Sputterpub's Blog

It was pretty obvious. Not like now, when hair color is mostly supposed to be recognized, either applied to young heads in odd patches and harsh colors, or modeled in natural tones of auburn or ash by middle-aged women in the company of gray-tufted men. Back in the late 50s and early 60s, only one’s hairdresser was supposed to know for sure, but anybody looking at my aunts would know, for sure. They could have been septuplets, the way they matched each other’s bouffant, apricot-Danish coiffures. Their hair looked like straw around their tan faces and I remember, it felt stiff. They all had cans of hairspray in their bathroom cabinets: Aquanet, with a design like a spiderweb on its shiny surface.

My brother and I spent time there with our cousins, who were almost all not-blonde, but I will always carry the image with me of my seven aunts sitting inside. I’m sure my mother was with them and the men probably weren’t far from the food, but it’s my blonde aunts I see in memory, with their legs crossed at the knees and their free feet bobbing, all with gold around their necks and fingers and most with cigarettes in their hands.

My cousins, as I mentioned, were mostly not blonde. Of the thirteen boys only Lloyd wasn’t dark-haired, and his curls were more red than yellow. My girl cousins had lighter hair than me or any of the boys, but Nancy’s was dull light brown and Debbie’s, while definitely blonde, was so frizzy it didn’t resemble anyone’s in the family. I’m rusty about my high school genetics, but my aunts didn’t marry particularly dark guys; we probably would see more light hair in our clan if any of my father’s sisters had been natural blondes.

My cousins, as I mentioned, were rambunctious. At their best they were high-spirited and at their worst, which is where they were most often, they were tiresome. They were all older than my brother and I, and they were together all the time when we weren’t there, so we exerted no influence over them.

They could swim well, of course, but they were masters of deliberate belly flops just to wet the poolside people. They were accomplished with water balloons, rubberbands, pea-shooters, and even BB guns. They tended to run in packs, teasing or attacking kids, spying on girls or grownups.

My aunts didn’t intervene. They tsked sometimes, and talked about boys being boys and made of mischief, and poured themselves another cup of coffee or maybe mixed a gimlet. My uncles paid no attention. I guess my father was used to it, having grown up with my aunts. Mom was the only one who seemed aware and sometimes pulled me out of the cousinly fray, like the time she overheard the boys talking about surprising me in my bath. It’s hard to believe that they really would have invaded the room with their snickers and Polaroid, but I’ll never forget how Mom grabbed my wrist and kept me with her while she watered the garden, and let me overhear at least Bruce and Mikey as they conspired. On the other hand, Mom acted like she didn’t believe me when I told her how often Uncle Buddy had “accidently” let me see his penis, when he exited the bathroom and when he lounged around in his boxer shorts. But Mom considered herself and all the uncles to be out-laws in the family; she seemed to get along with the uncles better than the aunts, and her favorite always was Buddy, who was the best looking and the only one who liked to dance.

I couldn’t even cozy up to my girl cousins. Neither Nancy nor Debbie was mean to me, but they weren’t interesting either. They were two and three years older than I, they both developed at younger ages than I did, and as soon as they entered puberty they started becoming their mothers; as far as I could tell, their hobbies were bleaching their hair and coveting bling and competing for the attention of the boy cousins.

My father was the only son in a Jewish clutch of eight. His parents had been fruitful five times before he arrived, producing a pair of twin girls and four individual daughters. My grandmother permitted one more pregnancy after my dad, which became his closest sibling my Aunt Sadie, but family lore has it that Grandma called it quits after seven daughters and a boy, and underwent at least two back-alley abortions, and that surgical history may in fact be why I never met her. She died young and of something vascular, a year before I was born.

But her babies survived. (That’s not exactly true. I learned lately that she had an eighth daughter, because the twins were actually rare triplets, but that baby, named Ida, lived only five weeks.) All of the others lived and reproduced. I have more than a dozen cousins.

I remember it took me a long time to get my aunts’ names and birth order straight. My parents seemed to expect that I was born with the knowledge, but I must have been ten or eleven before I could recite them like the catechism my then-friend Norah knew. They aren’t important in this narrative, but I can still reel them off like a rosary: Lillian, Audrey, Esther, Elizabeth, Pauline and Dorothy (the twins Polly and Dolly) and Sarah (called Sadie). My father Leon arrived in 1925, two years after the twins and two years before Sadie.

They were all born in New York, of Eastern European immigrant parents. I guess their home language was Yiddish but none of them spoke it when I knew them; instead, they seemed to use it for proverbs (mitten d’rinnen) or to be incomprehensible around us kids (like us with Pig Latin) or to pepper their indignation and gossip with delicious “F” words like “f-schleppena” or “f-schtoonkena” or “f-krimpt.”

I was born in New York, too, but by then all but one of my aunts had transcontinented over to LA, and she (Aunt Audrey) was to move West in three years. My own nuclear family – my parents, myself, and my younger brother – migrated to California when I was five. We settled down in Bonita, an unincorporated area south of San Diego and north of Tijuana, which put us about three freeway hours from my aunts in the Valley, so we managed to make the trek to visit them about every month.

Six of my aunts had two sons, and one had one. I have thirteen boy cousins. Only Polly and Lillian had daughters, one each; we were a clan with alternating gender-heavy generations. Our get-togethers tended to reflect that composition, so the adults were always involved in the gentler arts, with women cooking and talking and shopping and tending while the menfolk read the paper or watched sports, and the generation of kid cousins were active, rambunctious, boyish.

My brother and I were more unlike our cousins than they were unlike each other. I’m sure part of the difference was that we didn’t live close and see them often, but mostly I think it was about parents. We had a relatively strange mother. Our father was as unlike his sisters as a single male after a long line of females is likely to be. He was the only one who went to college. He served in the army. He got away.

Our mother wasn’t strange compared to the family that reared her. But she was an alien among my father’s sisters. She had shorter legs, wider hips, and smaller breasts. She wore less jewelry and simpler clothes. She moved faster, darting around and always busy compared to my sedentary aunts. And she was never, even remotely, blonde.

I guess my aunts were born with light hair. They had paler skin than my mother and me. Especially after they moved to the LA area and started sunbathing and planning Vegas getaways, all seven of them got into the peroxide.

Cindy understood. For the first time in her memory she was most important to someone. She felt almost desperate in happiness. Eager. She had heard versions of the sex talk at school, from her mother, out of the mouths of classmates, and she’d been around farm animals all her life; the only thing about that evening that scared her was her fear that Paco would stop.

He didn’t. In fact he was attentive and gentle and enduring with Cindy until he had to return to his family in Mexico. They had four and a half weeks during which, most evenings, she managed to visit him.

Cindy didn’t get pregnant from her first affair (that happened a bit later, and luckily after she’d left home). But she enjoyed her experience with attention and power. Paco convinced her that with her looks, she need never be lonely. And he wasn’t the last handsome man to lodge in that outbuilding.

By the time Cindy left home at 19, she thought she was pretty good at sex. She was comfortable with men. She loved the power she achieved, when she knew a guy wanted her, as she let him have a little more. She started using her full name. She arrived in the city as Cynthia, and she soon found a secretarial job and a room in a 3-bedroom flat.

The changes were stimulating at first. She even found a friend in one of her flatmates, a hard-partying valley girl from southern California. They had some congenial adventures until Cynthia’s pregnancy, when Sandy threw rigid disapproval at her. As it happened Cynthia miscarried, but Sandy started morning-after critiques of Cynthia’s prior evening choices, and the weight of those critiques soon broke their friendship. Cynthia moved on to another flat, just like she moved on to other jobs and other men.

When I met her, Cynthia was 23 and getting hardened. She had never been with a male her age before. She expected me to come on to her and when I didn’t, she wondered if I was gay. After all, I talked to her about shoes and hair like a woman would, I didn’t use up the air between our faces when we conversed, and I made a point of not looking at her breasts.

We became friends. She got a job through my weird cousin Allie, who never found employment herself except a position in clerical placement, finding jobs for others. Allie sent Cynthia to my office, and she was hired to assist my boss’s partner, so we had adjacent work spaces and projects and meetings to share. Our conversations led to lunches. We had afterwork drinks a few times, but I didn’t enjoy those. Once she started drinking she was hard to stop. After three cocktails she started spilling cleavage and/or secrets. I think I first understood my attraction to her when I noticed how much it bothered me to watch her flirt with old business men. I don’t think I would have heard about her history if booze hadn’t loosened her tongue.

One of the definitions of a friend is someone who will help you move. We did that for each other. And I was there for her when her oldest brother died.

It was a tractor accident on the farm. No one ever determined whether George was inebriated or the machinery misfired. The event was sudden and final. I accompanied Cynthia on her travel home for the funeral and aftermath. And it was there, in the then-unused outbuilding, the night after George was buried, that Cynthia learned I’m not gay. It was good; I think she was sincere; it felt real.

She was so tender then. Looking back now, I’m sure she was grieving as much for her sad childhood as for her dead brother. Being on that farm and around her folks brought it all back for her. That’s when she told me about the pregnancies. She admitted that she’d been caught several times, and the three occasions that didn’t result in miscarriages sent her to the doctor to terminate. The procedure was called a therapeutic abortion. I’m all for choice, but I don’t understand what was therapeutic about them.

I hear it; that sounds bitter. I guess I am. Because I thought we’d have a family. When we decided to marry I thought it would be more than the two of us. Even though the sex was never as sweet after the first time, even though it became so infrequent we almost never did it except in hotels when traveling, Cynthia got pregnant at least once. And told me in no uncertain terms that she would not go through with it. She never wanted to be a parent. She terminated that gestation.

She may have had other abortions, after. I now know how much she stopped telling me. I guess I was her celibate phase. In our quarter century together, we had sex a few times a year. That was okay with me; I’m not the most highly sexed guy. And I trusted her absolutely. I wasn’t looking for trouble; I had no idea about her dalliances. Now I know about her boss and the rich restauranteur client, and the married Colombian guy we hired so often to do odd jobs around the house. I try not to figure how many I don’t know about.

She was born in central California in the middle of the 1950s, in the middle of a family of boys. Her mother was vain and her father was egotistical; they neither noticed each other, really, so it wasn’t too surprising that they didn’t notice their daughter.

Some folks would argue that Cindy was lucky that way. Her brothers received rough discipline from their father whenever they misbehaved. Cindy managed to avoid the belt. But she would contend that even violent attention is better than none at all. Cindy can’t remember an occasion when either parent hugged her.

It really wasn’t fair. She was a beautiful baby and a gentle toddler. She was short and plump and had thick blonde hair that went where it should even though no one took the time to style it. She was sweet-tempered and bright enough to amuse the ambient adults. But the adults were busy raising boys and livestock and avocados and apricots during the day, and pursuing their own interests during the short evenings. They figured a daughter didn’t need much from them.

Cindy’s father read political philosophy when he had time. He would have liked an academic career but his rural family didn’t even let him go to the free community college; he was expected to take over the running of the farm and he did. But he spent his spare time cozying up to socialism and dreaming of the utopia he would design.

Cindy’s mother came from a whiter collar family. Her dad had been a veterinary doctor and her mother worked as a nurse before marriage. Cindy’s mother always felt she’d stepped down by marrying her father, and by the time Cindy was old enough to understand her parents’ arguments, her mother wasn’t letting her father forget the social gap between them. Her mother spent her free time reading society magazines and sneaking vodka.

Cindy spent time alone. Her brothers rough-housed with one another when they weren’t doing chores or attending school. Her father was outside during the day and in his small study most evenings. Her mother put her to regular work at domestic duties, but didn’t provide any companionship. The family lived too far away from congenial neighbors for her to find any friends near home.

She attended school of course, but she didn’t find friends there either. She was not bright or funny or coordinated enough to impress anyone there; she was too shy and quiet to be noticed. If she’d been a victim of teasing she might have acquired a defender or co-sufferer, but it was Cindy’s lot to go unnoticed. When she moved from the valley she left behind no close friends.

She came to the coast and the city. She brought with her substantial experience at cooking and cleaning and ironing and gardening. She knew her way around a sewing machine but disdained that skill. She had taken typing and shorthand in high school, so she aimed above au pair or housekeeper; she planned to acquire secretarial work.

She didn’t bring much luggage with her, but she toted a load of baggage. She had secrets.

She was the farmer’s daughter. She was a peach of a young lady: early maturing and luscious. Full grown she wasn’t over 5’2″ and her skin was fine-pored pink and white. She had sun blonde hair and sky blue eyes, and she produced impressive breasts by the time she was 14.

Her goods might have remained unsampled but for her father’s politics. He was so supportive of farmworker causes that he sometimes allowed a migrant or two to camp in the outbuilding behind the barn. Cindy’s first affair took place in that building, and it wasn’t her last.

His name was Paco. He was 32, tall and strong, darkly handsome. From the first time he encountered Cindy, he was gentle, friendly, and interested in her. Then he noticed that no one was noticing. He told Cindy how much he enjoyed her company. He said he wished they could talk more often. He explained that he had to work all day or he’d lose his place. He said he wished they were able to visit after work.

“I could sneak out,” Cindy suggested the next time they spoke. Paco said he didn’t want to get her in trouble. “No, I can do it,” she insisted. “Daddy never minds me; he’ll be reading in his study. And Mama has a cocktail while we clean up after dinner, and then she goes to her room and doesn’t come out. I could even bring some of her vodka.”

“No need,” said Paco (actually he said, no es necesario, but that makes this too hard to read).

Cindy showed up at the outbuilding around 9:30 that night. Paco had improved the room with a blanketed nest in one corner. He sat her down there. He asked her questions. She talked. He listened. Then he talked. He told her how beautiful she was. He looked into her blue eyes with his of chocolate brown, and he said that he loved her. Then he put one arm around her shoulders and stroked her face with his other hand. He kept looking in her eyes as he brought his mouth to hers. At first he gave her kisses like feathers. She didn’t pull back. Then he planted his lips around hers and gently pushed hers open with his tongue. At the same time he let his stroking hand explore one breast and he moaned into her mouth.

In your early middle years you cherished hopes for your children and disdain for your spouse. But by the time you neared 60, you’d gone beyond disappointed with your kids and you began to view your husband with favor.

It’s true. You’d gotten so tired of his jokes and stories that they almost seemed new again. You had to admit that he didn’t look as bad as many other husbands. At least he had the sense to buzz off his thinning hair. At least he still had an ass.

You don’t want to win by default, but it’s starting to look like you two will go the distance and maybe even appreciate one another. Who’d have thought?

Authority? POV? No problem. The speaker is an oddball. In terms of reasoning and confidence, I became an adult before I was 6. I have no affect. Ads and symbols don’t work on me. I don’t detect or react to attitude, so I rarely encounter it. I approach every mammal with respect and I haven’t yet been bitten.

As far back as you can remember you’ve been looking at the other kids and trying to assess who’s happier, and why. Your first recollection of a peer crowd was from kindergarten; even now you can summon that sense of children who weren’t your siblings or cousins or neighbors, sitting next to you on either side and behind you too, children in class with synchronized movements fingerpainting, sipping juice, resting, looking around at one another. You remember being aware of them and puzzling if they were happier than you, more or less frustrated than you with the teacher commands. You wondered then if they were really as excited and compliant as they seemed or if it was an act, and I wonder if you still wonder.

What were they seeking? Did they achieve it?

Your husband is a good soul, even if he isn’t strong. Or pretty. It’s too bad the way men get to smell as they age. It’s unfortunate how most seem to give up and let the chest waste. Sure that’s all physical but then we do have to go there. We’re going to have to mention sex.

Maybe a mention is all it deserves. For all the talk there never was that much of it.

Sure I remember it. I learned the pleasure my body could provide before I was 5. My mother caught me at it, but she doesn’t recall that. I taught my friends but I don’t know if that’s how they remember it. I talked about sex to anyone who would respond, so I knew early that everyone was insecure, and I knew always that folks enjoyed the anticipation and recollection more than the act.

So you’re turning back to love him. It feels like you’ve done what you signed on for – you stayed married no matter what – and now you can reap benefits. Now you will have that companionship. But in fact you’ve been reaping all along. You know how much you traded in order to have the silent cultural approval… Don’t argue! Listen… Every time you two went anywhere, you know what was assumed: that you were a proper heterosexual couple; that you were a natural woman, like other women, and he was an understandable male.

But he smells bad in the morning. He takes up most of the bed. He snores. He’s comfortable with you, which you treasured when you two were new, but now it means you see his hatefulness. Though he’s a good soul.

Really.

And that’s never enough.

Everyone you know has a good soul. Your kids have great souls, and look how disappointed you are in them. And it’s not like I didn’t warn you…

But then, I only warned because I knew you would disregard me. Back when I was in high school I emerged as everyone’s advisor; then my counsel was earnest and willful. Then I expected to be influential. And then I would have felt responsible if my advice had been followed and unsuccessful. So now I am comforted to know my words won’t be effective. Now I can safely speak.

Sure: you did everything that was recommended. Those family vacations covered all the national parks, and the college tours visited most of the name campuses. I should have known what was coming when you joined a church; that’s something no one would have predicted who knew you in college.

I should have known what was coming, but I’ll admit I was shocked. Shock means bad surprise, but still – like all surprise it’s rare, and so a little special, a little cherished. You shocked me every time you subordinated your will or opinion to Ned’s. I knew that was an approved method of achieving the compromise so crucial for a long marriage, but I just couldn’t figure out how you did it. How could you watch him scamming insurance companies and not despise him? Or maybe you did despise – maybe that’s the reason you sometimes filtered information for him; I always thought it wasn’t the act of a friend to withhold news about what might be a better job or weekend. Then again, I’m kind of a idiot-child about the meannesses of adult relationships.

I remember being astounded (that’s more positive than shocked) when you observed how much happier my children are – able to leap tall stories and stronger than an automaton – even though (in your actual words) they are products of divorce, whereas you and Ned stayed together. As if one- or two-parent homes were the actual issue! I looked at you then, to see if there was irony in your grin. No.

I tried everything I could to get you to remember. I reminded you of our young selves and you scoffed affectionately about my memory. I urged you to reread the notes and letters I’d kept in the old footlocker, and you steadfastly refused. WTF? The only reason not to read your old words is from fear of embarrassment, and child-me still doesn’t get how anyone would let that stand in their way. So I watched you romanticize your kids’ infancies and early childhoods and then fear them when they hit adolescence. Borrowing money to plant a lawn for them to play on, when we all played very well on dirt and gravel and in fact awoke maternal wrath when we came home with grass stains on our knees. Suspecting your teenagers of activities totally inconsistent with their personalities or your experience…

I have to tell you something. Jen called me the night before last. She wanted to know if she and her boyfriend could spend the night at my place this Friday. She said something funny had happened. She’s pregnant. She said that wasn’t the funny part: no. What’s “funny” is she’s way farther along than she thought. The local services won’t help her terminate it. And she’s decided that termination is the only way to go. So she has to come here. She’s wondering if she can crash at my place. She’s wondering if she can bring her dog.

I was beyond shocked. It was like hearing instead of seeing a “How Many Things Can You Find Wrong With This Picture.” What a cascade of bad choices! And every indication of zero enlightenment.

I started to ask about you. I think I pronounced “What does you mother – ” before she screeched “Don’t tell her! You can’t tell mom. She’ll just hold it against me.” I’m thinking huh? Hold it against her? Jen’s almost 30 …

You’re scowling. You’re aiming your disapproval face wherever your eyes peer and now directly toward me. You say it’s Jen’s life and her decision to make. It’s clear that you are not going to speak to her about this. “Stop being judgmental,” you state. “You’re being judgmental.” Uh huh. Like a judge. Or a teacher. Or a parent. And even as you say that, I know you’re not going to tell Ned.

“Good grief, she’s huge,” came as expected, before the door even shut. “She must weigh a hundred pounds more than she did when I saw her last.” Sheila’s mother came around the bed and sat in the large depression Gwen left in the seat of the brown chair.

“Come on, Mom. I still weigh over 300, and Gwen’s no bigger than me. Those words don’t help anyone.”

“Well, but you’re going to get better now. As soon as you’re out of here, we can go back to Dr. Miller, and start shaping you up.”

“You mean shaping me down. And it’s not happening.”

“Now honey. Don’t be impatient with me. Maybe Gwen can go with you this time. She doesn’t need her parents’ permission now. We can work out a way to help her pay for it.”

“Mom, Gwen does okay. I mean, she’s not wealthy or anything, but she can afford what she needs. So can I. We’re not going back to Dr. Miller.”

“We shouldn’t talk about this right now. I can see that you’re tired.” Sheila’s mother tried to adjust the pillow for her. She pulled the sheet-wrapped blanket higher on Sheila’s chest. “You rest now, honey, and we’ll talk more tomorrow. I’ll come by right after work.”

Her mother left but Sheila didn’t rest. She used that night to cry. The last surgical drain had been removed that day, and for the first time since her birthday, when she awoke to excruciating pain and her medical crisis commenced, Sheila knew that she would live. Up till then she’d been busy paying attention to the progress of her condition, contending with the pain and with her mother. But that night, she knew she’d live and leave the hospital.

She tried to think about what she wanted to do. She got nowhere. She thought instead about what she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to go to her parents’ home. She wouldn’t return to her old condo. She may not get any smaller, but she didn’t want to gain back to her old weight. She wanted to be able to move around.

She slept some. She watched a hospital video about prostate procedures. She thought some more. Tears continued to leak from the outer corners of her eyes.

She was upright and fresh when Gwen showed up at 12:30. The nurse had gotten her out of bed that morning and she’d walked for almost ten minutes, pushing her IV rig ahead of her as she shuffled down the corridor in her slippers. She noticed chart racks on the walls beside room doors, and a courtyard outside the windows. She imagined walking outdoors.

Gwen brought flowers and real estate ads.

“Hi, Gwen,” Sheila almost sang. “Want to diet?”

“Hi yourself. And ‘no.’ But I want to look for a place with privacy, a pool, some open space. I’ve thought about it and want to use a chunk of my winnings for a down payment. I can carry the mortgage on my salary, and I can save the rest of my windfall.” She arranged the flowers in a green vase and set them on the windowsill. “I could use a housemate and investor.”

“You’re on. Thank Mom for making me realize what I don’t want.”

“You thank Mom. I’d rather look at real estate ads.” Gwen moved back around the bed to her chair and unfolded the newspaper. Several sections slipped to the floor, but she left them there as she read. “Here’s a two bedroom, two bath, with a pool, a couple of miles out of town. Look: the price is right.” She passed the section to Sheila.

“We’d need a car to get around.”

“I can swing that and still have money to save. We can buy bicycles too. When the weather’s good, we can get around on them. Maybe. For now we’ll use a car.”

“For now, we’ll use our feet. Let’s take a walk.” Sheila grabbed the triangle above the bed and began the long process of moving her legs off the side.

“Now?”

“Why not? It’s a beginning.”

Gwen rose to help her. Together they got Sheila off the bed and began their first post-operative, post-lottery walk. Together again, the same and ever different, the two young women started down the long corridor.