Sputterpub's Blog

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.

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.