Sputterpub's Blog

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.

Emma tore her toe on the metal threshold at Jake’s doorway. It happened on the February Tuesday when Jake’s asthma and dust allergy were diagnosed, three hours after Dr. Blankman gave her the pamphlet with the picture of the grossly-enlarged dust mite and the terrible tales about carpets and curtains.

Of course she should have waited for help before de-installing the wall-to-wall in Jake’s room. But Emma is energetic to the point of impatience, so eager she is called impulsive. She changed into sweatpants, pushed up her sleeves, and started ripping. She lugged heavy rolls of the musty stuff down to the garage. She sweated and sneezed, but she got all that mite-harboring blue junk out of her son’s bedroom before dinner.

The job exhausted her. After she dragged the last of the carpet pieces out to the garage she was so tired that she finally stepped in the dog shit she’d been avoiding through all prior passes. Her own retriever had left it there that afternoon, fresh and soft. It stuck in her textured sole like butter on a cold waffle. She bent to untie her shoes, nearly keeling over with fatigue, and then she went barefoot back upstairs.

Unshod, tired, it was easy to shuffle. She lifted insufficiently as she passed into Jake’s room, tearing her right big toe on a nail that protruded from the metal strip that used to hold down the bad blue carpet. She was surprised at how much it bled. She was also surprised at how much it hurt, until she inspected the nail head and saw its dull edge. Walking was painful and awkward. An inconvenient injury.

No sooner had she finished the carpet removal than Betsy arrived and it started to rain. The events were unconnected but both made Emma happy. She was always glad to see her friend, especially on their regular Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. She  loved rain, and today the weather made her glad she’d already dragged the carpet pieces into the garage; if she had left them in the driveway, as she thought of doing at first, they’d be getting wet and heavy.

As it happened, Emma came to regret both events. Maybe she was irritated by all the carpet-pulling and her bleeding toe, but she didn’t have any patience for Betsy’s rambling mysticism. She didn’t want to hear about her friend’s recurring dream any more than the usual astrology. “I don’t know, Bets,” she said more caustically than she felt, “but it seems to me it’s too easy to push one’s dreams around, interpretation-wise. Kind of like the old Ouija board; you always knew someone at the party was steering it, you know?”

“No.  I don’t know that.” Betsy’s fair complexion reddened with emotion. “I for one have had some true predictive experiences with the board you’re disparaging. And I certainly am not pushing my own dream around. I’ve had it so often that I know what it contains.”

“But that’s just it. You’ve had it so often. Don’t you think your dreaming self could be recognizing some familiarity and then some part of you could be filling it in so you recall it as identical?”

“Look, Emma. Since I was a little kid, I’ve dreamed about this one house. I’m not too sure about the outside, but I can draw you a plan of its interior. And the thing about it is, there’s a windowless room in the center of the place, off the kitchen, hidden away. Each time I have the dream, I rediscover the room. And each time I find the room, I become sad that I haven’t been using it. I vow to remember it and use it.

“But I think I’ve figured it out. I think the room is a simple metaphor for a part of me that I’m not using. I have to find my own interior room and live in it.”

Emma knew she should retreat at that point. But her toe was still bleeding and she was still irked. She distrusted dream devices in books and movies, and she wasn’t much more receptive about them in a friend’s narrative. Instead of smiling or nodding and changing the subject, she mumbled something about dream interpretation being as useful as astrology.

“What’s with you tonight?” Betsy got up then for a glass of water, and didn’t sit down right away. She continued talking as she paced Emma’s kitchen. “Don’t try to tell me there’s nothing to astrology. I’ve invested years in its study, and there’s so much to it that I’ve barely begun. I can pick a person’s sign after fifteen minutes of conversation. How could I do that if there’s nothing to it?”

“Because you’re dealing with a bunch of people who know about astrology! Let’s find an island somewhere, where no one has ever heard of the ‘science’ and therefore can’t act his sign. Then I’ll bet you have trouble.” No sooner were those words out of her mouth than Emma regretted them. “Oh, I’m sorry, Bets,” she said. “Sit down. You want a stronger drink?”

But by that time neither had the energy to retrieve feelings. They shared a few minutes of delicious criticism about their friend Pam’s continuing cosmetic vanity (the woman was getting into “toxic” facelifts – injections of botulism bacteria that temporarily paralyzed small muscles and thus prohibited wrinkling), but Betsy left for her own place without sitting down again.

Emma fed Teddy the dog and Jake the fourteen year-old boy. She wasn’t hungry herself, but she nuked a Lean Cuisine and chewed through it. She tried not to walk on her toe, but stepping around on her right heel didn’t work very well. She went early to bed.

At 3:30 in the morning her bladder woke her up. Stepping out of bed right foot first, she forgot about her injured toe until she put her weight on it. At the same moment that she felt the pain, she felt the liquid.

Her first idea was that the dog had peed. But Teddy was a middle-aged retriever with good control; he never went inside. “What the?” Emma said aloud, as she limped to her lamp.

She had stepped in a four-inch wide stream of water coming from under her bed toward the fireplace. She hop-stepped over it and around the bed, to discover that the stream originated under one of the French doors to the small porch off her room. Under the door, across the Pakistani rug, beneath the bed, toward the fireplace. The water was definite evidence that her floor wasn’t level. It didn’t take long for her to find the bent metal weatherstripping under the door.

“Why now?” was her next frustrated thought. On her knees with her emergency flashlight she couldn’t see the problem, but she felt with her fingers the rippled edge of old metal. For who knew how many storms, that strip had held wind-driven rain outside the door, but some critical event that night, some perhaps hair-thin, feather-weak force, had pushed the stripping just far enough to let rain in under the door to flow across her room.

She fetched old towels. She wiped the floor, blotted the rug, created a roll of terrycloth threshold where the weatherstripping had surrendered. She limped to the washer with the wet towels, and then returned to bed, but she didn’t settle into good sleep for the rest of that night.

She and Jake managed to repair the weatherstripping the next afternoon, after he returned from school and she came home early from work. She and Betsy spoke that evening and normalized their relations. In fact, except for the continuing every-other-step annoyance of a toe injury, Emma felt better. She recovered from the frustrations and fatigues of her Tuesday.

On Saturday morning, however, she woke with a stiff neck getting stiffer. She knew she carried her stress there, and she did the exercises to relieve it, but throughout the day her mobility decreased and her discomfort grew. By that night she could barely turn her head, and she was irritable and drowsy. She considered her condition for some time before deciding that the pain merited prescription relief. She got into the Vicodin in the medicine cabinet and slid, eighty minutes later, into a pleasant restful sleep.

She woke Sunday morning on a soggy pillow. There was a slime of saliva on the pillowcase, below and around her mouth; she didn’t know why she had been mouth-breathing without a stuffed nose, but she assumed she’d slept mouth agape and drooled steadily from her left side.

As she raised her face from the pillow she realized that her neck stiffness had increased overnight. She was not happy. She struggled to an upright posture and continued to drool. She began to speak her frustration and found she could barely flex her jaw. She couldn’t enunciate. She panicked.

She woke Jake and managed to communicate the urgency of her situation. Grunt-talking and gesticulating, she made him understand enough that he called 9-1-1. Then he called Betsy. She normally came by on Sundays, but on that day her visit started early and went long, at the hospital.

Luckily Emma had had the prescribed series of tetanus vaccinations as a child. Unluckily, when she stepped in the bedroom water it had been far longer than the recommended ten years since her last booster. She became very ill, and her initial statistical chance of survival was less than eighty percent. But the doctors reacted promptly. They’d never treated a tetanus infection, but they loaded Emma with antibiotics, dosed her with muscle relaxants, and provided respiratory support for the brief time she needed it.

They conjectured that the source of infection was the rust- and germ-bearing water that flooded past the old weatherstripping and into the cut on the bottom of her toe. They read that the incubation period averages ten days but can be any number from three to twenty-one, so onset four days after exposure was not improbable.

What was improbable was Betsy’s reaction to her friend’s infection. She didn’t introduce crystals or candles or incantations to the sick room. She brought reference materials. Something about the event made her softly scientific. She was able to explain the infection to Emma (“It’s a little bacterium, called Clostridium tetani, which is actually a nerve poison.”) She was even able to entertain them with her knowledge (“Dig this! You know how your problem is Clostridium tetani? Well, Pam’s Botox? Those were injections of Clostridium botulinum – one of the eight bacteria of botulism – used to temporarily paralyze small facial muscles so they can’t contract and the face can’t wrinkle. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it a trip that a cousin of what tried to kill you is ‘helping’ her?”) Emma would have voiced responses to these and others of Betsy’s comments, but lockjaw isn’t conducive to speech. She would have nodded but her improving neck still didn’t permit easy movement. She used her hands and eyes on Betsy to convey her appreciation.

Emma recovered fully. She was out of the hospital in five days and after another ten there was no sign that she had been ill. Within three weeks of the Tuesday night exposure, it was like the accident never happened.

But Emma-and-Betsy were changed by the infection. Betsy’s ventures toward science continued; before long she could talk about her own digestive problems with authority and confidence. Without abandoning most of her mystic interest, she added some with scientific method.

As for Emma, she’s remembering her dreams now. She wakes up most mornings and jots down her impressions. She finds there’s a recurring motif in her nocturnal visions. Emma is dreaming about thresholds.