Sputterpub's Blog

There is a woman who rides the express bus from San Francisco to north Berkeley; she looks Scandinavian but she was born and raised in LA. According to her neck she is around fifty, but she colors her pale hair and she is not fat; from a distance she looks thirty-five. She is tall, maybe five foot ten, slim, blonde, blue-eyed. Her hair is thin and very straight, her eyes protrude, and her long fingers are knobby, with cuticles which are triangular instead of oval.

She wishes she had at least an exotic name, but her mother called her Mary. Just Mary. Tall and modest in sensible shoes, with little makeup and no conversation. She grew up in North Hollywood and she went to Grant for high school before she came to Cal. She went to Cal before she entered the work force. She got stuck in a secretarial rut when she went to work.

She hates LA. In her opinion, coming from there is just one more thing that makes her nondescript.

Mary had childhood asthma. They caught it early and she carried an inhaler everywhere with her. It was another thing that made her different in a sorry way. A lot of kids were wheezing a little then, but most of them didn’t tote meds.

Poor Mary. She grew too tall too young and of course she hunched. She was luckily blonde, but she burned almost as readily as an albino, so the same LA sun that bleached her thin hair white blistered her shoulders and required her to coat her nose in zinc oxide.

She wore coke-bottle-bottom glasses until she got contacts at seventeen. The contacts helped her see better but made her protruding eyes wetter. Her hair was hopeless: too thin to style and too straight to curl.

She grew up an only child in LA. In fact, after her father left them when she was twelve, she lived alone with her toxic mom. Mary who hated the sight of her toes was a kid in a barefoot place. Knowing she should have been happy about all the swimming pools, especially with her asthma, she spent her young life avoiding the sunlight.

She believed that her life would begin when she got out of LA. She enrolled at Cal in 1967, at the age of eighteen. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had the smoothness of youth. She had the long blonde hair, and while it was neither thick nor luxuriant, it hung down her thin back without a frizz.

She wore battered blue jeans well on her long legs, and her knobby feet looked no worse than anyone else’s, especially if the looker was on acid: then all feet were indescribably ugly…

She took sociology and anthropology courses, and she took up smoking. First Tareytons and later Benson&Hedges (menthol). She tried a lot of marijuana (and thereon discovered the tastiness of peanut-butter-and-marshmallow-creme sandwiches), a modicum of mescaline, a little LSD. As soon as she could she got rid of her virginity (to a neighbor-friend named Tom), but she didn’t enjoy that; she paced around her apartment afterwards, waiting thirty-two hours for the sperm to die.

She liked sex a little better two years later, with a young man she loved. She met Wayne in a classical archaeology survey course – he was a TA – and they started talking and dating and finally screwing, to the point where Mary kind of enjoyed it and was ready to try some variations. But then Christmas came along and Wayne went with her to LA. And was so put off by Mary’s mother that they ended up arguing enough to break up, and they never managed to reconcile.

After that Mary tried a woman – her own friend Barbara – but she liked lesbian love even less than the heterosexual kind.

She looked at her features in the mirror, and she saw she was ugly. Pop-eyed, with insufficient chin and a harsh nose. Thin-lipped, pasty-toned, wet-eyed. But still, if she tossed her hair about so it draped her thin cheeks, if she tipped her head back so her chin became more prominent, if she squinted a little and hazed the whole picture, she thought she could pass. Mary tried to be hip, but she loved Barbra Streisand.

Wayne backed away from their relationship after he and Mary spent that Christmas with her mother. He had little time for anything but his lab work, and then he went to Eastern Europe for research, with no definite idea about returning.

Mary took her bachelor’s degree in sociology and got a job in an insurance office in Oakland.

She tried to have a relationship with her friend Barbara but that didn’t work. She occasionally dated. She bought a small house in Berkeley. Time passed.

She cut her hair and started coloring it. She wore short skirts for a time and had sex with a few married men. She was always slim, and she looked good from behind. With a wig and a bit of cosmetic surgery she could have been a knockout. As it was, she knew her eyes were too watery and prominent, and her hair was still hopelessly thin and straight.

She rose as far as she could as a secretary in her company, and then she got a few more raises and began earning more than her job was worth. This caused some of her co-workers to resent her, which didn’t enhance Mary’s quality of corporate life. In general she was not a happy person.

It can take over an hour to commute home on the express bus. With little traffic and an aggressive driver the run can be made in thirty minutes, but that day was slow. There was the usual delay in the curve onto 80. This quarter’s driver doesn’t like to change lanes so he never gets in the HOV corridor on the freeway. Most regular riders think he’s a bit too cautious and courteous.

Mary was on the bus, wishing her mother were dead. She was sitting on an aisle seat as usual, not reading as usual, feeling emotional about her mother’s recovery from pneumonia. She had just learned that her mom would make it. The woman has the constitution of an ox. Advanced Alzheimers housed in a strong body. And it’s not even like she can move her mother north for the duration. Mary’s mom still has a few Lutheran connections in LA who comfort her and can help care for her.

Mary is in a dead-end job. She has enough in savings; along with her mother’s money, she can afford to quit. She knows that she has to move back to LA. She was realizing that, trying to accept it, during that long commute.

When the bus reached her stop, the driver neglected to release the back door. Mary was standing at the back steps waiting for the green light that would allow her to push the door open when the driver began to leave the bus stop.

She didn’t yell “back door!” the way most riders would. She didn’t even pull the cord in emphatic panic. She took the door handle in her right fist and began rattling it violently. At the same time she shrieked “Let me out! Stop! Let me off!” as if her life depended on it. All the while she faced the exit door, not the driver.

The driver stopped the bus. Impulsively he yelled back at Mary, “All right, already! Jeesh. Take it easy! You don’t have to yell…” but she pushed the door open and proceeded, no hurry, off the bus and on her regular route down the street.

The next day, and even the day after that, the driver reminisced about Mary’s panic when the bus got to that stop. Then he didn’t mention it any more.

The regular riders agreed that she was deliberately taking another bus. Embarrassed of course. But after a few days they knew she was gone.

Nowadays it takes no time at all to get to LA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annabelle Miller was a Hammond woman. And thus abused.

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

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

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

No. That wasn’t it.

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

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

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

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

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

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