Sputterpub's Blog

They only did it the one time. Jill told me she didn’t know why I always commented favorably about Mike in bed; she didn’t find him any great shakes. She went on to other guys and I tried not to receive her reports.

And maybe my lack of enthusiasm for her afterstories is what ended our friendship. Or maybe it was her low self-esteem. I’ve watched her for a long time, and as crazy as it sounds, it’s like she comes to despise anyone who loves her because she’s so convinced that she’s unlovable. The way she sees it, if I like her, then that’s proof that I’m untrustworthy or foolish.

Anyway, our relationship cooled even while she stayed married to Jack. And ten years later, after they finally split, the severance was total.

During that decade I had no reason to think Jill altered her habits. I heard about her affairs early in those years, and after we stopped talking as much, the words I received came from Jack. Their marriage was not open, and I could tell that nothing had changed.

I also knew that Jill had spoken to Jack about Mike. Jack never asked, but Jill volunteered the libels. She told Jack that Mike had come on to her. She reported more than one occasion when she had resisted Mike’s lusty advances.

The way Jack told it to me, Mike had betrayed him. Jack said he used to feel close to Mike – like Mike was the brother Jack never had – “until he came on to my woman.”

Awkward doesn’t describe how I felt. But I had been Jill’s friend; there was no reason to “out” her even though we were estranged. I let Jack’s comments be.

Until the lunch.

Ten years after Mike and I divorced, the excrement hit the ventilation system in the Jack-and-Jill household. Jill left her home computer open while she ran some errands. Jack’s attention was grabbed when he passed their study door and he stepped closer to see the screen. He was slapped in the face (more like batted on the head) when he read the sexy exchange between Jill and some Facebook friend.

He confronted Jill as soon as she returned home. Immediately she confessed that she’d been straying. I thought that was refreshing, when I heard about it. Was she open because she’d come to some epiphany or moment of change? Was she hoping to provoke a declaration or new passion from Jack? I don’t know. He acted reasonable and understanding. He told her he wouldn’t stand in her way if she thought she could be happier with someone else. But he accepted her momentary honesty like it was his own, and it made him assume she was telling the truth in general. So he believed her when she asserted that this was the first time. And she later told a mutual acquaintance that he disappointed her with his reasonableness.

Jack was tolerant but decided not to wear the horns. He asked Jill to move out when she told him she was going to continue to have her own after-work relationships. He asked for a divorce when he realized that he couldn’t agree to the sort of disconnected marriage she said she’d accept.

And so it was. The final decree was about to be issued when Adam came home on winter break and Jack joined us for lunch. Jack had always been more like an uncle to Adam than a cousin. They even look alike.

We tried to make the meal celebratory. Adam was doing well at college. Jack was not happy about the divorce but was trying to view it as the first step in a new life chapter. I had white wine. Jack drank bourbon.

We were most of the way through the meal when Jack narrated the Mike story again. I guess it was supposed to be some sort of avuncular reminiscence about friendship or something, but when he got to the “I used to think of him as my brother until he came on to my woman” line, I had to speak. Jack was talking about Adam’s father.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said, “but that’s not the way it went down. Mike and Jill did do the deed, but it wasn’t just his idea. And he wasn’t the married one. I’m sorry, buddy. I didn’t want to tell you. But I can’t let this lie about Mike go on.”

Jack believed me. He asked Jill about the story that night. Her reaction was profound anger at me. “I can’t believe she told you,” he reported Jill saying. “She was supposed to be my friend. I’m tempted to send her an angry email.”

Of course she hasn’t. I’d welcome a chance to speak to Jill about the incident. I know why I told, and I was justified. What I want to know is why she created that lie.

Jill was an excellent house guest. She was helpful and considerate and appreciative. She got along with my husband and she was great with our son. She was also into a nonsexual cycle, so even when she drank (not much, and more likely then to smoke than drink) she kept her clothes on and her language clean. Mike and I enjoyed her company, and when Jack came by the four of us laughed a lot, played board games, watched TV.

By the time she moved out a month later, she and Jack were a couple. As far as I could tell, they had little chemistry and less sex, but they were both very nice people who enjoyed the company of one another. They were also each insecure, about their educations and body types among other things, and they seemed to develop an alliance or agreement about the hostile world. From then on, even when they quarreled, they seemed to stand back-to-back against a threat (which may have been the reason for little sex).

When they married half a year later, Mike and I were their attendants.

Their partnership prospered in daily tasks and nightly meals, but their romance never flowered. I’m not sure that bothered Jack. It must have gotten to Jill, though, because she soon sought connection beyond their comfortable existence. I was stuck because I was viewed as her closest friend; I saw and heard more than I wanted to, and I was supposed to keep it secret.

She had an affair with the senior partner at our firm (Cliff was sleazy and older than our fathers, but I guess the money and power spoke to Jill). She had sex with the Colombian guy she and Jack hired to help them rehab the house they bought, and that must have cured her of her bigotry because soon after that she told me she’d done her stepfather. She dallied with several of our clients and at least one referral source.

Jill decided not to have children because she’d had such bad mothering. She despised Marge. But the more I knew Jill, the more she resembled what she told me of her mother. Not that I had much to do with Marge. I only met her once besides the wedding events. That was an evening after the four of us had been to dinner. We stopped by Jill’s mother’s apartment to pick up something. Marge had been drinking alone; Jose was on a business trip. When Jill opened the door with her key, we surprised her mother in the act of admiring her own legs. Marge was flat on her back on her couch, left foot on the upholstered backrest and right foot straight up in the air.

“Hi kids!” she almost sang out from her supine position. “See: I still haven’t lost it. I think that’s one fine leg.” And she remained with her feet up and apart, flashing us all her black panties. Yeesh. (Even worse: after that evening Jack told me that Marge had slipped him some tongue when she kissed him goodbye.)

Nobody’s marriage lasted. Mine was the first to end, two years later. Mike and I were amicable about it (splitting up the kitchen reminded me of choosing street baseball teams when I was a kid). We agreed to share custody of then 8 year-old Adam, and we each sought new partners. The divorce was my idea, and I was happier about it than Mike was. I had my hands full as a single working mother, and I took some time finding my next husband. Mike entered a depressive phase. He started drinking nightly. He dated like a maniac, and he proposed to any woman who looked favorably on him. He was desperate to acquire a new mate.

There was a two year period between the divorce decree and Mike’s second marriage. I know Mike was unhappy but those were Adam’s best times with his dad. Mike had time for him when they were together. He made his son his best buddy. Adam still talks about staying up to watch SNL, about experiments with pancakes and food coloring, about things they built together. After Mike remarried he didn’t make much time for Adam, and the bedroom in the new house became more the property of his new stepbrother than his own.

It was probably inevitable, but early in the two year period of Mike’s singleness, he and Jill had a night together. I know because they kept calling me.

Really. It outdid any tackiness from Marge. They started in a bar after work, and I’m sure the phone calls were Jill’s idea. The first one came when they were about an hour into cocktails and had decided to cab over to Mike’s Mission District apartment. Jill called me with that sex-slur in her voice, and I could hear Mike kibitzing in the background.

I received another call half an hour after they got to Mike’s place, and then a third giggling bit of salaciousness a little after. Meanwhile Jack phoned asking if I knew where Jill was. Of course I lied.

Maybe I’m in denial (not!), but I don’t think Mike and Jill were battling an attraction when we co-habitated, to which they finally succumbed. The truth is, Jill was always way too interested in my sex life; she seemed to want to sample anything I had experienced. And Mike was just plain desperate like a puppy with any woman who said yes.

I tell you, these people are crazy. I’m surrounded by dysfunction, and I’m not going to take it wordlessly any more.

I have tried to suspend judgment. I have concluded that people read one another, and I’ve ceased harboring negative opinions about the behavior of those around me. But I will explode if I suppress it any longer. I must sputter.

It hardly matters. I’m not likely to publish this and even if I did, it would attract few readers and none who know these characters. I have learned to cherish my nonentity, like I have learned to appreciate ineffective communication.

I’m a hyper-adult who grew up at age 5, so I carry a loud child within me. I do not perceive affect, and I don’t attract it. Nothing but honesty and clarity make sense to me. I love fairness.

I’ve got family members with impulse control problems. A few with anger management issues. We’ve managed to marry into a lot of booze. Self-delusion is rampant. Most of my loved ones seem to crave murkiness or at least think there’s no getting rid of it. They don’t use words carefully or lovingly. Their perceptions are alien to me.

Take Jill.

For the longest time I didn’t think a woman would gratuitously lie about a man’s sexual aggression. Whatever for? How could she live with her self-image after? Sure I could understand a girl who felt she had to lie to family about her sexual activity to save her own life, but I assumed no woman would volunteer an untruth just to make trouble for a man. So I doubted the Bible story about Potiphar’s wife accusing Joseph of rape. And all the other myths about a rejected woman’s perjury.

Then I met Jill. The poster child for low self-esteem. The bar skank with a heart of gold. My cousin-in-law.

She wasn’t my cousin-in-law when I met her. She was my (subordinate) co-worker. I felt protective of her because she was a farm girl set loose in the big city, placed at my firm by my college roommate. I tried to look out for her.

That was hard to do. She moved fast and drank faster. She was heated and hot every night, and filled with remorse every morning. It was hard to watch and it didn’t last long.

She tried to kill herself four months after I met her.

Her mother was worse than she was. I hadn’t even met Marge but I knew from Jill that she liked to drink and flirt and had recently married her third husband, a Latino man between her age and Jill’s. Jill had developed an anti-Chicano bias in her valley school days, so she wasn’t receptive to Jose. After she downed a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of vodka Marge called me.

“Jill’s in SF General,” she said. “They’ve got her on a 72-hour hold. You’re going to have to take care of her now. I have a husband to attend to, and he and Jill don’t get along.”

I was beyond astounded. It was the most blatant example I’d yet experienced of parental abnegation. The Greatest Generation: more interested in its own gratification (“we were robbed of our youth”) than in its responsibilities…

What could I do? I picked Jill up and took her to my place. I rolled joint after joint and told her she could end her life if she wished. I pointed out that she was going to get dead sometime anyway, and maybe she should hang on for whatever good days were available between now and then. I made up the guest room for her and she moved in with us for a few weeks. That’s how she met my cousin Jack.

Yes. Jack and Jill. Proof that I’m not making this up; any editor would blue-pencil those names.

Annie saw the periodontist again a month ago. He poked and scraped, knocked and gouged, and then sat back and said, “Will you consider a nightguard?”

She felt sardonic. “Probably not,” she replied. “Why?”

“Your teeth show signs of the wear that comes from grinding.”

“We’ve been through this before,” she reminded him. “I used to grind. I remember the headaches. I taught myself not to do it any more. Those must be signs of old grinding.”

“Hmmm,” said the periodontist. He did a quarter spin on his stool, and then turned back to her with his metal hand mirror. Annie marveled at the little tool – it never fogged up – but not as much as she admired the above-chair light that didn’t blind her but always provided the illumination the dentist wanted. “Hold this,” he said as she expected.

She took the mirror handle in her right hand and positioned it in front of her mouth. The periodontist pointed to an area in her front lower right. “Now gnash your upper and lower teeth till they mesh,” he directed.

She complied. It took a second before she managed to make her teeth meet perfectly. Then she was arrested by what she saw. The only way to get her upper and lower front teeth to come together without a space was by moving her lower jaw to the left, like a camel chewing. She still couldn’t believe she was gnashing in her sleep, but she had to admit that significant wear had occurred. She left the periodontist’s office without a nightguard or a plan to acquire one, but with a definite impression.

Several hours later, at home, she thought she was relaxing. She sat on her favorite chair, TV on in front of her and iPad by her side, soft munchies and soda water within reach. Unconsciously she brought her right thumb to her mouth in order to remove a flap of hard skin. As she clamped her front teeth on that skin tag, as she prepared to tug sideways, her body remembered. She realized she had just put her jaw into the precise position she’d seen in the dental chair.

Epiphany! In a flash Annie realized that she wasn’t sleep-grinding. She was awake-grinding. She didn’t need a night guard. But she needed something.

It wasn’t rocket science. She sure wasn’t going to walk around publicly with gear in her mouth. The only course of action for Annie was to stop contorting her mouth. And the only way to stop contorting her mouth was to stop eating her own fingers. Really. She loved chewing her skin so much that she even considered using a cuticle nipper to trim and then (disgusting!) munching the removals. But she didn’t have the close vision necessary to use a nipper with precision. She was not going to don reading glasses and find good light to persist in her nasty habit. She was finally done.

As she got older Annie became self-conscious about the activity and its traces. Of course she tried to break the habit, and sometimes – in a vacation environment – she’d leave her hands alone long enough to see healing, to feel softening, to plan on a future with lovely unpicked fingertips. But then some stressor or good book would absorb her and before she understood what she was doing, she’d make inroads on the skin of her right thumb (it always started there). Another word for “inroad” is “invitation,” she came to realize. For soon after she injured her thumb with her teeth she created a fresh hard spot, that became impossible to ignore, that her index and middle fingers found. Then her teeth joined the party, and she had ragged flesh again.

She wondered if there was any nutritional value in her own skin. Was it protein? Carb? She figured it was a fat-free snack. Was there a calorie gain or loss? Did it cancel out? Did she remove with her teeth the exact value she ingested? She and some friends had used the Internet to learn that one couldn’t be sickened by eating one’s own shit, but she couldn’t find information about finger-munching. (No one was deliberately dining on excrement…that question came up during a discussion about bathroom contamination. They’d all heard about the perils of lidless toilets, paper towel dispensers, hand-dryers, and door handles; one could breathe germs or accidentally ingest excrement that got on one’s hands – and then came the question could one get sick from one’s own poop? and they read that the answer was “no” – one’s excrement matched one’s GI tract – so they wondered why the flushing paranoia extended to the homes of those living alone.)

Annie’s ultimate cure, as it turned out, had little to do with will power or determination. Her mouth started to rot. She was diagnosed with periodontal disease when she was 50, and it turned out to be chronic and severe. She had always followed dental protocol (she can still recite the words from the old Crest package, back when the brand bragged that it was the only paste approved by the American Dental Association). She saw the dentist once or twice a year and engaged in all recommended oral hygiene activities, but she had root proximity in her upper jaw and some components in her saliva that were like manna to the anaerobic bacteria that create plaque. She learned to endure painful deep professional cleaning, she used special toothpaste and brushes, she spent much time and more money wrestling her condition into almost remission (slowing its progression anyway), but her mouth grew ever more tender and her teeth felt loose even when still in bone. She stopped eating unsliced apples. She no longer enjoyed corn on the cob. It became uncomfortable for her to really go after a piece of thumb skin. She started noticing. She started stopping.

Meanwhile, amid the regular trips to the dentist and periodontist, injected into their periodontal comments almost like a nonsequitor, her examiners would occasionally theorize that Annie was grinding her teeth in her sleep. The nightguard suggestion was made several times.

She resisted. In fact she refused. She was a light sleeper and she didn’t want to add any paraphernalia to the experience. She used to clench; for a period of almost a year in her mid-30s she had headaches that she ultimately attributed to jaw-clenching. She began then to do exercises to relax her jaw and neck. She knew how unattractive it looked, pressing her chin into her upper chest to stretch her neck, but she did it, at home. And she trained herself to keep her teeth apart while she slept, and to check her jaw position first-thing, whenever she woke. She still sometimes clenched, but she didn’t press her jaws together any more.

And it came to pass that Annie learned to leave her fingertips alone. She was 65. She had started snacking on her own skin before she was 12. A mere half century or so.

She wasn’t born with the habit. Like other babies, she arrived with ten fingertips and no teeth. And even after she cut some teeth and learned to use them, her fingertips were too soft to be satisfying. She munched on her nails.

Her mother tried to stop her. Of course. Annie’s mother was the fidgiest person Annie ever knew, but she wouldn’t allow it in her daughter. “Stop that,” she’d snap. “That looks ugly. If you keep doing it, your face will get stuck that way.” Or she would remove Annie’s hand from her mouth. Sometimes the removal was gentle. Mostly it was like a smack or a swat. Neither words nor motions worked.

Then Annie’s mother bought a substance that was supposed to deter any nailbiter. It came in a polish-type bottle but it wasn’t pretty. It was Crayola flesh-colored, with a bad smell when it was wet. The odor disappeared when the substance dried, but the stuff had a terrible taste, according to the words on its packaging. It might have worked if Annie’s mother had applied it carefully. But she was an impatient woman and she claimed to have no manual skill (her hobby was paint-by-number sets – “why I can’t even draw a circle!”), and she glopped the stuff onto Annie’s nails so clumsily that it dried in thick lumps. It was satisfying for Annie to pick off. Almost as good as biting her nails after the coating was gone.

In time Annie matured. She didn’t exactly give up her digital habit, but she exchanged it for an improved nibbling experience. She started noticing how ugly nailbiting appeared when others did it. There were several in her classroom, and she saw how they had to twist their fingertips to get the right angle, how they screwed up their lower faces to get the job done. And they were developing ugly fingers, with pillows of flesh around their short nails. She didn’t want to look like that.

Annie was an avid reader. She’d get into a story and then notice that she was nail-nibbling. She determined she’d keep her hands away from her mouth. She tried wearing gloves (that didn’t work because it felt too unnatural). Several times she put her hands under her butt to keep them away from her face. That didn’t work either. But the attempts had effect; Annie began to be able to sit without biting her fingernails.

For awhile. She couldn’t seem to totally quiet her hands. She soon found herself raking her index fingers against the sides of her thumbs. She’d make a rough spot and keep raking. Over time that activity roughened her thumb skin. Then there was more to rake at. Her middle fingers might get involved. Maybe even her ring fingers. It wasn’t long before the rough skin was bitable. Annie bit.

Promptly she acquired a taste for the callused skin. She nibbled, pulled, bit, tore. Sometimes she went too far, ripping a cuticle or otherwise drawing blood. Then she had to press and lick to avoid a stripe of scab. Unsightly. But if she didn’t bite deep, her habit wasn’t visible on her fingers. Unless her hands were soaked. She tended to hide her hands when she emerged from a swimming pool.