Sputterpub's Blog

“Bathroom’s all yours, Mom.” Sharon strides silk-aswish into her favorite room. She makes music water on water, and lovely in the mirror. She takes a hundred moments to appreciate herself. Then she thinks again about Saul’s prose.

He writes well. She smiles as she imagines for an instant how she’d read him personally. But all that Judaism on Ashkenazim ad nauseam: how does a Jewess tell a Jew, in Jewish Berkeley, to get off it already? enough is enough …

She dabs the China Musk on carefully. From the old Body Shop, before it sold its name. The stuff’s a light oil – lovely scent like old Jade East from the cheeks of junior high boys – and will stain clothes. She puts it behind her ears but high up, away from any scarf, where a nose will have to seek it. She strokes it deep in her cleavage; she hesitates and then, deciding to go without panties, she feathers it at the creases of her thighs.

She leaves the bathroom and has just opened her closet door when the phone rings. Sam answers. Her mother. Sam announces the call to her from downstairs, before leaving the house. He doesn’t let her begin her conversation until he has notified her about where he’s going and when he’ll be back.

“Fine,” she calls down to him cupping the phone in her right hand. “Have fun. I’ll probably be back before you; I’ll certainly be home by ten.” She pulls a black skirt from its hanger clips. “Hi Ma,” she says into the phone.

Her mother as usual calls her Sadie; Sharon has never been able to learn why. She wants to tell Sharon about Aunt Ruth’s elevated blood sedimentation (sediment of what? Sharon wonders, but her mother doesn’t have an answer). Also about returning some sweater set already worn for a year, but Sharon is used to that. Her mother is a master of retail return, and Sharon tends to tune her out when she talks about shopping.

Sharon is wrapping the black skirt around her and thinking about Saul A’s posture and prose. She pulls a cropped cashmere sweater off a shelf, sets it on a chair for when her head is free of the phone. She has nothing to say about Saul’s stream-of-consciousness excursion into Jewish guilt and circumcision, let alone about Aunt Ruth and merchandise returns.

Saul A on the penis. Spear shape. Gear shift knob. Acorn. Circumcision as evidence of the great sociological experiment. If dogs consent to surrender their wildness in exchange for our control of fire (warm hearth, cooked food), then it is not strange that men agree to surrender their wildness for the benefits of our community …

Ah but there’s an edge. There’s the rub. Sharon giggles. “What?” her mother asks.

“Oh. Nothing,” she says but with a smile her mother can hear.

“What’s with you?”

“I have to go, Ma. I have to meet an author for a drink.” She turns the phone off but stands with it in her hand, absentmindedly rubbing the black plastic with the edge of her thumb. She contemplates her little black sweater and concludes of a sudden that she’d be better blonde. She reaches up to her closet shelf for the tousled wig.

Sharon pulls on her sweater and fits it to her upper arms and bra before she settles the wig over her dark hair. “A modern sheitel,” she thinks. Let Mr. A think me orthodox … an orthodoxy.”

One way or the other Sharon hopes to attract him. Just because. It’s that or talk about his writing. And some writers don’t go far enough.

Sharon being the oldest child observed her parents. Being the daughter the reader, she kept a diary. She took notes. She is fortunate to have parents long into her life, and she is able to see them in perspective. Watching from her back her knees her toddling sturdy legs her magical midget self her adolescent rigor her racing worrying maturity, she has witnessed her parents from their twenties to their geriatry, and she has seen them frame their worlds in diminishing portals till everything they view satisfies them in a sad accepting way.

“I will not go gently into that sloping tunnel,” Sharon thinks, envisioning her life as a journey in a cornucopia, “but maybe I’ll go speaking quieter.”

She pushes up from her desk chair. “I will, however, have to get into that bathroom,” and listens for Sam sounds. She thinks he’s out of the shower. “Hey: buddy! Can I get in there soon?” She raises her voice but she doesn’t shout. She is modulating. Sam answers “Just a minute,” and she figures she’ll have the bathroom in five.

She is meeting a local author tonight. She reviews for the neighborhood monthly magazine/newspaper, and this guy Saul A wrote a series of short stories about his family and heritage. Sharon is trying to compose a little literary criticism about the collection, but she has also agreed to have a drink with Mr. A. Tonight. She started with hoping the meeting would inspire her writing. Now she’s hoping for else.

She kind of hates reviewing. She has a bachelor’s degree in English lit but she never read or wrote criticism. She thinks most lit crit is just gossip. It’s okay with Sharon to put the writing in historical or societal perspective. But it’s not particularly useful or germane for her to receive biographical data about the author. Let alone a picture.

She got shanghaied into writing these reviews after the little paper published a couple of her poems. Which poems she only submitted on a dare from her friend David. Not even a dare, really. David must have gotten tired of hearing her read her verses to him. He almost submitted them for her, writing up the cover letter, typing the envelope. She was so gratified at first to be published, even in a neighborhood paper, that she agreed to write the random review. And now here is Mr. A’s Yiddishe yarns.

Or Hebrew hauntings? The stories aren’t stories, and that bothers Sharon. They’re beautifully written, and they’re emotion-jerkers, but they lack plot. Nothing happens. That irks her but she doesn’t want to pan the book.

She sits back instead, and envisions Saul A. He is tall, dark, and slim. She thinks he’s in his early fifties but he still has hair: salt-and-pepper, close-cut, curly. He has dark intelligent eyes and lovely large-nailed hands. Full lips a little sneery.

She thinks she will dress up for this drink. Wear a skirt. She rises and pulls on her thigh-high black stockings under her robe. She walks around her room for a minute, feeling the rub of her inner thighs above the lace top of the stockings, and her mood softens.

Sometimes they go too far. Into the rarified air of their art. Painters do it, with cubes and splashes and excursions into the process. Composers do it, at the edges of variations, around the corners of jazz. Decadents do it, venturing through the borders into the dark side, acclimating to the hideous. And writers, even writers, have been known to go too far to follow … into the offputting paths of later Joyce, or Barth, or worse.

Rand could have stopped with The Fountainhead. She made her point when she had her hero declare that he would die for his beloved but wouldn’t live for her. She didn’t need to write Atlas Shrugged except maybe for herself. And a writing for herself doesn’t need to be published. Vanity.

“Okay if I use the shower?” Her son’s voice pulls Sharon away from her indignant reverie. His deep voice. He is seventeen, but his voice changed with never a crack four years earlier. He is checking to make sure she doesn’t want to get into the bathroom in the next twenty minutes. Sam is very considerate that way. He always tells his mother what he is planning to do, where he plans to go. He always tries to answer her query about when he’ll be back. His frequentest phrase is “Just so you know,” and he as often follows it with a recital of his intentions toward homework as he does with an out-of-the-house itinerary. Sharon never considers what activities that openness might obscure.

“Go ahead, Sam. Have a good shower.” She sends the words over her right shoulder through the study door, and then she starts chewing on her thumb. Nothing tastes better to her than the thickened skin near her fingertips, around her thumbnails and the nails on the first two fingers of each hand. Not the cuticles: no. The almost-calloused skin at the sides of the nails, where she rakes habitually with her ring fingers, where she nibbles and pulls at the tips of her index and middle fingers. She wonders if there is any calorie gain or loss in chewing one’s own skin. It hardly matters though. She can only gnaw a little bit before she pulls off the epi and exposes the dermis, or worse: draws her very blood and has to be careful not to blot it on papers, has to apply pressure squeezing her fingertip together, pushing the torn skin against the nail for an amazingly long time.

She twists her right thumb to her mouth, knuckle forward, and she gnashes her lower teeth against the roughened skin. Loving aloneness and the sound of her son’s shower a room away.

“I want you to speak more quietly.” Sharon remembers her father saying that to her three weeks earlier, seriously, while cupping her chin in his hand. Bossy old father. Always forgetting the space between his body and his kids’… her dad is an intelligent loving man but he sends out too many shoulds, and he usually reacts with indignation instead of humor.

“Take your pick,” she wishes she’d said. “Either I won’t have sex, or I’ll eat the foods you like, or I’ll lower my voice.” And as she wishes that, she knows what he’d choose. They’re old enough now her father would pick the modulated tones.

They’re old enough now she starts to understand her parents, even if they don’t understand themselves. They are bright, somewhat happy, and very complacent; they see themselves eyeglasses off, her right leg cocked ahead of left, his shoulders strong. In fact, Sharon’s mother is impatient/impulsive, burning baked goods and pushing against small barriers, all because she never had the vigor to defy her family orthodoxy. In fact, Sharon’s father tries to govern his children’s bodies because he hasn’t yet had the governance of his own. He has always been too responsible.

Oh but Sharon’s mother and father devoted themselves to raising their children. With maternal impatience and paternal control they took the job seriously. Creatively they everyday expected something to go wrong. And wrong rarely came, but they were always prepared. Sharon’s mother cut her thumb slicing cucumbers the wrong way, but the children were unhurt. Her father’s neck chords stood out in fury when his kids wouldn’t eat mushrooms or eggs, but calamity never struck.

We both slept in a little. I kept thinking about Jase and Lani, and probably the subject kept David up too. It was after 10 when we hit the kitchen, and David started making the usual pancakes and twisted bacon (he bakes it on a broiler pan, but first he spins each strip around itself, so the grease lands in the drip pan and the process is spatterless). Meanwhile I headed out back to consider the pond.

It was a beautiful morning as usual. Sure it costs more to be in the bayarea, but we can enjoy outside just about every day. I’ll take it over the desolation of Jamul any time.

The morning looked good but Brutus didn’t. One portion of the pond bank was smushed as if some critter had been using the water or trying for the fish, but I couldn’t see any marks on him. He was barely swimming though, and his movements weren’t the circles we were accustomed to see. Brutus was wobbling in the water, side to side and even a little bit nose and tail, and he was hardly shifting his pond position at all. He looked sick.

I called David, and he was as mystified as me. We figured it was best to leave Brutus alone for a bit. As David said, the situation was probably going to change, and we just had to wait to see if it would get better or worse. We didn’t think there was a vet around who would make a house call about a carp.

So we ate, read the news, showered, took a look at the shelving idea David had for the garage. Then we figured we’d check up on “the kids.” We knew the procedure would be completed in a couple of hours.

Jase didn’t answer. David has Lani’s cell number so he tried her and she picked up.

Jase didn’t answer because he’d forgotten to bring his phone (typical Jase – he never left a place with all of his stuff). Lani said their drive went all right and the motel room was okay. But she wasn’t comfortable. She hadn’t realized the procedure would take two days, and whatever they’d done yesterday, to get things started, resulted in a surprising amount of pain last night. She said she hadn’t known how emotional the whole deal would be. Like her husband, she revealed absolutely no sign of regret or enlightenment. As far as Jase and Lani were concerned, shitty things just happened to them, either because of the actions of their enemies or due to plain old bad luck.

David was shaking his head in classic avuncular fashion (I’d looked up that word just days ago – uncle-like!) as he hung up the phone and before he reported Lani’s words. “They’re hopeless,” he murmured. “They’ll never change.”

“No strategy?”

“Ach. It’s beyond that. I can’t believe how consistently they’re wrong. So many bad habits. And changing bad habits takes more than strategy and tactics even. It’s a grief issue.”

I looked my question at David and he continued. “A habit is like a best friend. You go to it for comfort, relief, support. Losing it is like the death of a dear one. You have to make room to grieve for what you no longer have. You have to make time too. They say grief takes a year.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve been trying to stop overeating forever. David’s words almost excited me: they were so promising. Immediately I felt some fresh determination.

What with the garage shelves and our trip to the farmer’s market for salad ingredients (David decided to join my new healthy eating campaign), we didn’t check on Brutus for a few hours. He looked worse. Barely moving, starting to list so his starboard side was rising. Brutus was clearly moribund. He looked like he needed euthanasia.

He was too big to flush. Too small to shoot. Not built right to throttle. Neither of us could bear the idea of whacking him on the head. Then I had a brainstorm. Or a lightbulb. An idea.

“Let’s release him.”

David literally goggled at me.

“Let’s get him out of this pit we call a pond, and set him free in the creek.”

“He won’t live.”

“We don’t know that. I mean, it’s certain death if we kill him now, but if we put him in the creek at least he has a chance. At least we don’t have to watch. At least he dies free if he doesn’t make it.”

“It’s a good idea,” David said.

So we fetched the bucket and scooped up Brutus and pond water. We edged onto the creek bank so we could pour him in close to the water. The creek wasn’t flowing hard but there was enough in it so a fish could avoid the rocks.

It felt ceremonial as Brutus flowed into the creek. He moved with the water and our last words to him were “Turn back when you taste salt!”

We both knew as we returned to the kitchen that we wouldn’t renew the pond. That was a fail as designed, and neither of us had the desire to try again.

What we didn’t know was the decision I was about to make. Before dinner I told David that I’ve decided to return to school. I can support myself writing code, even while I study. I know now that I want to learn classical Greek. I need to know more about linguistics, about words. And I may not have an exact plan for my life’s work, but I see a glimmer of strategy and tactics.

I’m certain that I want to swim in a big pond.

Jason is a jerk. He has been angry all his life (I’m only five years older than him, and I remember him rearing back in anger as a babe-in-arms, trying to bite us when he got frustrated, throwing his ever-fattening short body into tantrums even as a young adult). He blames any personal failure on “the man” or on his father my uncle Sam. He’s probably bright enough to do okay, but he’s managed to flunk out of two state colleges (hard to do), and he’s been busted three times for pot.

He moved away from the family, ostensibly because he sought a more rural setting but probably because he couldn’t stand having us know how unsuccessful he is. He took his wife Leilani (they met while eradicating kudzu in Hawaii, when he did a volunteer service gig as part of a pot conviction) and moved to Jamul, which is a hot dry “census-designated place” a few miles north of Baja California. Jase works when he can at coffee shops, tries to get a tattoo business off the ground, and probably runs a fair amount of weed (Lani is attending junior college – there’s no way those two are supporting themselves, even in Jamul, on Jase’s taxable wages).

David picked up details when he called Jase back with the motel arrangements. Lani ran out of birth control pills. She didn’t have money for a refill for about a week. Did they call their clinic to learn how they should handle that lapse? Of course not. Did they take action or even make inquiries when Lani missed her first period? Her second? Her third? Jeez…

It’s all hard to believe. I wonder if the abortion is a Jase idea/obsession, and it took him this long to talk Lani into it? I’m thinking about his temper. Suddenly I have questions about their home life. But Lani doesn’t open up to any of us. She and Jase have this intense one-on-one relationship, and it’s like he forms a perimeter between her and anyone who might care.

David listened, and of course he tried to help. He countered Jase’s “It’s no big deal” with a gentle “Yes, it is, dude. You have to stop treating it like it’s a one-day job. Have you talked to your father about this?”

He didn’t expect Jase to clue in his mother. Aunt Bobbie is a flaming narcissist, and the last person anyone would turn to for advice or help. She describes Lani as the perfect daughter-in-law, the girl she never had, but clearly Lani hasn’t called Bobbie. Jase told David there was no way he’d tell his father – said Sam would “hold it against him” for godsakes, and when David said he was going to talk to me, Jase bleated like a baby “he’ll tell Grandma!” which was so far out of whack David didn’t even comment. All David could do, he told me, was arrange a couple of nights of accommodation for them, so at least Lani would have a chance at comfort and recovery.

We’d lost our appetite for uncle pizza during this talk. We poured a couple of beers and had a few hits off the protopipe (David gets much better stuff at the Harborside than Jase ever brings) and even got into David’s expensive tequila, but our moods didn’t lighten. We couldn’t get over how many bad choices Jase (and Lani) had made.

Even after we got comfortable (“dropped trou” is David’s phrase, and it perfectly captures how good it feels to get out of the jeans at the end of the day, especially for guys like David and me, who carry a bit of extra insulation), even after all of that we were still talking about the situation.

We agreed that David had to tell Sam. We were pretty sure that wouldn’t result in anything – Sam was sure to say “it’s Jase’s problem” and maybe even act uncomfortable about hearing the news – but we both knew we’d want to know, if we were in Sam’s place, and we agreed that David didn’t owe Jase confidentiality. (As I later learned, Sam acted exactly as we predicted when David told him. See, my mother is a confronter, but she’s the oldest of my grandparents’ kids. And David is such a stand-up guy that he’ll sometimes speak up too. But my Uncles Sam and Nate are total avoiders – middle children who learned early how to shine Grandma on and let all stress just roll off their backs).

We got onto the subject of Jase’s so-called business. It’s really pathetic if you ask me. He thinks he’s a tattoo artist, and he has a handful of customers who seem to agree with him. He’s always talking about expanding the business but he never has an actual plan: just ambitious wishes and grudges against anyone he perceives as not supporting him. He even has dreams of forming some sort of club or army – the Ja-Mules, he wants to call it, for location and stubborn determination – but we can’t figure out who the enemy is (I’m always reminded of that “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” question).

David gave a little lecture. “A business plan is like a military campaign,” he said. “Or a political campaign. Or any plan to make a big change in your personal habits.” He started to mulch some weed for the pipe. “They all take strategy and tactics. Strategy is the part the generals plan, in the war room with all the maps. It’s literally the big picture. But tactics are for the field of battle. They are the little moves the sergeants choose, in response to the actual conditions they experience. The problem with Jase (one problem anyway) is he has no strategy. I think he and Lani are pretty good with tactics, but they have no overall plan.”

Those words struck me. I like words and I love it when they grab me so hard I look them up. After David went to bed I went to the dictionary. Strategy comes from “strategos,” which is classical Greek for “general.” And tactics means “touch,” from the same language. It made total sense. It was as satisfying as when I looked up “ichthyology” and learned it was from the Greek “ik-thuse” which means “fish” and that the religious ΙΧΘΥΣ is an acronym for a Greek phrase which translates “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior.” Sweet.

I went to bed.

My uncle David is the nicest guy I know. Mom says that’s because Grandma was depressed when he was little, and David could make her smile by acting cute and lovable, but all of that took place 50 years ago, and Mom’s always quick and loud about analyzing the behavior of those around her, so I haven’t necessarily adopted her view. What I know is that David loves to make people happy, apologizes for bad weather or traffic, and is the person to call when you need a favor.

I know David pretty well. He’s been around all my life. After my mom and dad divorced and Dad moved half a state away with his new wife, it was David who came to my games and took me mini-golfing and bought me the stuff I really wanted. I can’t remember ever calling him “uncle” – he’s always been “David” to me.

I’m not his only nephew. Mom’s two other brothers have supplied me with four cousins and David with a niece and another three nephews. But I always lived closest and spent the most time with him. He’s been more of a father to me than my own, and I guess I’m the closest he’s had to a child of his own.

I’ve stayed at his house a lot. I spent the whole summer here last year, and I’m angling to do it again in four months. As I’ve been telling him, the pond we built together needs work, and I need another break from Mom.

The pond is almost natural. There’s a small year-round creek that runs through David’s back yard, and we dredged a channel from it to the low spot near the side of the redwood deck. It was a challenge to make the thing water-tight because we opted for a plastic liner instead of the recommended concrete pour, but we managed to construct a container almost six feet in diameter, and we stocked it with half a dozen carp.

We didn’t know then how individual fish can be. We had no idea that the big fellow – presciently named Brutus by David – would outgrow all the others and be so dominant and hungry. We suspect he ate his co-residents; within two months he was the only fish in the water. I suggested we restock and watch Brutus more closely. David didn’t disagree but decided we’d wait till spring or even summer to try again.

So Brutus has had the pond to himself this winter. That fish just kept circling, growing fat on David’s fish food and whatever else he could find, and before the end of last month he had finned out so much mud that the connection to the creek clogged. David cleared it a few times – I helped during weekends when I stayed over – but a fish has to keep moving to breathe, and Brutus’s fin action kept clogging the connection.

I arrived last night for a long weekend. Even by the deck light I could see the fresh damage. The pond was measurably smaller.

And Brutus was bigger. As he grows his fin action gets stronger, and he stirs up the mud the pond has acquired since it was dug. The muck settles around the encroaching circumference; the more Brutus swims around the less room he has.

I was pondering the erosive situation when David called me inside for pizza, and I was about to bite into my first wedge of what we call “uncle pie” (pepperoni, sausage, bacon, and peanut butter) when he starting telling me about my cousin Jason.

He wasn’t talking out of school. David and I have no secrets about Jase.

The call had come the night before.

“Funny thing, Uncle D,” was Jase’s opening line. “Well, not exactly funny …”

Lani is pregnant. On the surface that’s not bad news: Jase and Lani are in their late 20s, married, apparently happy, within a family that loves them and loves babies. But Jase said they don’t want to bring kids into this sick world (Lani is a quiet one, new to the country and without friends or family here, so no one knows what she thinks), certainly not now when Lani is in school, probably not ever. They aim to terminate this pregnancy. Not only that, but they just found out that Lani is farther along than they thought. Jase said 16 weeks. (Isn’t a whole pregnancy like 40? Did they really let her get halfway there without doing anything?)

Yes. And now they learn that the San Diego clinic can’t handle an abortion at this stage. They have to come to Oakland for the procedure.

It turns out Jase was calling because he and Lani need a place to crash for a couple of nights. They were driving up today, but I’m using the spare room here. And the living room won’t work for them.

Funny? What’s funny? I’m all for reproductive rights, but I don’t think this is what Mom had in mind when she marched with Planned Parenthood.

David booked a motel room for them. He and his estranged spouse have like a million Starwood points and could get them a room with those. Idiot Jase thought they could drive up, have the procedure done, and then get back in the car for a 10-hour haul home. He even wondered if they could bring the dogs! “Like it’s a field trip,” commented David. He had a look of disapproval on his face that I’ve never witnessed.