Sputterpub's Blog

Her name wasn’t really Cedar. If she’d been younger anyone in Berkeley would believe it, but she was a Boomer, and her parents had never been eccentric. Her birth names were Sharon Elizabeth, and she took on the tree name Cedar when she was 19. She always loved trees, especially evergreens.

When I met her we were both in our 40s. I moved into the house next door, just north of hers, across the creek. I was a newly single mother (raw and reluctant from divorce) and she was a happily-married mother of one. My two kids were years older and younger than her daughter so they didn’t play together. But Cedar seemed to derive pleasure and solace and other positive effects from hand-hosing her garden, so she was often outside, and we naturally got to talking.

Cedar and Carl were an attractive couple, and their daughter Autumn, coltish and platinum blonde even at nine, was eye-catching. Cedar was well-shaped and about 5’9.” She had thick wavy shoulder-length hair in the usual array of blonde streaks. Carl wasn’t much taller than his wife. He was slender and blonder. He did some sort of business consulting, out of the house. Cedar wove, knitted, crocheted, and quilted items for home and body, mostly forest-inspired, mostly marketed online.

Except for the winter months, every morning I could hear her hose on greenery even before I got out of bed (my head aimed south when I slept, and my headboard was two casement windows, one of which was open every night). It was a relaxing sound, and I could imagine the accessory sensation of the cool, almost vibrating hose in hand, so I understood Cedar’s irrigation pleasure even though I didn’t get the regularity – behavior that appeared to be compulsive.

I don’t think I would have paid so much attention to Cedar and family if coincidence hadn’t occurred. But I had a commute friend named Terry, and one day she got off the bus at my stop and came to my place for an afterwork glass of wine, and when I walked her to the sidewalk to say goodbye, Cedar and Autumn were passing by. It turned out that Terry knew Cedar from before she and Carl bought the house. Terry had been in the apartment next to theirs before Autumn was born.

The next day Terry talked about that old apartment. She said her bedroom was adjacent to theirs. She used to hear the sound of their lovemaking through the wall. The remarkable memorable quality was the amount of laughter she heard. Terry said she’d never been close to such a healthy, happy couple.

Terry was an oddball. She was rail-thin and always cold, and she wore layers of scarf-like clothing around her body. Her face makeup was applied like paint: red circles on her cheekbones and iridescent blue on her lids all the way to her brows. She tended to writhe a bit when she sat. Cat-like. In fact, the only times I ever saw her genuinely smile were when she fondled her cats and when she reminisced about Cedar and Carl.

Terry told me she’d been a heroin addict. She said she used to drive a cab, nights in New York City. She claimed to have been a nude model, and she’s the only person I ever knew who festooned her refrigerator door with black-and-white pictures of her unclothed younger self, in ostentatiously “artistic” poses.

She described herself as bisexual in orientation, but with a relationship history populated largely by men, largely by passionate large men, largely by men who were sexually aggressive with Terry in ways that abutted abuse but amounted to provocative gymnastics, at least the way she told them.

I let the friendship with Terry peter out after my visit to her place and my viewing of her refrigerator. Not that I was offended (or aroused) by the pictures. More because I found Terry boring and superficial and affected. And also because I got the strange but undeniable feeling, while we were looking at that refrigerator door, that Terry was waiting for me to make a move on her. I believe she was giving me what I’ve heard guys call a “come hither” look.

As if. I’m incurably straight. And I’m never the sexual initiator. Terry had to know those facts about me, if she was paying any attention.

She wasn’t paying attention. And I stopped regarding her. But I kept noticing Cedar. We often encountered one another over the creek, while she watered her trees and I moved leaves around. The first time I conversed with her after hearing Terry’s memories, of course I mentioned them.

“It was just a lovely recollection,” I announced. “Hearing how often you guys laughed. Terry seemed to really enjoy those neighbor sounds.”

“Oh yeah,” Cedar agreed. “And I remember Terry’s cats.” She directed her water away from the oak tree between us and toward a big bay laurel. “Carl and I were new then. But I feel a little weird now about our laughter. It was all about his wife.”

I’m sure I looked questioning; I hope I didn’t drop my jaw or anything.

“Carl was really unhappy in his marriage. I worked for him then, and I knew all about it. What can I say? An office relationship grew into a friendship and that developed into more than either of us intended. Meanwhile Mary got more and more demanding, and Carl moved in with me. Mary used to call us at all hours, haranguing Carl or threatening to kill herself if he didn’t come back. She even made some aggressive comments about me. We had to get a restraining order.”

I would have expressed sympathy, but Cedar was smiling wide as she reminisced. “Uh huh” is what I said. “So your background is in the same sort of work Carl does?”

“Oh not really. I mean, he’s the one with the advanced degree. My job was clerical, and business management consulting never grabbed me. He had ten more years in it than I by then. And I quit as soon as we got pregnant.”

It was hard for me to imagine Carl as any sort of player. He wasn’t bad looking, but he was slight, quiet, kind of shy. Not very masculine. Cedar was such a take-charge person, so energetic in her art and her nonprofit tree-planting work, that she seemed to be the dominant personality in their household.

I noticed Carl a little more after that. I even joined them for wine one winter evening (I’m friendly but a bit of a hermit, and I don’t want to be so close to my neighbors that anyone feels comfortable dropping in). I tried to converse with Carl that time. He responded to my questions but didn’t ask anything in return. He struck me as monotonous: as pale in conversation as in complexion and eyelashes. He was more attentive to Autumn than to Cedar or me. I thought it was a little weird, the amount of time Autumn spent on his lap.

A few months later, about a week after springtime watering noise had commenced next door, I woke to the unmistakable sounds of marital argument. Cedar’s voice carried better than Carl’s but I could tell from tone that they were really going at it. I heard “skinny-assed bitch” and several “fuck YOUs” from Cedar, followed by the sound of what must have been a newspaper on asphalt, finished by the abrupt ignition and acceleration of Carl’s Honda.

I’ll admit it: I found a reason to go outside even before the coffee was ready.

It was very bad news. Carl was leaving Cedar. He was now in love with the young woman who’d been working with him in his office. He planned to marry this Jennifer person. He told Cedar that Jennifer was eager to have a baby and he was looking forward to “doing it right this time.” That drove the blade deeper. Cedar had wanted another child after Autumn, but Carl insisted their family was perfect and complete as it was. Cedar had finally given up just a year ago; I remember the conversation we had when she hosted a yard sale that featured (mostly) baby gear.

It only got worse after that. Carl returned that day but moved out about a week later. Cedar grew progressively more agitated and angry. I’m sure I’m not the only neighbor who heard the yelling, the door-slamming, and sometimes shrieks from Autumn. And that was when Carl wasn’t around; the times he stopped by to pick up or drop off Autumn tended to be even louder.

I could tell from the lamplight that Cedar wasn’t sleeping much at night. Or not regularly. Often there was a glow from her house in the eerie pre-dawn hours. That’s probably when she used the phone.

We had our last conversation shortly before she moved out. She was no longer watering the garden; she accosted me from her front yard when I was returning from the market with a bag of produce.

She looked at least ten pounds thinner. Her hair needed cut and color; it straggled around her newly-narrow face. “You won’t believe it!” she started as she approached me. I had no choice but to stop. “That fucker served me with a TRO! Me! A restraining order!”

I murmured some sympathy. It was sincere. “Were you going by his place?”

“Never! I’m not even allowed to phone him!”

“I’m sorry, Cedar.”

“I just can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s like my whole life is coming apart, layer by layer.”

“Do you want to grab some dinner with me?”

“Oh. Uh, no thanks. I mean, thanks really, but my appetite’s been off lately, and I can’t settle down. Let’s do it soon though.” Her smile was habitual and didn’t even push her cheeks up.

Within another two weeks she came completely apart. I understand the catalyst was when Autumn called her father and asked if she could live with him and Jennifer. Cedar went ballistic. Someone in the neighborhood called the police, and the police called Social Services. Autumn went with her father and Cedar was taken to a rehab-type facility.

She may have improved, but not in time to prevent the house being sold. My new neighbors are delightful people – friendly and private. They have an only son named Jason who is currently fascinating me. He’s 15, probably on the spectrum, and liable to act out in weird ways. His parents bought him a trombone because making music seems to calm him; they’ve plastered his bedroom door and windows with soundproofing strips, but I can hear him anyway. Just last week he tossed a match out of his room and started a little conflagration. With all the trees on that property, less watered now that Cedar isn’t around and we’re so drought-aware, someone needs to keep an eye out.

Sadie’s first husband was an active, intelligent, adventurous young man. Sometime in his late 20s he changed – turned into a hypochondriac hermit with a bitter attitude and a mean temper. She didn’t understand the alteration, and for a long time she bought Hank’s repeated accusation that she’d done it to him, with her high-maintenance demands and pickiness, even though she believes a woman can’t emasculate a solid man any more than a recruiter can sign a happy employee. Sadie started exploring a different perspective after lunch with her friend Susan.

She’d just had an encounter with Hank, and she told the story over pizza and wine. That’s when she realized that she’d never described the marriage to Susan, who started asking basic questions. Sadie didn’t want to go into it all right then. She answered but briefly, partially. Even so Susan blurted ‘Wow. Something must have really scared him,’ and Sadie had one of those moments when she could almost see the cartoon bulb light up above her head.

“Yeah. No duh he got scared. What I can’t figure is how I missed it all. I was right there. And I knew his sister’s story better than anyone.”

Even though Hank and Sadie were married only ten years, she held the memories about his family. He didn’t want them. Remembering is one of Sadie’s skills.

His sister Natalie died of toxic shock syndrome shortly after their divorce, so Hank’s next wife never knew her. And his parents went, him then her, within a few years after Nat. Sadie was the one who heard Hank’s stories when they were in high school, when they were still bright talkative friends. She’d known his sister even then, before she spent marital Christmases with Natalie and Bill at Hank’s parents house.

Sadie remembers Nat. She was eighteen months older than Hank, petite, homely, into handcrafts and chatter. She was a good soul but she used to agitate Sadie, the way she wouldn’t shut up. Nat was short and shapeless, with nondescript features and long blonde hair that was just too lank to achieve the California-girl style. But she wasn’t then Californian; when her parents moved from Utah to Marin County she was finishing high school, and she stayed with the family of her best friend. Then she went on to college there and got knocked up by her boyfriend Bill.

Hank and Sadie were seniors at Redwood High. His parents told Hank that Nat and Bill couldn’t get married because Bill might get drafted. Nat came to California for the pregnancy. She gave the baby, a boy, up for adoption. Sadie remembers when Hank’s dad bought Nat a puppy, on which she was expected to expend her maternal affection.

Nat resumed college after childbirth, and promptly married Bill. He’d gotten a permanent military deferment because he was deaf in one ear (neither Hank nor Sadie ever learned why the hearing issue didn’t take care of the initial draft threat).

Nat and Bill married. Hank and Sadie married. Nat and Bill moved from Utah to Clio, California, in the northeast sector of the state: old gold country. Sadie and Hank scooted over from Marin County to Berkeley. They saw Nat and Bill at Christmas time at Hank’s parents’ custom-built residence and also for a few overnight visits at Hank-and-Sadie’s new old box of a house or on the trailer-cored homestead in the Clio woods.

They didn’t spend many days together in any year, but their few times tended to be intense. Christmas at the parents was dreadful. Hank and Nat’s mother made a big deal out of any excuse to use styrofoam and gold paint in the house, and Christmas was the acme of her mania, with the place crowded and dazzling and near epileptic in glitz. The rules were multiple and confusing. She always talked incessantly and her husband never spoke, a relationship dynamic that was replicated by Nat and Bill. The young people got out of that house as often as possible, and when they walked the neighborhood or ran an errand Nat and Sadie conversed while Hank and Bill accompanied. Of course Nat did the talking.

When Hank and Sadie visited in Clio the accommodations were at the level of fancy camping. There was a toilet, but for personal hygiene the summer choice was an outside unheated shower or immersion in the swimming hole which collected water under the railroad trestle and made a bath an adventure when the train went by. No TV. No night life. Again, lots of talking.

The few times they came to Berkeley there was more to do than chat, but Sadie’s memories are of Nat sitting in the kitchen, cradling a cup of tea in her small hands, talking while Sadie took care of the baby, talking while Sadie flipped the laundry, talking while Sadie cooked. That was where Nat told Sadie about the abortions.

There were two, after the first pregnancy. Three times Nat decided not to be a mom.
As she told Sadie, she and Bill had conceived and implanted twice since they married, and she asked for Sadie’s promise never to tell her mother about the abortions she coldly arranged each time.

Sadie was folding Gennie’s onesies while Nat spoke. The cotton was soft in her fingers and her heart was doing that warm spreading melt about her four-month old daughter as she glanced at her sitting sister-in-law and marveled. Nat was much more homey and nurturing than Sadie. She would have made a good mother. But she told Sadie, with a tone of certainty and an expectation that Sadie would get it, that her relationship with her mother had been so awful, so toxic and disturbing, that she wouldn’t venture into another mother-child situation no matter who the personalities were.

Sadie thought “oh it couldn’t have been that bad” at the same time that she knew it was. Undramatically bad. Nat’s mother wasn’t a molester. She didn’t abuse alcohol or drugs. She never tortured a child into multiple personalities. Life is much cornier than fiction.

GeorgeAnn Keeler was the most emotionally stingy person Sadie had ever encountered. She was so cold and ungenerous that Sadie thought she might even be evil.

Of course it wasn’t her fault. But after she got sufficiently mature, surely she was to blame. She must have known she was damaged and she didn’t do a thing to get repaired. She visited the sins of her father on her kids.

She was a member of a big Mormon clan. She left the faith when she married, but she never left the pathology
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The way Sadie got the story, Nat’s and Hank’s mother was one of six full siblings and a larger crowd of halves, all sired by Aloysius Uriah Miller, portly banker and family despot. He fathered two sons and four daughters before exhausting his first wife, and GeorgeAnn was the third of those four girls and the fifth child. Her mother died a year and a half later, giving birth to the second son. Mr. Miller promptly brought a new wife into the house, a timid Swedish girl named Dorte, and then kept her pregnant or nursing a succession of offspring. GeorgeAnn was pretty much raised by her siblings, with occasional fearful advice from Dorte and sometimes terrifying discipline in Aloysius’s study.

The silent treatment must have been often experienced in that household, because it’s what GeorgeAnn used on her husband and kids. Whenever she was displeased she stopped speaking. She had a stiff spine and a heavy tread so it wasn’t like she disappeared when she went mute. The times Sadie was around for it she wanted to call in a bomb squad to defuse her mother-in-law before it got worse. The explosion never detonated, but Sadie had a glimpse of how dreadful that presence must have been in a suburban household that was trying to be happy.

Sadie can’t make it sound as bad as it was. Looking back on GeorgeAnn’s behavior now, it seems like no big deal. But she was in charge of raising the kids. Like most men of his generation, her husband just assumed she knew what she was doing and left it all to her.

She never hugged Nat or Hank. She approved of them when they acted courteous and frowned whenever they cried. She raised brave little soldiers.

GeorgeAnn was a cold, controlling woman. She was on the tall side of average in height, with a medium build that included thick ankles and clunky feet. Her posture was ramrod-straight. So was her hair. Her features were regular but boring, and too small for her face. Her complexion was pasty. She was an efficient secretary and worked after the family moved to California. She spoke incessantly about herself and her interests when she was pleased, and she stopped speaking entirely, but in a very loud way, when she wasn’t. No one can recall her ever asking a question about another person. Her main hobby seemed to be decorating the house for a holiday, any holiday. She had rules about every holiday.

And her husband Karl was quiet. He sat in his chair, doing a crossword puzzle in pencil and very occasionally muttering “shut up, GeorgeAnn,” or “what-a-fool.”

Karl once told Sadie that he proposed to GeorgeAnn by accident. It was a rare time when he voluntarily conversed, so Sadie believed him. Karl and GeorgeAnn had been dating at the time. He was playing in a band and moving toward his first career (running a movie theater in Provo) when she had to have her wisdom teeth removed. He visited her that evening and she wouldn’t stop crying. He couldn’t stand to see the tears and the only way he could think to stop them was to propose marriage. Which worked.

Sadie figured out some of Hank’s upbringing when they were together. The more she experienced of GeorgeAnn, the easier it was for her to envision what must have occurred. She could imagine her nodding with approval when her boy acted like a little man: tough, stoic, strong, helpful. And snapping her face into sternness and her stride into anger if he exhibited anger or frustration or weakness. It was like Hank grew up with a hole in his soul, and then he tried to fill it with Sadie. But she had no idea how abysmal and far-reaching the hole was.

Hank and Sadie had a good time for the first five years. They each finished school and started their careers. They bought their boxy house. They had a child. But looking back from now, Sadie can see that Hank began to change not long after the wedding. He became uxorious.

She knows. She was the uxor. And if an abuse victim is the one who gets to define the abuse, then the uxor probably gets to make the call about uxoriousness. Shortly after they married, Hank told Sadie that his biggest fear was she’d figure out what a duck he was, and he’d lose her. It was unsexy for him to reveal that sort of amorphous universal inescapable insecurity. Whatever for? Everybody has it and nobody can cure it. Sadie remembers facing him as he made the declaration, standing with him in the little nexus of their apartment where the bathroom and kitchen and dining area all adjoined, wondering what the hell he really meant. She was looking up at him and taking in his face mostly with her right eye, standing close as the first crack appeared.

It would have been okay if it stopped there. But Hank began trying to guess what Sadie would like instead of saying what he wanted. That was annoying when the question was banal, like what to have for dinner, but it was a drag when it extended into what they did for fun and how they made plans. He stopped skiing and flying and riding his motorcycle because Sadie didn’t share those hobbies; he wanted them to be together, all the time. Worse for her was the position he took when they argued; he believed that their union was more important than either individual. He thought that comparative happiness was good enough.

It wasn’t bad enough then to leave. Their time was filled with work and fun. They were excited when we moved into the house and began fixing it up. They were too busy with new experiences and youth to notice how much Hank was shifting from trail boss to camp follower.

And they were blissful when pregnant. It’s an appropriate time for a male to indulge his mate, so Sadie didn’t complain then when he sought to please her. She agreed with her mother and women friends that Hank’s behavior was rather perfect.

Their daughter was born in September. For Sadie it was twelve hours of discomfort and serious inner work, completed by the ecstatic release that accompanies the delivery of a flawless small human. The post-partum apple juice was the best drink she ever swallowed. The features of the baby were the loveliest she’d ever seen. The deluge of fondness, protectiveness, and loyalty were the most powerful emotions she ever acknowledged. She was undone. She was made vulnerable by her daughter’s significance.

Hank was there for it all of course. So was her best friend Anne. Sadie was aware of them. But her experience was centered in her body and all of her attention was directed inward to her belly and outward to her breath.

That day was about Sadie and the baby. Except that Sadie was a whirlwind of changing emotions, all loving toward Gennie but with some anxious and fearful feelings about lurking danger. She needed help. She needed Hank. She felt like she knew exactly what she was doing. She felt like she was in over her head. She felt.

So she took in what Anne told her, but she didn’t analyze it. Anne went out to dinner with Hank that night, while Gennie and Sadie napped. She reported that Hank looked stunned during the meal. Clearly he was happy, moved, profoundly satisfied, she said, but he was also as white as an ill person, distracted, oddly confused.

And recently, when Sadie narrated the steps of her revelation to her mother, her mom blurted “I never forgave him for that night.” Sadie asked “What?!” and after repeating herself a few times her mother explained that Hank stood outside the hospital room the night Gennie was born, barring the door, and prevented her from coming in. He insisted that Sadie needed rest.

Yeah. Something must have scared him real bad.

It’s so easy to see now, almost forty years later, even though Sadie’s vision is weakening. All it took was four decades for her to attain her no-duh moment.

Poor Hank. He had the same mother Nat had. And GeorgeAnn was even more clueless with a son than a daughter. At the moment when Sadie was sipping that apple juice, craning her head to fill her eyes with her new daughter, enduring the belly massage that was supposed to help her spongy uterus regain its form, her poor friend husband was being devastated. Attacked by love and memory, it’s as if Hank sank to a cringe with his hands protecting his head and then pulled those arms around his wife-and-child and determined, right then forever, that he would protect them, he would allow none other to enter the fold, and he would keep them by being good to them. Like the time Sadie tried to save dream candy by stuffing it under her dream pillow. Like trying to force the genie back into the lamp.

He crouched down and never got up again. Sadie stuck it out for seven years after the marriage spoiled. She coaxed, nagged, encouraged, threatened, raged, waited. She dragged them to counseling. She tried Hank’s prescriptions: relationship books and more sex. But Hank was building bulwarks to protect them from an enemy on one else could sense. He was too busy.