling it first when she opened the jar and again while she applied it to her perfect face. She passed out on the train home, and I don’t know what would have happened to her, drugged and lovely on that late night run, if I hadn’t gotten the story from Mother and gone after her. As it was, two assholes were hovering over her disarrayed self when I found her. I chased them off, gathered Carol in my arms, and kissed her back to consciousness. Fortunately, she came to and we got home without involving the authorities.

I was big-time mad at Mother after that. She not only gave full approval to our union, but she humbly and readily entered therapy with me. We’ve still got a long way to go, but there’s reason to hope. And Mother’s relationship with our daughter is healthy.  Hedy is only eight years old now, but she promises to outdo all her ancestors in emotional health.