Sputterpub's Blog

gravicembalo col piano e forte

I am piano. I am a harp supine, encased in echo, felt, hammered.

I am piano but I sound loud. Say me soft: piano. piano. pianissimo. Still it sounds louder than forte.

I am the golf game of musical instruments: easy to play and impossible to master. I am the empress of orchestra.

I am stringed, percussive, wooden. I am the range of human sound, in cabinet.

At first it was no instrument to me. I never saw anyone play the grand piano in my aunt’s cold living room, in White Plains, New York. The room wasn’t really any colder than the rest of her Tudor house; it just wasn’t used, so it seemed cold to my five year-old self. It was the dark mysterious left turn from her front door. Everyone usually went right, through the dining room and den and breakfast room and kitchen, sometimes all the way to the back yard, where the playhouse was. Or maybe straight upstairs to the bedrooms, either the big one where my aunt and uncle watched The Tonight Show in bed, or one of my cousins’ rooms, with the two-doored bath that connected them. No one ever turned left into the fancy living room. Except me.

I hid in there. I crawled under the big black piano and crouched quietly when they looked for me. My uncle was a dentist, and he wanted to pull my front teeth, which were getting loose, and he said I could swallow them in my sleep, which frightened my mother so she said he could take them. But I never said he could take them. I hid under the piano, and loved it for sheltering me even before I learned what it could do.

Uncle Iz took my teeth anyway.

Years passed. Long years. Formative years. The next time I noticed a piano I was thirteen. Sure there had been others around, for Mr. Stone to pounce at or Madam Ortane to push on during my intermittent ballet classes, or planted like a tree in the corner of the stage in every school auditorium, but those were like armoires at the edges of my life: seldom noted, picturesque.

My family had ballooned from three to six and we had relocated to the West Coast. I no longer stayed with Aunt Esther and Uncle Iz and the cousins from my mother’s side; now we visited extended kin my mother called “The LA Contingent.” That was her term for my father’s four sisters and offspring.

There was an embarrassment of boys in that family. Not only had I and my parents been bombarded by my triplet brothers, but my father’s fecund sisters had only produced two girls. To counter the presence of my eleven boy cousins, I had no one except Camille and Judy.

It was almost corny, how precisely we three divided the feminine family honors of our generation. Camille, the oldest and dimmest, grew blonde hair and big tits; she took on the role of dumb tramp. Judy was a little younger than I and the baby in her family after five boys; she too was blonde, but it curled! She fell right into the role of cherub, and developed very smoothly into a dutiful (bitter) daughter.

My hair was brown, and straight until it frizzed with adolescence. I was neither voluptuous nor sweet. I tended to challenge rules and if I had to spend time with cousins I usually preferred the boys. And they preferred me.

Mark especially. Seven of the eleven were three years older than I. Mark was my favorite of that cohort.

Unlike the others, unlike even his older (born-to-be-a-cop) brother, Mark was smart. He was thoughtful, and interested in philosophy, ecology, and genetics. He was the only one of my cousins who didn’t own a gun. He supported my opposition to sport hunting. Together we admired our creative outputs.

For we were sensitive. I wrote protest poetry and he played the piano. With his encouragement, I even submitted, to real magazines that sent polite rejections, lyrics like “We’re all people, all human beings,/Black, yellow, white, red: all of one mold…”

Mark walked with me and talked with me, and it didn’t hurt that he looked like a lifeguard. He was tall and fit. He swam every day and his fair skin was tanned to a fine-pored gold. He was the only boy cousin with blonde hair, and it curled light against his forearms and thighs. He kept it short, so it was thick and springy around his face. He had a small nose and a wide mouth, and his smile revealed perfect white teeth.

When we visited him in LA, he played piano for all at night and for me in the afternoon. We swam in the morning, and then I watched his clean square fingers on the black and white keys. He aspired to compose then, but he played drills of Chopin. He made me notice how the piano works.

When he visited us in San Diego, he talked to my father at night and my brothers in the morning, but I usually had him for long walks every afternoon and longer talks after my parents went to bed. We spent so much time together that my parents and my aunt began to worry. We were at that age, after all. There were nervous jokes about first-cousin marriages, which I found silly and which seemed to offend Mark.

I guess, generally, I didn’t follow Mom’s advice. I’m much more likely to follow my daughter’s. She’s now at the parenting age, and I won’t be surprised if she starts in on the experience soon.

My mother is alive and well, and she comes by here at least once a week for tea. She still has disparaging eyes. Just last month she told me she thinks my hair is thinning, and she suggested I wear it longer and bleach it a little, to hide that.

I must admit it got to me. I asked my daughter for her opinion. Now, I should remember that she has occasionally shaved all or parts of her head, following her idea of fashion. I should bear in mind that I’ve usually disagreed with her choices in attire, although never enough to make it an issue unless to tell her she was sending an inadvertent message to my peers. But even with all of that, I’ve got to admit I was stunned and overwhelmed and gratified beyond words when she told me my hair is fine: I’m the most beautiful woman she knows.

“Come on,” I said then.

“No. Really.” She looked at me, and she said the words slowly and distinctly. “Mom. Listen. Someone asked me just last week: who’s the most beautiful woman I know. And I said you. Really.”

So now I look in the mirror and I don’t know what to trust. I see an aging face, ripply around the chin, reminding me of what I never liked in my aunt’s face and my mother’s. And I also notice an attractive presence. My image is like one of those little cards that changes its picture as it catches the light at different angles. I’ve discovered that I can’t trust my eyes when it comes to witnessing my own visage. I’ve decided to stop trying to see my face, to let those photons wash through me until I begin to fill with a pattern. And the view in front is starting to refract as much as it reflects. It begins to include the view in back.

[She was a beautiful infant, unwanted but loved. Her poor weary mother had five babies in six years, followed by four abortions, and then her, an exotic Chinadoll of a child: raven-haired, porcelain-complected, almond-eyed, round. She looked like no one else in her yiddische Brooklyn family.

Her mother was then an elderly thirty-five. She taught her to be busy, and to fear pregnancy. Her father was just starting to make money; he was seldom around except on the Sabbath, when he tended to indulge his pretty daughter.

Her siblings, four brothers and a sister, protected and parented her in their joint and several ways. The brothers were variously sheltering and zealous. Her sister was the closest to her in love and in age, but she was homely and jealous, and only taught her to distrust women.

She had many aunts and uncles, and a score of cousins. The family was orthodox, so the men didn’t touch women except their wives and daughters, and very young relatives, like her. Two of her uncles exposed themselves to her before she was six. She always did think penises were ugly.]

I outgrew the climbing a few years later, but I didn’t outgrow the tennis courts. They continued to be a popular place for kids to gather. It was there I discovered that Betty was half-blind.

Betty was our beagle. I had to lobby for years to get a pet better than the tropical fish Dad was always nursing through ichthy-whatever (I learned that tropical fish are sick all the time with something or other, and I used to wonder what made the tropics so great, if those blue lagoons were filled with sick fish). I was almost thirteen when Mom finally relented and let me have a dog.

She was a beautiful purebred puppy, with velvety long ears and lots of white on her, and she matured into a lovely animal. But she seemed a bit stupid at times. One Saturday I walked her to the high school, off-leash, and when I left the tennis court she lagged inside. I called her to me and she dashed straight into the fence. I knew then she wasn’t stupid; she just couldn’t see.

My family moved to Northern California when I was fifteen, and I had to give Betty away. That made no sense to me then or now, but my parents required it. I didn’t have another pet until I set up a household of my own.

And there was Mom, with disagreeable advice.

I was twenty-five then. Into my first house, and pregnant with my daughter. I adopted a retriever.

Mom wanted me to have a monitored alarm system. I told her the dog was a better solution to that kind of security issue. She insisted that I fence in the front yard. I refused. The yard was small and right on a pedestrian thoroughfare. It wasn’t like we needed it to be private; we did all our relaxing in the relatively large (and fenced) backyard. As far as I was concerned, a wall fence just invited graffiti. And I was put off by those run-of-the-lumber-mill pieces of paintable picket fence. Until we could afford a beautiful low stone wall or something, I declined to accept her recommendation.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t helpful. After my daughter was born Mom was often with us, cooking and freezing meals and making me rest. It’s more that she had an overly strong urge for physical safety. As if a fence or an alarm were going to do it.

All in all I would have done better without her help. She got overly upset about any kind of diaper rash, and when my daughter was about a year old and discovered how much she liked rolling on her stuffed sheep in her playpen, pushing her plump little pudenda against the sturdy stuffed animal and grunt-moaning a little, Mom seemed to freak out and tried to get me to “make her stop that.”

My mother had a fat pussy. Not plump-fat but bland-fat, like a mound of bread dough. It was broad, sparsely furred, surrounded by girth. I didn’t see it often – not even she did that – but I can almost sketch the view from four years old: that pad of pale flesh that appeared briefly above me between her stand from the toilet and the hoist of her big white underpants. It didn’t look at all like mine, and I don’t think she liked it. I never saw her touch it, but more than once she warned me not to touch my own. She even advised me not to take so long peeing.

She had weak fingernails and ugly feet, and legs that widened from thick ankles to dimpled knees to pocky thighs. Like inverted piano stools, she used to say.

Ugly this. Fat that. Yet the world found my mother pretty, and she knew it. She was the beauty in her family of origin, the flirt in high school, the mistress of my father’s romantic heart. Whenever a camera was aimed at her she pulled her glasses off and held them behind her back, in her left hand. She positioned her legs so that her feet made a T, front foot pointed forward and back foot almost perpendicular to it. She tried to teach me to pose that way, too.

She was always energetic and helpful. Even now she finds it impossible to repress her suggestions. Why, I probably wasn’t older than seven when she started teaching me how to hide my flaws. I don’t remember having any then, but Mom was a big believer in genes over environment; her cautions were about familiar problems I was likely to develop. I learned how to minimize the width of my nose before it was even apparent that I had inherited my father’s. I understood that a T-strap would slim the look of my foot before my feet grew. I was taught how to pick clothes that wouldn’t “cut me in half” long before I ever widened.

I’m not sure I would have known I had flaws if she hadn’t told me. Her incessant suggestions weren’t good for my self-confidence, but fortunately I had a few charms against her. It turned out I had qualities aside from my body, that I could esteem. And because my mother was the baby of her original family, and I was the first of mine, I swapped some roles with her. In many circumstances I parented her, and disregarded her foolishness.

Like when she told me not to climb fences. I must have been ten, and we lived in Southern California, south of San Diego, half a block from what would be my high school. The subdivision was wild and free, grass and dichondra conquering tumbleweed and prickly pear, a new school amid a new housing tract, just cut into the adobe-hard terrain. When the rare rains came, the street gutters coursed with tan water from the corrugations of the school grounds. When the Santana winds blew from the east, half of the school’s outdoor lockers sifted sand into their ventilation slats.

There were chain link fences everywhere. Short ones around the parking areas, six-footers at the school perimeter, and two-story woven walls for the tennis courts. We were drawn to those walls. Even though they would take us nowhere, the tall chain link fences just begged to be scaled.

Mom really didn’t want me to do that. It was okay with her if I climbed trees, and I don’t remember her objecting to normal-sized fences, but she drew the line at the double fences around the tennis courts. When pressed, she got flustered and blurted that I could injure myself at the top; tall fences and horseback riding carried some risk that I would not be an acceptable bride.

I’d seen the film at school. I knew the rudiments of reproductive anatomy. What she said made no sense. I could just as easily injure myself, that way, on a low chain link fence. Or the right kind of tree branch. And I’d already decided I didn’t want to be a virgin on my wedding night.

Of course I climbed the fence. There was a little thrill and danger in its height. All of us neighbor kids met that challenge.

I went on to the grocery store, feeling a little exposed. I’d been unable to make a $6 purchase without having my selections announced and analyzed. I’d been unable to take the $6 purchase into another establishment without having myself and the items again noticed, coming and going. I figured I could make the last stop quick – a few cherries and apricots and a bottle or two of Perrier – a whisk through the express line before noon on a Sunday. But even that was not to be.

The store was relatively crowded. Both express lines were open and jammed. Another six regular registers were open too, and all had multiple customers.

I bagged a pound of cherries. I picked four firm apricots and one ripe avocado, and I left the produce section for the adjacent aisle, where they stock the beverages. In rounding the corner between those areas, I started to pass by a church-clad black woman. She was wearing a pale blue crocheted dress, and long straightened hyper-styled hair. She looked to be in her 30s. There was plenty of room. Neither of us is fat and neither had to break stride or slow pace. But she decided to speak. “Excuse you,” she said.

“Pardon me?” I countered.

“I said, ‘excuse you.’ That’s what you’re supposed to say when you pass someone like that.”

I made a quick decision not to engage in this dialogue. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be,” the woman replied. “No need to be sorry. ‘Excuse me’ is just the thing to say in these circumstances.” And she waltzed away, slowly, in the other direction.

I had been considering the addition of a few items to my basket. The express lane permits 12, and I could carry more than I had collected. But that was the last straw. The third strike. I was getting a clear message that I was not fit for the world I was finding today.

I joined an express lane line. I said the required words to the cashier, and I paid for my groceries (the tab was $16.99, and with the change I’d gotten at Long’s I had $16.84 in my pocket; I used a credit card). I managed to get out of there and I headed for home and my room.

What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them? Why can’t we see the same?

I think the Long’s cashier was uncouth. She shouldn’t have commented on my purchases.

I think the bookstore woman was unnecessarily bureaucratic. Policy my ass. There’s a big difference between a large opaque backpack and a plastic bag which advertises both the store and its contents.

I don’t think I was rude in the grocery store, but I got a lecture. How’s this?

I think I’ll say how. I must have gone out of here with a chip on my shoulder and then broadcast it. The Long’s clerk probably sensed something and tried to converse and cheer me up. The book bitch probably sensed nothing, but between not finding the book and having a small fit getting my bag back, I left that store with a hard-on that then got read by blue-dress. I think she interpreted attitude as behavior. I passed her in a whirl of negativity, and her complaint (I think) was not about my proximity. I doubt she knew what she was objecting to, but I think it’s probable she just came from an experience of community and found my mood jarring.

Short-term hindsight is perfectly sarcastic. But it’s good that I didn’t say to her, “I’m sorry that my behavior bothers you,” and then when she replied (as she would have) with the “Oh no, don’t be sorry,” I could have sliced back with, “Well, perhaps you should be sorry that your behavior bothers me. Because, lady, you’re not my mother, and you’re confused about your role if you think it’s to teach me manners.”

It’s good I didn’t say that, because it wouldn’t have made me feel better, and I see now it would have missed the point.

She was off base but not baseless.

(Longs is now CVS. The bookstore (Black Oak) is no more. I wouldn’t buy cookies that contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oil unless commanded to at gunpoint. And either my attitude has improved or I’ve gotten better at preventive solitude.)

That wasn’t the end of my irks. It was hardly even annoying. A better person than I (or a better mood) would have made a light joke, if anything, out of the experience.

Today is Sunday. I left the house an hour ago to run a few easy errands. I intended to visit Long’s for sunflower seeds. I know that a drugstore is an odd place to go for sunflower seeds, but the grocery store doesn’t seem to have them lately. I also wanted to drop by the used bookstore on the same block, to pick up a copy of Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy, for my mother. It’s about growing up during WWII, as she did, and I think she’ll enjoy it. My final planned stop was at the seedless grocery store, for some fruit and vegetables. Naively I figured I could run these errands without undue notice from my fellows.

Long’s had lots of sunflower seeds. I like the 5.75 oz bag, and I pulled three of those off the metal rod. I also selected a package of eight chocolate chunk pecan cookies. I proceeded to the register with my four items, where I got to interact with the heavy-set young woman behind the counter. She looked mixed-race, with dark golden plump skin, and she had long hair, apparently straightened, pulled in flat curving bangs across her domed brow and down the right side of her rounded face. She acted manically friendly, and decided to comment on my purchases. “These look good,” she said as she dropped the package of cookies into the plastic bag that was suspended by a frame on her side of the scanner. “And yes,” she continued as she pulled the red bags of sunflower seeds over the glass reader, “I always like to balance the salt snacks with the sweets, too.” She looked up at me then with a conspiratorial grin, and I thought “Huh? What’s with this girl? Why does she think it’s okay to make comments about my purchases? And why does she assume it’s all for me and for today?” I mean, it probably is all for me, but it isn’t all for now, and it’s not all I have around.

My total came to $6.16. I wasn’t carrying any coins. It’s another small thing, but it would have been lovely not to have received the 4 pennies back. I guess Long’s doesn’t have a good-cents policy.

I was more grumpy when I left Long’s than when I entered. I also had heavier pockets.

Next stop: the bookstore. Not only did they not have the book I wanted, but the woman at the entrance made me surrender my Long’s bag.

This woman was not a kid. She was at least 40. And not only am I not likely to be a shoplifter, but the Long’s bag is translucent white plastic, and it’s very obvious what’s inside. “Do I really have to?” was my first response to her “Excuse me: please check your bag.”

“It’s just food,” I added as I showed it to her, but she informed me that this was store policy; to be consistent they require that every bag be checked. (Bullshit. I’ve shopped there for ten years and never surrendered a bag.)

I handed over my poor sunflower seeds and cookies, and accepted the playing-card piece she gave me as a receipt.

It took about 90 seconds to determine that Gone to Soldiers was neither on the Literature nor Pocket Book Fiction shelves.

I spent twice that long getting my bag back, because it was behind the register and there were two customers waiting to pay. The woman who had insisted on taking custody of my food acted deaf and blind not six feet away, but (clearly) her job description includes the policing task of taking bags but not the relatively pleasant job of giving them back. I had to get a little forceful and announce to the cashier that I was stepping behind the counter to retrieve my bag. I had to observe her anxiety as I almost left the place without removing the clothespin and matching playing-card piece.

Okay…

Sometimes the collection of evidence becomes impossible to ignore. Like when I think I’m doing fine and then I catch my heel on a street grating, almost fall and drop my stuff, encounter a silly obstacle or a rude driver, and the next thing I know, I’m sobbing at some retail counter, receiving the awkward consolation of a minimum-wage stranger. It’s as good as an injury for making me stop and notice myself.

It doesn’t happen often, but something like it just occurred. I got a clear message that it was time for me to go to my room.

I guess the first signs of annoyance came yesterday, over the Internet. For some reason I got tired of deleting all the unwanted e-mail marketing messages, and I started attempting to remove myself from each mailing list.

I was surprised when most of the “remove” routines acted like they were working. There were a few that required me to send a remove reply by e-mail, and one of those was undeliverable, according to DAEMON, or whatever they call the mailer who governs my traffic. But most of them shot me over to some Internet “remove service,” which appeared sincere and only asked for my patience. I agreed to postpone my irritation for the 72 hours the service said it needed.

The only sender that fried my cookies (or perhaps refused to fry their cookie) was WallStJournal.com. I once had an online subscription. I never paid for it; my daughter received it as some sort of reward for donating to public TV, and she gave it to me. It was supposed to be a free year, but it wasn’t. I didn’t use it often, but I noticed that theWallStJournal.com’s idea of a year was the time from when I signed on (mid-May) to December 30. I didn’t even get December 31. I know because that was one of the very few days I tried to interact with the interactive online service. I sought closing market prices. But on December 31 the only thing I was allowed to do was either click a button that would let me pay for another year, or exit. I exited.

WallStJournal.com had been sending me little headline e-mails ever since I first signed on in May, and kept sending them to me after I declined to resubscribe. The e-mails were useless to me, because if I tried to visit the site to which they were linked, I was informed that the page was for paying subscribers only. And I get headlines I can follow up, from the New York Times and elsewhere, all free and not bothersome.

So I got to viewing the headline e-mails from WallStJournal.com as spam. They arrive uninvited, and they clutter my inbox with text I don’t want. Yesterday, when I received yet another, I attempted to have myself removed.

The headline was about the conviction of Arthur Andersen Company for obstruction of justice (file shredding). No big deal. Not big news.

At the bottom was the following message:

TO REMOVE YOURSELF from this list, see: http://online.wsj.com/user-cgi-bin/searchUser.pl?action=emailalert

So I clicked/visited. Guess what? The page is for subscribers only! My choices were to give a credit card number for their charge, or exit. I exited.

I could have called customer service and complained. But I didn’t want to complain. I was done interacting. I just wanted out, quietly and without undue notice. Pheh.