Sputterpub's Blog

Then Merle became agitated under a strong impulse. It began when she read a news story about the Marshall Islands. Although many have chosen to disbelieve the calculations about global warming, those small Central Pacific islands are already becoming tinier as the ocean rises. Sixty thousand people will lose their country over the next century. Merle clucked over that report. She said it was pretty dumb to settle on islands that were only six feet above sea level, but still… and then she put her palms on the table and her eyes on me. “We have to visit the ocean,” she said. She pushed herself to a stand. “I’m sorry. That was abrupt. But it just hit me. I’ve been antsy and unsettled lately. Something has been lurking in the back right corner of my brain, my blind spot. Reading about the Marshall Islanders, I just visualized the ocean and it all came clear. We have to go there. Right now. I need to think by the ocean.”

There wasn’t any good reason not to do it. Oz wanted to come along. We cranked down all our systems and got into the Jeep. But first, we cruised the Internet for accommodations. We weren’t in an exploring mood; we wanted to settle into an ocean home. Sea Ranch had all the listings so we went with it. We took a big place perched above the northernmost cove. It’s so large that we each have a suite of rooms. I sketch and write these memoirs from the north end upstairs; my room is lit with afternoon reflected off cypress-framed ocean. Oz is at the other end of the house, also upstairs; when he isn’t working on the verse play with Merle, I think he’s tinkering with some electronic models. Merle has taken over the whole downstairs. She moves around a lot lately, arranging items or pacing. She sometimes visits me up here, or invites me to walk outside, and we all get together in the big room for meals and evenings. This place is strange to us and very lovely, but it’s eerie the way it seems to be inhabited with none but gray-hairs. There are no children, no stores or businesses. Everyone walks along the coast and admires the flowers in the same way. It’s fabulously monotonous, as if it were cast under a spell.

We have gray hair. Merle has a dozen strands. Oz’s brown curls are salt and pepper now. I color my hair regularly. But the other folk here are old and automatic. They move like zombies. Luckily there aren’t many of them, especially during the week.

And the drivers are obnoxious. We’re too close to the Bay Area to be away from that.

I think it’s time to get out of this place. If not back to Nevada, I want to propose that we move farther north. I’ll suggest it to Merle.

(Some memoirs. I just reread these pages and they seem more a journal to me.)

(Some big love. I just listened to Merle and got my heart shattered.)

She’s pregnant.

By Oz.

She agrees it’s time to leave here. She has completed what she came for. She has decided to let the pregnancy continue.

I may be a woman, but my first feeling is that of a man. I want to kill both of them.  With my hands. I can feel that passion dissipate even as I describe it.

Right. Merle at 48 and Oz at 49. He of the tiny dick. He has the smallest penis I’ve ever seen on an adult. Oz is only about five foot eight himself, so his dick ought to look big no matter what size. But it doesn’t. And Merle told me it didn’t work for her, back when she and Oz friendly-fucked in 1968.

Then again, gorilla dicks are only an inch and a half, and that’s sufficient to impregnate lady gorillas. The proof is in the pregnancy I guess.

Right. Merle who always wanted to be Minerva, sprung from her father’s brain without a mother, therefore just, that Merle is now choosing to be a mother? And what for me? Godmother/father? Probably…

I didn’t know what to say to her at first. “Sure,” is the sound that came out of my mouth, followed by “Aren’t you the one who pointed out that women can’t complain about men as long as mothers are the ones who raise the boys?”

But Merle doesn’t particularly complain about men. She complains about people. Anyway, she tells me she’s carrying a daughter. She says the challenge is to raise her without an eating disorder.

Merle is nauseated and chagrined. But she’s not confused any more. She’s beginning to search out a perfect name.

At least the ride isn’t boring…

I’ve known women who didn’t want children because they’d been the oldest of a large brood; they’d already done the job. And I’ve known a pathetic few who had such a toxic relationship with their own mothers that they wouldn’t risk initiating another mother-child relationship no matter who was going to be the mom. But Merle refused motherhood on principle.

Merle is mad at God. She thinks our species is too flawed to survive. She doesn’t want to participate in a game we’re doomed to lose. She’s brilliant, my Merle, but like any person she tends to repeat the phrases which mean the most to her. I can close my eyes and see her oration: she is standing, green eyes rounded and shining, face emphatic, dark hair moving with her head, right index finger extended at the end of a bent arm angled 45° away from her body, punctuating every other syllable. “Read the Bible,” she commands. “If it’s the book of God, then it’s the journal of a mean, jealous, violent being. Read 1 Samuel 5 and 6, and convince me that any one else is reading the damn book.” Or: “God’s best skill is irony,” she’ll declare. “And face it: irony is just a divine form of sarcasm. We all know sarcasm is the cheapest form of wit. You do the math.” She gets herself so worked up that her body trembles a bit. Her nipples stiffen. Only her orations and cold will do that.

She says motherhood is insidious and overglorified. Pretty much any female can do it. We talked about it the other day. We took a walk along the edge of the headlands and we stopped at the cove overlook, to watch the sea lions. It took us awhile to conclude that the red flag-like material floating in a tide pool was afterbirth. We saw the adult and pup in the pool, but we didn’t recognize the placenta for what it was until they left the pool for their first swim together, mother nose-nudging her child into the waves, and the sea gulls landed to pull the afterbirth like taffy.

“See?” Merle argued after her natural awe subsided. “It’s work more than it is pain. That’s why it’s called ‘labor.’ And don’t let anyone tell you it’s different for people than it is for other animals. They’re delusional. It’s like the folks who maintain that their dogs don’t feel cold, living outside in northern California. Hah! Dogs feel cold; they just don’t complain.” Merle speaks with such authority that my first impulse is to believe her. She was born a woman, so even though she hasn’t had any children, maybe she knows more than I? But I doubt it. I’m very empathetic, and I have a twin sister. I think even in utero I was learning to feel like a woman does. And my sister and I have always understood each other. No: I think Merle may know just because Merle somehow knows. Maybe she’s psychic. Maybe it’s her genius. But she seems to get ideas differently than other people. Her startling statements often turn out to be right. We tend to go with her strong impulses.

That’s why we’re sojourning at Sea Ranch. I thought everything was going well in our little Nevada hide-away. After Oz joined us, we three settled into a comfortable routine, with me as usual maintaining our domestic systems, Merle writing and performing her bits of consulting magic which contributed (at this point unnecessarily) to our income, and Oz recovering from the last five stressful years of his personal and business life. I thought Merle was enjoying the reconnection with Oz; I know they spent hours together composing collaborative poetry.

Merle makes a big deal about everyone’s name but her own. She finds significance in Oz, she lectures on Lazlo, she validates Vyvyan. But she never tells her full name if she can avoid it, and she always says that she hasn’t yet learned her own true appellation.

Her mother named her for the movie star. She sent the Certificate of Birth in to the New York City Board of Health, with the names Merle Oberon Morgan printed on line one. “My full name makes me gag.” That’s what Merle said to me 30 years ago, after I finally heard her middle name. “I’d change it in a minute if I could figure what to change it to.”

I was Sigmund then. I wasn’t much stronger than Merle, but I didn’t hesitate to act stronger. I had to wrestle and tease her into giving me Oberon. And I laughed at it.

But for at least ten years now, I’ve thought the names suit her well. Merle means blackbird, and the lady is small, dark, and quick. Oberon was king of the faeries, and my love acts more like a king than a queen.

She has the strongest soul I’ve ever known. Not that I really know souls, but I’ve been as intimate as possible with her for a third of a century and in a variety of ways. King Merle has a grounded, adamantine ego. She’s also profoundly objective; she acts because of reason instead of feelings, even in situations where most people are governed by emotion. For example, she and her best friend ran away from their homes in high school. They only left for a couple of days. Neither of them was unhappy at home. They did it because they felt their childhoods would be incomplete without the experience. Merle told me they shoplifted, too. Not for need and not to keep: in fact, the only time they got caught they were returning some flatware they’d stolen the day before. No, they thought shoplifting was a necessary skill to be learned on the way to adulthood.

That’s a rare way to make decisions, but I tend to do it too. I spent the first 39 years of my life male and then switched to the woman I am now, and I didn’t do that because I was trapped in the wrong body… I did it because I wanted to experience life as both genders. I figure men have it over women in sexual matters for the first 25 or 35 years, but then the pendulum swings. A woman’s supposed to hit her sexual prime at 40 or so, and I didn’t want to miss that.

Funny. I started the switch earlier, but I didn’t feel female till the final operation. When I met Merle in 1967 I was Sigmund. I was a few years ahead of her at Cal, and I changed my name to Vyvyan the following year, when I graduated. I meant the male version of the name – that spelling had never been used by a woman – but looking back now, I can’t deny something was happening. I got into cross-dressing when I was 30, and once I started shaving my body hair I never wanted to stop. But it took actual dick removal for me to become who I am now.

So it would have been easy for us to have a kid, except obviously Merle would have to carry the child. She refused. Firmly, freely and finally. I even froze sperm before my operation, but she hasn’t consented to receive it.

I can use the shower as an illustration. The only daughter of one of our college friends is engaged to be married. Isabella is 33. Her mother Joan is a sweet woman. True she sometimes drives me nuts with all her do-gooding (she is forever volunteering somewhere, baking or collecting for the poor, doing the necessary for her church). Thinking about it now, Joan is about as far from Molly as possible, in terms of social behavior.

But we three were close when we were young. Joan was my randomly-assigned frosh roommate (Molly and I were not allowed to live together, owing to a summer camping adventure and our parents’ stubborn ideas that we were each a bad influence on the other). We hung out together that year and then managed to share a three-person co-op suite for the ensuing college years. We stayed pretty close after Joan moved back to LA, where she found a church member to marry and they produced Isabella.

Then a distance arose between Molly and Joan. I knew how hurt Joan was when Molly failed to send a baby gift. And I knew Molly meant no harm with her omission; that’s just the way she is. I guess I should have stepped in and made Molly do the right thing. But back then I still thought her asocial behavior was a decision instead of a disability. It’s funny to realize now how little I understood my bff when we were 21 and thought we knew it all.

Joan and I stayed tight. That’s partly because I have cousins in LA, and I visit there. In fact my cousin Barbara has become one of Joan’s closest friends. But it’s mostly because we hung onto one another. I can tell that Joan is often frustrated with my dippiness, but she accommodates me. Her smarminess mostly puts me off, so I can’t take it if she visits for more than a couple of days, but we go back so long I’d never think of letting us dissipate.

So Joan and I talk on the phone twice a week. We visit one another at least twice a year. She and Barbara and I usually take a summer trip together to a destination spa.

Now Isabella is engaged, and Barbara and I are hosting the shower.

Molly can’t relate. That’s not really so – she understands the concept of a bridal shower – but to her it’s for the practical purpose of setting up a household for a young couple. She says she’d get it if Isabella and Hugh weren’t in their 30s, living together, making good money, and already in possession of all the towels and dishes and appliances they want.

She also says she’d understand if we were throwing a co-ed party to celebrate the engagement or something. But we’re doing it our way. (Or maybe we’re doing it Barbara’s way; she’s there and knows how they arrange these things now in LA). We’re having women only, in a hotel, on a Saturday night. We’re not going to play any shower games, and it’s up to Isabella if she opens gifts at the event or takes them with her still wrapped.

What we’re focused on now are the colors (we need to use purple and green, to go with the bride’s wedding palette and the groom’s color blindness), and the guest gifts. We’re pretty excited about presenting each attendee with her own little potted succulent plant.

Now Molly keeps riding me about what she calls the “cactus plan.” She states that shower attendees don’t get party prizes. She claims even wedding guests don’t receive more than a net bag of Jordan almonds. She laughs that a plant known for surviving in arid areas is NOT a happy symbol of a young fertile union.

I’ll admit that Molly’s statements make sense. But they’re beside the point. And that’s what she doesn’t get.

We’re not inviting her. I realize now that I should have had her back, back when Isabella was born. I knew Joan; I just should have sent a baby gift in Molly’s name. I missed that opportunity, but I can protect her from accepting or declining an invitation to this party.

Who knows what she’d do if we let her help anyway? I’m chuckling right now as I remember us prepping for our big junior high dance. The theme was Tropical Paradise (we even had paper mache volcanoes that spewed dry-ice “steam.”) One of the refreshments we chose to serve was fresh pineapple, and Molly and had the task of cubing the fruit for the occasion. She was alone at it (I was apportioning the maraschino cherries among some of the other treats), when she slipped with the paring knife and cut her finger.

She didn’t know I saw the incident. I still can’t believe how she reacted. Her first act was to put the cut finger in her mouth to remove the initial blood. Next she paused for a minute, pressing the small wound together. Then she resumed work. The light was dim but I when I passed behind her I could see that she had tinged some of the pineapple cubes a pale pink.

It was bizarre. I didn’t say anything. I noticed that neither of us ate any pineapple at the dance. Years later and on several occasions, Molly has told me the pineapple story, like it’s part anecdote and part confession. I like to make a skeptical face while I say I believe her. That irks her, I know. But what the heck; we go way back.

Molly has told me that she never really believes that other people feel the way she does. She says she’s single now for the simple reason that she can tolerate loneliness better than boredom. She doesn’t seem to understand why most of her fellows make the other choice. She observes that she has friends who nightly sleep with an enemy; yet they consider themselves lucky because they are not alone. She shakes her head about that.

Everyone acts like they don’t want the best cookie on the plate, but Molly doesn’t believe them. She says “Don’t we all want the best cookie? Wouldn’t it be better if we were open about it?”

She detests being manipulated or managed. She is super-sensitive when it happens and she escapes as soon as she can. She loves all the special effects at Disneyland, but after a few hours there all she can see are the cordons and posters of subtle crowd control, and she’s repelled. No other visitors seem to mind. She’s put off by ritual and traditional observances – again because of the manipulation – yet she sees her fellows derive comfort from these occasions. The heavy-handed nature of new age seminars like EST and Landmark make Molly form anagrams from their polysyllabic buzzwords and tally the take from their lectures and run like a twelve year-old from their missionary efforts, yet these programs, and ads, and human interest stories, and Hallmark cards, are successful, popular, potent.

Molly describes herself as weird. She is a bit of a freak. Obviously she dwells on the spectrum, but she’s so high-functioning no one has made her get help. No one even offered, when she was growing up. Nowadays, with all the zero tolerance policies, I’m sure she would be forced into counseling. I’ve gotten benefits from therapy, and I recommend it to her when I can. But probably it would be about as effective as it was for her son. Not at all.

For some of us, rules just don’t work. Some don’t respond normally to authority. They’re not many, but they’re uncontrollable. Sometimes they avoid calling attention to themselves by following whatever the rules are, but that’s just a way to lay low and not be conspicuous. To Molly, it’s tiring being conspicuous.

She’s told me that she often wonders what it would be like to just slide a blade into someone. Or step out that window and let her body fall the twenty stories. And then she gets a panicky sense of the feeling that would follow immediately: that terrible moment when you realize you can’t take it back and you didn’t dream it.

When her babies were tiny and helpless Molly says she’d frequently notice an impulse to hold the infant by a foot and smash its head against a wall.

Of course she didn’t do it. She winced even thinking about it. She says the wince felt goofy but a little thrilling. And then she couldn’t resist thinking it again.

But following any of these black impulses? Not in a million years. Molly wants to like herself. That’s the biggest cookie on her plate.

I saw a geneticist on TV recently, who ran a lot of DNA sequences to see if he could isolate the gene that makes a psychopath. And he found the marker most decidedly in his own strand. And then of course he had to wonder.

His answer was “it’s complicated.” It’s not just the genes. There needs to be a trigger if you’re going to build a monster. The predisposition is required but also a large application of child abuse. That geneticist is known in his family for his temper and poor impulse control. But he got so much love and support as a kid that his evil never flared.

Is my bff like a serial murderer who never got triggered? Or like a CEO or a military leader?

I think not. That’s too extreme. But she resembles what I’ve heard about Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, or maybe someone described as an idiot savant. Brilliant, different, uncontrollable, and possibly unfit for normal human interaction.

Molly used to worry about her son. He was a behavior problem from the age of three. They were referred to child psychologists when he was in pre-school, and she has written reports predicting that he’d never make it through 12th grade.

He had a pretty bad temper. He lashed out readily, sometimes with whatever was in his hand. He got kicked out of after-school “carpentry” in first grade because he bopped a classmate over the head with a 2 x 4. He put his fist through his bedroom wall when he was eight. The cycle of behavior was hideously repetitive: enrollment; a note from the teacher; a conference that concluded with a behavior “contract;” suspension; expulsion.

The quality that disturbed Molly most was his lack of remorse. No matter how she went at him – in his face yelling, the go-to-your-room silent treatment, reasoning, making him compose sentences – no matter how they conversed about the issue, he’d maintain that the only problem was that he had gotten caught.

Really. It was beyond exasperating. He appeared to love Molly in spite of her rants; he’d look her in the eyes and, when he wasn’t saying whatever came to his mind to get her placated and out of his face, he’d consider and give what seemed to be his sincere response. She’d drill him with questions about his behavior. He never would tell her “what he was thinking of” before he offended. He always responded when she asked him if he understood the misdemeanor, that the problem was he got found out and punished.

She was stymied. There was no remorse she could use. She started to wonder if the shrinks were right about his future. Molly recalled the rages in which her ex-husband would sometimes revel, and she blamed him.

Molly and Alex saw psychologists. Some were selected by school and three she found herself. As a group she reported that they were smarmy and ineffectual.

Alex made it through high school and college and into functioning employed adulthood. Molly says it was the girls of late middle school who provided the cure. Alex was consistently attracted to smart high-achievers, and he joined them in homework and study, and he then reaped the benefits of engagement in his work and satisfaction with the results, and that kept him at it.

But he’s still got a missing part (his term). He didn’t cry when his grandfather died, or when they put down the old dog, and he’d been close to both of them. He seems to always wonder if he loves his girlfriend enough. Molly fears that he lacks empathy and tenderness.

Lately I’m wondering too. And I’m beginning to think Alex didn’t inherit his impulsiveness, anger, and distance from his pathetic nonentity of a dad. I’m starting to turn the scope on Molly.

She was a challenging kid and a disruptive student. Recollecting, I think both parents were awed and her mother was frightened. Not that Molly was violent (except when angry, and then she threw items at walls and not at people). But she was moody and her mother didn’t understand her passions. She constantly accused Molly of lacking common sense. “You may be smart,” Molly’s mom would say, “but you’re stupid when it comes to getting along with people and understanding everyday things.”

I wonder now: was “lack of common sense” the greatest generation’s phrase for “has trouble understanding normal social interactions”? Is Molly’s dislike of surprises really about her needing time to arrange her reaction into an acceptable expression? Just where is my best friend, on the spectrum?