Sputterpub's Blog

Dinah read once that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. She loved her friend, but Annie could have been a poster child for the epigram. She’d never had a plan. She’d never made a change that wasn’t thrust upon her by familiar or health conditions.

Annie had sent an email to Jeff two months earlier. That communication resulted in a lunch which ended with cocktails at Annie’s condo. She followed up with a telephone call. She invited him to continue what had been interrupted so long ago.

He was still solidly married. No one would accuse him of domestic happiness, but it appeared that he had signed on for the duration. However, he gracefully accepted her invitation. He began visiting Annie after work once or twice a week. He never initiated anything, including sex, but he was as accommodating as his caution and discretion allowed. They enjoyed daily telephone calls. According to Annie, they fell back in love.

Dinah was demi-disgusted.

It’s always trying to be around an infatuated person. Every lovesick adolescent is tiresome, and the condition grows more unattractive to witnesses as the participants age. To Dinah, Annie of late was silly, besotted, moony and most of all boring. She talked about Jeff like he was some sort of hero instead of a spineless adulterer. She seemed unable to stop herself from sharing his sweet talk or even his possessive or sexual declarations. It was a challenge for Dinah not to gag. Classic TMI.

But more than that, Dinah was struck by Annie’s attempts to rewrite her own opinions and potential. After Annie stopped doing married guys around 1980 and settled into her sad relationship with the alcoholic, she came down with both feet on marital cheating. She spoke with disdain about any adulterous situation, equally disapproving of married and unmarried participants. Somehow a few months ago that philosophy disappeared like it had never existed. It was swamped by a new conclusion: based on how happy Annie was in Jeff’s arms, she declared that she was put on this planet to love, that she was above all else a natural-born lover, and that her need for love overrode every other consideration.

Dinah heard Annie help herself to a glass of something before she mounted the stairs to the study. Her footsteps clacked on the hallway floor before she appeared in the doorway. She set her glass on the masonite pull-out at the left side of Dinah’s old oak desk, and she perched on the front of the rocking chair. After a few perfunctory social tropes she launched into a report about seeing Jeff the day before.

“That’s why I didn’t come by last night,” she explained. “I was too tired and relaxed after seeing him. I always feel so good after seeing him. In so many places.” Annie sat back then and made her mouth into a sort of leer. “He may not be a good husband,” she suggested, “but he’s the absolute best boyfriend.”

Dinah responded without words.

“And it’s the same for me,” Annie said. “I’m a really good girlfriend, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been a good wife.”

“What are you talking about?” Dinah blurted. “What makes you say that?”

Then it was Annie’s turn for wordless response.

“No really. What makes you say that?” Dinah swivelled in her wooden desk chair. “You would have made a great wife. You never wanted to work. You wanted to make a home for your man. You more than anyone I know would have enjoyed curling up at his slippered feet after he returned home, hearing about his day.”

“You think?”

“I know. But you saying that reminds me of a similar statement my brother has made more than once. He as much as says he wouldn’t have been a good father.”

“Mark? He would have been a great dad! I mean, look at the fabulous job he does uncle-ing. Is that a word?”

Dinah chuckled. “It probably should be. Anyway, I completely agree with you. It wasn’t his idea not to have children. I remember how he collected Dad-stories and mementos to pass on to his future kids. But now it’s like he’s trying to revise his past so his present is consistent with it or something.”

“Does he actually say he would have been a bad father?”

“No. That’s more Barb’s line, about herself. Like her relationship with her mother was so toxic she doesn’t want to take a chance on repeating it. Mark’s claim is not as jarring as that. He keeps saying that when he’s around an infant he has no desire to cuddle it, but he can’t resist picking up a puppy.”

“But most men don’t have baby love till they meet their own…”

“Tell me about it. That’s what I keep saying to him. But my words are not changing his.”

It wasn’t Annie’s subject so she changed it. She had other ideas on her mind. The two friends discussed new shoes and the elaborate plans for an old friend’s daughter’s wedding shower and the current state of another friend’s divorce trials (literally: the once-loving couple had now been in litigation for six years) and what shirts Annie wanted to buy for Jeff (that was the last conversational straw for Dinah). Then Annie betook herself home.

Dinah was about done with the day. She pulled the old train off the siding and discovered it no longer had much steam. She discovered a few fresh optimisms in herself, about her future, and she decided she’d like to meet her 2025 self.

And she wondered a little more about her Mark’s and Annie’s self-derogatory interpretations. She even tried to run some for herself. Could she say she would have been a bad stay-at-home mom? Could she figure she would have performed less well if she’d tried to make a living at art?

She couldn’t say or think those opinions. But Dinah was pretty sure that either of those alternative courses would have been boring.

She thought about Dinah-2005. She tried to summon up an image of her. She glimpsed someone who had strands of still-dark hair around her face. A body ten pounds lighter than Dinah in 2015, housing a mind more unhappy with her own shape than now.

Dinah-2005 assumed that she had started down the slope toward old age and that the slide was going to be constant. She misplaced a noun then, here and there, and noticed that she sometimes forgot what she was about to say, and she worried she was treading the path toward dementia, like her father, even though he gave no sign of losing it till he was 77. Dinah-2005 didn’t know then that the slide isn’t constant. Her face wrinkles hadn’t deepened as much as she feared they would in the decade since. Her word/idea loss didn’t worsen. She now understood that aging included a number of plateaus.

Back in 2005 Dinah certainly knew her retriever was sick, old and not going to last much longer. But she didn’t know that the dog’s death would be so much more civilized than her father’s. She didn’t anticipate how sensible would be that vet-administered shot, after a tranquilizer, in a comfortable room, her arms around her dying pet. She had no idea how dreadful it would be to watch her father’s body starve to death in a hospital bed, where she provided similar brow kisses and passionate words of assurance but felt disconnected from the process and cold amid the hospital protocols. She wouldn’t have guessed before going through those deaths that her dog grief would be sharper than the bereavement she suffered when she lost a dear parent who had actually departed six years earlier, and she knows now that the real estate changes were as much triggered by the emptiness in the post-dog house as by the desire to provide better housing for and better visits with her daughter’s family.

Dinah-2015 then tried to inhabit Dinah-2005. She sat back in her desk chair, closed her eyes, and dreamed backwards. That 55 year-old phantom was harder to catch than memories of elementary school. But after a few minutes she managed to engender a specter of her old self.

The specter was ill. Wasn’t 2005 the winter of the nonstop cold? Wasn’t that when she thought she’d never feel vibrant and energetic again? She happened to chat with a doctor client and honestly answered his “how are you?” in January. He asked her a few questions and prescribed penicillin. She balked, then as now leery of white market drugs. “Why should I take an antibiotic for a cold?” He told her it wasn’t for the cold. He explained that her immune system was so busy fighting the cold that various opportunistic bacteria were having a heyday in her. He said the penicillin would give her body a break and let it dump the cold virus. That made so much sense she filled the prescription.

But she wasn’t sure that was 2005. She remembered sitting at her office desk for that call, and the furniture arrangement was more like 1999, or 1995. She wasn’t feeling any thrill of accomplishment about her ability to recall ten years ago. She thought that she probably felt old then, and somewhat hopeless.

Anyway, next she made a try at imagining ten years hence. Her son will or will not become a father in the next decade. Her grandkids will be 19, 17, 15. But that’s about them: who and how will Dinah be? She’ll probably stop working and that will mean changes in how she spends her days. Her teeth will probably continue to give her problems; she forecasts consequential changes in diet.

Her train of thought was then interrupted – shunted to a long siding – by a rap at her door.

She started to get up when she heard the open/close sounds and knew it had to be Annie. Dinah’s kids no longer lived nearby, but her best friend did. Annie had a key and a custom of dropping by almost every evening. She had given up her day job a decade ago when her father passed and she inherited enough to live on; she had lots of time on her hands and enough loneliness that her visits were near-daily.

She also had enough loneliness to re-up with her old married lover. They went back 35 years, to the late 1970s when they were young and pretty. Even then Jeff had been married, solidly if not happily. Annie was single then (still is, but back then everyone including she thought it was just a temporary condition before husband, home and babies). She was good-looking and classically vivacious; she enjoyed a few drinks after work and lapped up the attention of the ambient men.

Their early affair lasted about a year. Jeff then went back to commuting home after work, and Annie turned to other guys and a lingering relationship with a depressive alcoholic Catholic from Chicago. Days grew into weeks that amounted to months that became years and decades.

Mark dropped Dinah off after a full day. They worked in what had been their father’s office, so they spent almost as much time together as married folks. In fact, they’d been taken for a couple a number of times, by people who noticed them on the streets or in local restaurants, and they’d been commended for appearing to be one of the happiest pairs around. “You two are always laughing,” was a typical comment, sometimes followed by a statement like “You obviously enjoy one another. You’re like my model of marital happiness.”

The speaker was always surprised and then pleased/relieved to learn that Mark and Dinah are siblings. The statement might be “Oh, that explains it!” The thought was likely “Whew – now I feel better about my own home scene.”

They were like a platonic couple. They spent weekdays together, traveled on business, and didn’t mind socializing away from work, with each other and their extended family. So they heard each other’s stories a lot.

Like at lunch. They were dining alone so it’s not like Mark repeated himself because it would be new words for a guest’s ears. Once again he said it was just as well that he’d never had kids. This time Dinah didn’t argue with him. She didn’t agree with him either. She just shifted the subject back to the work issue that had sent them to a lunch with wine in the first place.

It wasn’t till sometime after he dropped her at her condo, transporting her with the food items they picked up after work instead of leaving her to her usual bus, that his retro-assessment recurred to her. She’d been thinking lately about the nature of ego and self-knowledge.

That started with a recent news item about how people consider their future selves. Dinah heard that some neuroscientists applied sensors to subjects’ heads and then showed the subjects pictures of loved ones and of people they didn’t know. The screens revealed that one part of the brain fired when looking at a familiar face, and another section was activated when gazing at a stranger.

Then the neuroscientists asked the subjects to envision themselves, ten years in the future. The stranger portion of their brains went to work.

Dinah was stunned. It made her realize that she’d never considered her future self. Like anyone else she’d had childhood aspirations about love, marriage, career, fame. Like most others she had a bucket list, and maybe that meant thinking about how she’d act in awhile. But she’d never asked herself how her future self was likely to be.

She had a couple of qualities rare among her peers. When her friends said “Well, you never know what you’d do if confronted with a challenge like so-and-so’s,” Dinah disagreed. She had a solid personality and a good idea of exactly what she’d do. That made her think she might be more able than many to forecast her future self. And she kept a journal regularly enough that she could do spot research about her past. She wondered if examining the self of ten years ago might lend perspective on the self to come.

So in spring of 2015, Dinah embarked on an investigation into Dinah-2025. She started one evening with the notes she found about 2005.

She’d been 55 then. Single for 15 years, her kids were launched and she was alone with a medically challenged dog. Her daughter was pregnant for most of the year.

That was the spring when Dinah fell on her ass on the brick walkway to her house. She didn’t know it then, but the impact would result in the herniated disk between L3 and L4 that presented itself the following year, and eliminated high-impact exercise from her life.

It was the summer when she first sought cosmetic dermatology. She’d seen the doctor before, about a few bumps that required removal and once about a cyst at the back of a knee, but ten years ago was when she had her first Botox injection (in the approved location, between her brows), bought her first miracle cream, subscribed to her first program of clinically-approved exfoliants. Why, she even attempted her own before-and-during shots, but a decade ago was a little before the explosion of smart phones and selfies, and Dinah wasn’t good enough with her digital SLR to capture the subtle improvements, if any, on her face.

It was that autumn when her fledgling nonprofit, in partnership with a bigger organization, cut the ribbon on the one inclusive housing project they were able to complete. Dinah had been involved in the project from before the beginning, and she was one of the speakers at the grand opening. She prepared a five-minute talk and even rehearsed it in front of her home mirror. As it turned out, she rocked. Hers was the speech best received. That experience made her conscious of being “on” when she was in public; she started paying more attention to how she walked and to her facial expressions.

And that was the winter when her first grandchild was born. Dinah promptly grew a heart chamber for Abby, and swore that she would never love another as much as she adored this grandbaby (she would be just as astounded two and then five years later, when Abby’s siblings arrived, and each of them immediately excavated a new room in Dinah).

Robert wasn’t attracted to me either. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d been in a relationship with a woman for twenty years and even married her when she was terminally ill (the poor woman managed to get the sort of rare killer breast cancer that doesn’t show up on a mammogram and does present with pain as a symptom), the folks in our group would have concluded he was gay. In fact, some of them concluded that anyway. Personally, I think the man was asexual (or maybe one of the recently-named demisexuals in our midst). As far as I could tell, Robert just didn’t seek intimacy with another person. He once told me that he’d acquired a video on self-love – I guess he wasn’t without libido – but I never saw an inkling of any lust in him.

Robert was the only person I ever knew who used the word “excrescence” in normal speech and correctly pronounced “desultory.” He was the only peer I ever had who owned a grand piano. He used to play Gershwin for me when I came to his house for dinner. I remember sitting on his angular sofa, my head bent back over the square cushion, lost in the way the tones rang in his living room.

The rest of the room wasn’t spectacular. Robert had beautiful rugs but there were too many and they overlapped like a Bedouin tent. He’d hung a few expensive well-lit paintings on the walls but they were all still-life scenes of flowers and vegetables. The furniture was uncomfortable and the drapes were dark and dull. But that piano gleamed like a magic lamp. Its lines were pure elegance. Its tones were in tune.

Then Robert began to lose his mind. He was six years older than I (I would have said “than me,” but he in his prime would have corrected me), and at first I considered it normal for him to misplace a few nouns in his speech. But when he told me he thought he was losing it, and he mentioned the brain exercises he was doing to try to keep it, and one of those exercises was attempting the Chronicle commuter crossword puzzle (this from a guy who used to do the NY Times puzzle in ink), I started paying attention.

He often had a look of confusion, about normal social interactions. He started to trip a lot when walking, and then it appeared he was having other balance problems. He lost so many common words that he started stammering and often avoided talking. He stopped trying to translate French stories. He exchanged reading for watching movies at home, and almost scared me and his other friends with the number of films he screened (I remember him bragging that he’d watched one hundred eighty-four movies in a month).

One evening he fell down his own basement stairs. It must have taken him an hour to crawl up to the kitchen and work the phone. He had a broken right wrist and he knocked out a bicuspid. In the gap months before the implant his mouth resembled a portion of his own piano keyboard, with that black space between his ivories.

The accident prompted us to get him checked out. That process landed him and his best friend Fred at the Mayo clinic. The diagnosis was acute progressive aphasia. Too ironic. Too awful. The most articulate individual I ever met was losing his ability to speak.

There was more to it. There was clear memory loss and the balance issue. It was only a matter of time before we’d have to intervene and remove him from his house.

We got him to stop driving. Soon he gave up playing music. When he stopped responding to texts and emails, Fred and I decided to visit.

My heart clutched at the first smell. Even from the front door it was obvious that housecleaning and bathing weren’t happening. The sunlight scattered storms of dust motes. And Robert didn’t respond to our voices. Not even when Fred yelled.

As hard as I try to remember Robert smart and healthy, even after five years I can’t get that last sight of him out of my head: crouching like Fred and I wouldn’t see him, face pushed into his bony knees, in plain sight under his grand piano.

I met Meredith when I was thirty-four. Almost mid-span. I wasn’t viewing the number as significant but my mother was, and she and my dad decided to take their first-born on a trip before the thirty-fifth anniversary of their parenthood. We booked two rooms on an Alaska cruise.

My divorce from Jim had been finalized a few months earlier. We were less easy friends but still friendly, and I felt comfortable leaving the kids with him.

My parents had an outside stateroom, with round windows looking out on gray water and blue ice. Mine was an inner single room. It was dark like a sensory deprivation tank when the lights were out, quiet like a grave. I didn’t want to be in that room except to sleep and dress, so immediately after unpacking I took to the deck. On my third revolution I saw Meredith, in a deck chair gazing westward. On my fourth revolution we began to speak. By the sixth time around, pacing in natural unison, we were M & M and infatuated.

We made a corny pair. M was the child of a Jewish mother and a Yiddische character actor, raised in New York hotels and Catskills resorts while I was sampling suburbs. We were the piano player for the cruise and one of the guests.

M was then thirty-eight, tall, with thick brown hair. Long-faced, sad-eyed, wide-mouthed. His teeth were white as milk. We stayed up most nights for hours after the show, for hours after we closed the upper bar that swelled with passengers requesting old favorites on the piano and then exhaled them to their staterooms happily humming what they sought. We drank gallons of coffee and retired to M’s room, better than mine, where we cuddled like a braid and told each other old bad jokes and gossiped about Henny Youngman.

We had exhaustive, exploring, incomplete sex. Perhaps it was the coffee or the clean strangeness of the Alaskan air, but we spent most of our time adoring each other’s face. I took an obsessive interest in lovely teeth, and then had to learn that a mouth of such beautiful enamel was anchored in disease-ridden gums. It was my first exposure to lurking periodontal disease. M in turn became fascinated with my eyelids.

We stayed up almost all night, but we always separated a few hours before dawn. It wasn’t that we were being discreet, although we weren’t blatant either. It was that M needed a few hours, between playing and sleeping, in which to compose music.

There was a climactic concert on the last night of the cruise. That was the evening the meal ended with a parade of baked Alaskas (really), and the show pulled out all stops. Afterward, M sold cassettes of past piano performances, autographed of course. I didn’t have to pay for mine. But when I asked for an autograph, M looked up at me with surprise and cracked, “And what should I write? ‘Best Wishes’?”

Because of course it made no sense for M to autograph it. Of course we were going to see one another again. Of course.

That was twenty-five years ago. We never even talked again. I think we each got busy with our separate lives. I stopped missing M and started writing lyrics to the music I imagined him composing. Softly imagined piano.

I wasn’t done with pianos or with men. In my mid-forties I met Robert. We were introduced by a mutual friend who was his partner in their small law firm. Our friend was an incurable romantic and hoped we’d fall in love.

That didn’t happen. Robert had a compact body and a way of crossing his arms over his chest and his legs knee-over-knee that seemed too feminine to me. He had the biggest vocabulary I ever encountered, but he also couldn’t resist correcting my grammar, which I found obnoxious. And except for a petulant kind of fussy anger, he didn’t seem to have any passions.

But he was well-read and voiced intelligent opinions. He knew art, wines, fine rugs, and opera, and he liked to teach what I wanted to learn. We were both single and living in the same town, and there were five years when we saw one another regularly, for walks, dinners, shows.

So I was gratified when he asked me to the Winter Ball. And I felt like a bit of a celebrity with him. He knew the band, and I didn’t mind when he interrupted our dancing to help with their equipment. I minded even less when I had to sit a number out while he played the electric piano for them. Immediately after that, when he took me in his arms and we two-stepped around the floor to his friends singing “Yesterday,” I knew most of the other kids were watching us and had one of the peak social moments of my adolescence. He whisper-sang the lyrics and I pretended he meant the words. Finally he murmured “Melody” (which is my name because, my father says, it’s what a pretty girl is like), and I’ll admit my knees got a little weak.

We stayed till the end of the dance. Jim helped the band pack up. We were invited to some sort of party but he gave his friends a noncommittal response. His hand pushed my damp dress against the small of my back as he guided me out the door and toward his maroon Corvair. He drove to the outlook near the prison, parked with the lights-on-water view out my side, and naturally lay his right arm along the back of my bucket seat as he leaned to see the skyline out my window. “Hey,” he said softly, and I felt his breath against my cheek. I turned to him, his lips arrowed in, and I couldn’t help it: I ducked.

He was quite annoyed. He drove me home without any discussion. But we resumed conversation the next week and friendship the week after that, when he called and sought my advice about how to ask Gretchen to the game. We both went to Cal, and we even fooled around a little with opiates and hallucinogenics and genitals, now and then when our significant others were not around. It was a surprise, to me at least, that we got together romantically after all. But it was fun.

We married when I was twenty-one and Jim was twenty-three. I thought we did it because it would hurt our parents too much if we cohabitated, but Jim apparently had more traditional reasons. I thought our deal was to strip off the covers and really know one another and, through knowing one another, know ourselves, but it turned out that Jim made a different deal. I thought we were going to keep exploring and he thought the time had come to tuck ourselves in.

For before we married, Jim was a continual grin at me with his sensuous mouth. His eyes and his teeth sparkled as he bicycled, unicycled, flew, hiked, camped, drove, built, fixed, disassembled. He played the piano, the organ, the concertina, harmonica. He built a clavichord and refurbished a harpsichord. He discovered Scott Joplin and learned to play syncopated rhythm. He could construct anything I could draw.

But after our wedding, he was diverted from adventure and keyboards, to home repair and computers. He stopped innovating and he smiled less. He grew hemorrhoids. He began to have frequent nightmares about losing all his teeth.

I had never lost my fear of dentists. I brushed twice a day and I flossed every night. I understood the horror of Jim’s nightmares. What I couldn’t understand was his propensity to skip nighttime brushing. He’d let himself nod out on our bed while watching TV. Finally I’d push at him to get out of his clothes. Brushing his teeth was clearly out of the question. He’d slink under the covers like a ten-year-old boy getting away with something. That’s how it seemed to me. Then he’d have the toothless nightmare and expect comfort from me.

It got to where he just wasn’t sexy any more. He wasn’t making music and he wasn’t adventuring. He never felt well. He never felt good. Our sex became less frequent and more pallid. He wanted to work on the relationship, and I wanted him to work on him. Not “work” exactly: I wanted Jim to figure out what would make him happy. He said the only thing he wanted was for me to be happier. He only wanted me to look around and see that what we had was as good as it got. I didn’t get that. Still don’t.

My other boy cousins were so into sex by then that they were tiresome. Most of them were around sixteen and having enough wet dreams that their libidos were a new topic between their mothers. I knew this because, being female, I was supposed to associate with my aunts and mother in the kitchen, where I could not help but hear. Kitchen time was one of the many expectations I rebelled against, but even so I spent some with the women, more than the boys did anyway. Once I was warned not to answer a chorus of cousinly summons; my mother intercepted me on the way into the house and told me to stay with her, because she’d overheard several of my cousins conspiring to get me in the bathroom and strip me. Boys are curious, she explained, and they will be boys.

My mother told my aunts and they corralled my cousins somehow. But Mark wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Mark and I were special. In fact, he came around right after that event, smiled with his even white teeth, hugged me in his strong arms, and took me back to his place, where we talked and he played piano till the others fetched us for dinner.

Then it got complicated. Mark started really mooning around, partly about me, and his brother Philip teased him nonstop. Mark tried to talk to me about it the next time we visited, and I must not have regarded him seriously enough. I guess I made light of the family jokes about us. He said we might as well do it, for all the fuss. I assumed he was joking. I said well sure we could have intercourse, just as long as I didn’t have to do anything with my mouth. I don’t think he understood that I was going along with a joke. He played some more on the piano, but half an hour later, when I left to go to the bathroom, he followed me.

I went to the toilet beneath the stairs, the one with no window, and at first I didn’t know what hit me when the lights went out and my back met the wall. Then Mark was against me, strong thighs and hard chest, and his mouth dipped down to press mine.

His teeth clacked against my teeth and mashed my upper lip. I opened my jaw to pull away and his tongue filled my mouth. I grunted. I gagged. I pushed him away.

We were never as close after that.

In fact, I became a little phobic about kissing. First-kissing, anyway. Maybe I’m too connected to my own mouth, but it seemed to me that French kissing was just about the most intimate act possible. And a first kiss, a kiss that almost certainly would either begin with the male pressing too forcefully or develop, orchestrally, into an insinuation, such an act was simply too loaded for my comfort. I was all for it in anticipation but when the moment came I tended to avoid. Sometimes I even ducked.

Looking back on it, I may have married Jim because he was the only one to persevere after such a duck.

My parents and brothers and I moved again, this time from extreme Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area. My brothers were then eleven, and they always had each other; they slipped into the new environment like tadpoles into a pond. But I was sixteen. I had to leave all my pals and start over in a four-year, stratified high school. Even as an eccentric I was not going to have much of a social life. I gravitated to the few other new kids in the fast-track classes. Jim was one of them. We became friends. We talked a lot, walked a bit, worked even on the homecoming float. I’ll admit I found him attractive. His hair was too thin and his ears were a little prominent, but he had good teeth and a strong body. He was on the diving team, because he was too big for gymnastics and they hadn’t yet gone to fiberglass poles for vaulting. He swam daily. His body was tan with glints of blonde hair. But he only wanted to talk to me about politics, astronomy, and girls who didn’t look at all like me.