Sputterpub's Blog

We called them the weird sisters but that had nothing to do with destiny. If you google “weird” now you get origins in “wyrd” and references to the Greek fates and the Scottish witches, but they and we doubt it. The weird sisters looked the word up when we were younger and dictionaries were printed on paper.

Weird came from “we-ïrd” then. Short for “way-ward.” That made sense. It agreed with our “not in the mainstream” understanding of the word. Even Shakespeare referred to his Macbeth crones as “weyard.” But the wayward meaning has now been swamped out of Internet search engines.

Our weird sisters are not old or ugly or triplets. They share no vital organs. They are three white suburban siblings, the only children of lower middle class parents, and they were born two years and two months apart, dropped like cabbages by their fertile mother, into the barnyard of our little society. Jane, Jude, and Jem.

Their mother had dark blonde hair and their dad was a redhead. The daughters have varying shades of strawberry blonde waves around narrow faces with nice eyes, generous noses and thinnish lips. Jane has slightly prominent ears. Judith’s notable feature is a rack of standup breasts. Jemima needs glasses for astigmatism.

Their parents are Jenny and Jack. Their pets are Jazzy and Jiggles. The family is brought to you by the letter J. That’s a little odd, but not so weird. Jenny changed her name from Leilani. Jack was originally Jason.

The sisters have always been close. They were near enough in age to go through all the sibling battles and reconciliations necessary to create intimacy and they happened to have opinions and interests different enough that they never had to engage in competition about favorite subjects or favored dates. They made it to the ages of 35, 33 and 31 before any of us tried to write them up.

Maybe they wouldn’t have been quite as weird if they were raised elsewhere and by other parents. Our little CDP isn’t a real community, our school didn’t have enough kids to provide real diversity, and the Jacksons were among our strangest neighbors. It wasn’t that odd, then and here, for a family to have no visible means of adequate support – there was always a component of the population involved in extra-legal entrepreneurship – but the tattoo-inscribed culture the Jacksons worked to create/describe, complete with the renegade Ja-Mule “army” they founded (going as strong as it ever did after 20 years of recruitment, with its six dozen members) created an unusual environment for the sisters to inhabit.

Jane and Jude and Jem attended school but not whole-heartedly. They were all early and good readers, and they seemed to obtain most of their education on their own. Along the way they acquired odd attitudes too. Like Jane refusing to accept the notion that time is the fourth dimension. She was the sister most apt at math/science, but she dug in her heels like a fundamentalist about adding time to the spacial three. Jude grew into such a sincere vegetarian that she offered brussel sprouts to trick-or-treaters (their house was regularly toilet-papered on Halloween). And little Jemima became the champion of garden snails. Something about the molluscs fascinated her from the age of five. Her passion grew to include slugs and other pseudopods. Maybe it was all about home climate; snails were rare in our native aridity, and therefore precious.

Instead, I brought the meeting back to order. I commented on the lateness of the hour and I reminded everyone that we had to move along. I prevented Linda from asking what she later gave me: how disabled does someone have to be to be credible for Barbara or the Carols? I heard Linda’s story the first time we met. I know she was in a car accident awhile back; she lost her mobility for six months. Does that count with Carol? Does a severe bout with cancer score enough points for Barbara? How hurt, for how long, does the expert have to be?

I watched Linda not go there tonight, and I know it was hard for her. But she wouldn’t have accomplished anything by challenging those bitter old women who sit in adipose puddles and complain no matter what that it isn’t good enough…

“Diagonal curb cuts are bad,” declared Carol J. “Because the drivers can’t tell which way the chair is going.” And I thought, “Give me a break. The driver knows as soon as the person gets the chair in the street. The driver has already slowed at that point.”

But Linda stayed calm. I watched her take it in and put it somewhere useful. I think that’s why she’s beautiful. She’s open, and she still wants to learn.

I can tell she aches to start her first project; I imagine being her, and I want to build. I understand she’s been close four times in the past three years, but this is the one most likely to break ground. The Commission should give her its wholehearted support.

I’ll admit it: I may be more critical of Carol J. because she brought up the elevator incident. I don’t know. I feel like I see into her thoughts (alternating complaints and boasts), and I despise the woman. “Listen up, everyone!” she announced in that civic-uncivil tone of hers, raising her fat left hand in its greasy velcroed brace. “Did you all hear what happened to poor Isabella here, in the elevator at old City Hall? She got stuck. Stuck for 40 minutes and she couldn’t reach those controls! You know what I mean.” And Carol B. nodded, grinning complacently.

Then all their sympathy surrounded me. I had to demur. I had to explain that the event occurred nearly two months ago, and I had to become the apologist for Public Works, assuring everyone that the control panel had already been replaced. I had to worry about Walter.

I haven’t even told Mom that he was in the elevator with me. I want to be farther along – in a way, my parents know my body better than I do myself – but still, I want it to be difficult to even consider terminating this pregnancy.

I don’t know if Walter’s imbalance will be passed on to the baby, but we can watch for that. Certainly my disability can’t be inherited. I have great medical care. I’ll have appropriate obstetrical attention. My baby won’t be butchered at birth.

What if? I occasionally wonder… what if my parents hadn’t gone like missionaries to Indonesia? They were: what? 26? Younger than I am now… babies! If I hadn’t been born there, my spinal cord might not have been wrecked, my mother might not have been so lacerated that they had to sterilize her. I might have had a life with feeling below my neck. I might have had siblings.

No, Bella. Can’t go there. That’s the place of mouth wrinkles and sad karma. Remember instead Walter in the elevator. Weird Walter off his meds and kind of violent, sexy. His handsome complicated face. His strong hands undeterred by wool cloak or plastic tubing. I can’t feel, but Walter in the elevator vibrated in a strange way that I could sense, like notes from an electric bass pounding up through the floor, through my chair, up my severed spine to dance in my head.

I couldn’t control the elevator and I certainly couldn’t control Weird Walter off his meds, but it wasn’t all bad. My face met urgency and strange strong love in those kisses. I watched him hold my hands.

I will have this baby. I will share her with my parents. Perhaps with Walter. Perhaps with Linda. But for now I will lie awake and listen in my body. To my soul swimming with a new spirit. I am restless, and I can’t toss or turn.

For one thing they’re ugly. Their aggressive complaining personalities might be bearable if their persons were acceptable to the eyes or ears. Barbara seems to think her blindness is an excuse to pay no attention to her appearance. It’s bad enough that she’s at least fifty pounds overweight and that her thin dirty blonde hair is scattered sleep-flattened around her face. What’s really striking is the way she actively and publicly chews her fingernails to the quick and beyond, often drawing blood. Lecturing us around saliva-slimed fingers. It’s about as pretty as picking her nose in public, or masturbating. And it’s not like she’s stupid or chemically unbalanced. She’s just bitter. She’s angry at not having more control over her life. Too busy being bitterly angry to assume the control that’s available to her.

Carol and Carol aren’t much better. They’re both in chairs and now sufficiently obese that it appears their fat is what’s tying them to the chairs (in fact, Carol B. is so large she does have to be tied into her chair; she has no lap). Carol J. and Carol B. wear raggedly clothes and their graying hair is long and scraggly. They have fat pasty faces lined downward with frowns and sneers. They smell stale. They generate uninhibited body noises. I’ve tried reaching out to them but I sense their resentment; they hate my face. All I feel when I imagine being them is impatient desolation. Their only moods are angry; their only pleasures are food. Their fingers are fat and grasping.

By contrast, Lisa and Debra and Walter are delightful. Sure Deb’s voice is a little funny – the timber that she’s never heard is nasal and throaty – but her vision isn’t tunnel. She reminds us of the needs of the deaf without hammering on us. Lisa is our newest commissioner; she’s still feeling her way in and trying to find consensus. She seems to be as sensitive to the good in people as to the bad in environment. And Weird Walter is sweetly weird. He can be scary-weird when he doesn’t take his meds, but he is following his program now. No matter what, he is always handsome.

When it’s quiet like this I can hear my pregnancy. Fluid like my digestion. I swear I am listening to my baby swim in me.

I’m bothered about the Commission meeting. We were unaccommodating to Linda’s group, and I like Linda. I need to think about it. Realize it wasn’t all of us. Make Carol and Carol and Barbara take responsibility for themselves. Ignore their screaming whispers, and maybe they will hear themselves.

I’ve met Linda twice before tonight and I was impressed both times. She’s warm and direct and open. Her group wants to build inclusive affordable housing: talk about shooting for the moon. Communities where everyone, no matter their physical condition, can move around and visit and interact. She has the right attitude; it’s obvious to me she’ll get the job done. How can we do anything other than support her? But no: first Barbara and then the two Carols attack the plan from their too-little-too-late position!

“Will the manager be disabled?” Barbara craned her edgy face toward the presenters’ table. Linda was trying to discuss universal design as a fairness issue for everyone, and Barbara kept bringing it back to disability.

“Well, I don’t know. We haven’t even bought the land yet, let alone tried to staff the place.”

“If you want my support then you’d better find a disabled person for the job,” Barbara harrumphed.

“Who’s this universal design consultant you plan to bring in?” Carol B. asked the question with a tone of challenge. Her mouth looked ready to argue.

“Her name’s Ruth Silberman.”

“Is she disabled?” from Barbara, while her teeth tore the skin at the end of her left index finger.

“No, but…”

“If she’s not disabled she can’t be a specialist in access.”

“But she’s redesigned several schools and playgrounds for children with – ”

”We’re not children,” declared Carol J., and I wanted to spit at her there beside me. If it weren’t my custom to keep my voice low, I would have yelled at my commissioners then.

Lately I’m restless in bed. I don’t toss or turn but also I don’t sleep.

My father once told me it doesn’t matter whether we actually lose consciousness. It’s only important that we rest our bodies and our minds. He counseled me to lie quietly in my bed, to relax. I knew even at eleven when he first told me this that it wasn’t the truth. I sensed then that he was tricking me into some form of sleep-promoting meditation. But it worked.

My father is Japanese and a Buddhist. That advice is typical of him. He has also taught me independence of spirit, control where I’m capable, patience with my mother. Mom is Jewish/Italian; we like to say she leads “a rich emotional life.” Watching my parents has always been more entertaining than TV.

Lately I’m restless because I have so much on my mind. The characters on the Commission. The catastrophe in the elevator. Small wonder I’m not sleeping.

“My name is Isabella Aaroner Muramoto. My face is pretty and my spirit is persistent.” That’s what I wrote on my eighth grade statement when I ran for student body secretary. It made little sense but I won the election. I was a good listener, and they let me take the notes for my class. That’s one of the reasons I remember youth so well; I wrote it down. I understand kids because I recollect. I think I’ll be a good parent. I hope so. Oh God I-beneath-the-level-of novice so humbly invoke the necessary skills…

I continued to be pretty. Persistent. Organized. Determined. Humble. Polite. Hopeful. I was lucky in the love of my parents. I was seen as a good representative. I was successful in elections. High school class president. College yearbook editor. Now the Commission. Next year, maybe City Council.

If the Commission met more often, each occasion wouldn’t be so momentous. But the schedule is monthly. I think that’s why I make such a big deal about it. Always preparing for a week ahead of time, envisioning the other commissioners to get a feel for how they’ll move the meeting. Reviewing the agenda, imagining. And now: afterwards… debriefing myself this way. Replaying the motions and emotions. Understanding.

I pan around in memory…my camera obscura… this dark box…a talking head. Easily I remember a meeting that ended only two hours ago. I’m positioned at one corner of a “U” of rectangular tables: Chairwoman Isabella. To my right are deaf Debra, Lisa, and Weird Walter: to my left the two Carols, blind Barbara, and the ever-formal Commissioner William Jones. Debra and Lisa and Walter, brownhaired and well-proportioned…Carol and Barbara and Carol, lighthaired and grotesque…Commissioner William Jones, tall, black, deep-voiced and proud, with a Caucasian-colored prosthetic right foot. The sight of that Crayola-flesh-toned device, peeking like a lip of Silly Putty between the Commissioner’s pantleg and his New Balance shoe, makes me feel sad in a slow way.

Commissioner William Jones always identifies himself before he speaks to the group. He thanks us for the time when he’s done. I can’t say I really like the man, but he’s a character. The Commission wouldn’t be the same without him.

But maybe the Commission can do without Barbara and the Carols. Tonight I could have done without them.

Jill read a memorable magazine article years ago, about a strange little father-daughter family. The father was mentally retarded or developmentally disabled or otherwise just marginally capable of caring for himself. He’d somehow managed to marry a functional woman, and she had run away sometime after the birth of their daughter. At the time the article was written the little girl was about ten years old. The reporter commented on how miraculous the situation was, with the bright little girl loving and caring for the father. But the reporter also quoted some experts as saying that, while a situation like this little girl’s might be expected to promote autism or at least dysfunction in the child, sometimes (rarely but observably) the child rises to the occasion, and acts like a responsible adult.

Jill knows that. And she’d be the first to declare that the child doesn’t just act like a responsible adult. The child becomes a responsible adult. Short but analytical. Inexperienced but determined. Absorptive and retentive and adventurous. Some of them even take notes.

(Jill crossed over to adulthood herself at five and a half. That’s the primary reason she gets this. She also knows that she views life at least two ways – from the perspective of five and a half as well as from now – but she’s starting to suspect that happens to each of us. Whatever age we look from when we mature, we retain as we proceed.)

So it’s memory but also journals that tell the story. When Anita introduced Jill to Kevin and his friends, back in 1978, the guys were all in their mid-thirties, all married and unfaithful to varying degrees, all surprised devoted fathers. They were lawyers or business people, they wore suits, and they all liked cocktails after work, in bars where the single young women went after their office jobs, alone or in sauntering groups, to sip at vodka or wine until the frustrating edges of their day melted and they became receptive, maybe, to the men’s looks.

At the time, these men seemed harmless and friendly. Now perspective shows that they – far more than any high school boys – were exactly the sexual predators they said they feared when they contemplated their own daughters. Kevin and Bruce and those suited old boys were systematically hunting for what they called “talent” and then comparing war tales, simultaneously eliminating the possibility of intimacy with their own wives while they also betrayed the already low confidence of their single girlfriends. For they talked. They talked out of school like crazy. Kevin betrayed Jill once by announcing to the others that he was going where he knew he had a “sure thing,” and then heading unmistakably for a meeting with her. And she felt a little flattered but mostly exposed when he told his friends he came once just by eating her.

Eddie was the worst. He is an Irish Catholic alcoholic depressive, self-medicated back then with cocaine and gossip. He could be completely charming in his manic phase, and he made up some fantastic stories. He would have had his way with Jill except the night he tried he was far too soused to perform. He did end up with Anita for awhile, and that’s where the problem began. Eddie circulated a nasty fiction about her, with repercussions.

Anita began her tour of that group by having an affair with Kevin. He was accomplished at sniffing out needy females, and he zeroed in on her shortly after she started working and not long after she broke up with her college boyfriend. Flush with the thrills of work and legal drinking, she’d had a number of quick liaisons before settling into some habits with Kevin. He visited her once or twice a week for nearly a year before they both moved on, he to the new secretary in his friend Bruce’s office, and she to Kevin’s friends Pete and Tim and Eddie, and then to Bruce.

She actually feel in love with Bruce. She loves him even now. But he was married of course, and he was more conservative than Kevin. One evening Eddie told the guys that Anita had to have surgery to repair her rectum after he had been too forceful in bed. There was no truth to it, but Bruce stopped calling her. Kevin hadn’t been their deal breaker but it didn’t help when he joked that Allen was the only guy in their group whom Anita had rejected.

Bruce is nice but he’s conventional. It’s easy for Jill to imagine Eddie made enough of a joke of Anita that Bruce decided to discontinue the most important affair of her life. That’s how Jill interprets what happened, based on occasional conversations with Kevin. But Jill couldn’t talk about Kevin to Anita, and Anita wouldn’t talk to Jill about sex. There was no way Jill could tell her about it.

Jill’s going to have to break up with Kevin soon. Except soon can whip by so fast at their age … she could temporarily do nothing and then find months have passed. It’s not like there’s anything so wrong. Mostly it’s that she can see the writing on the wall: they’re old now, and already he’s needing more care and coaxing than she’s likely to want to provide. They’re looking for different things.

And she has to face it: she’s embarrassed by him. This surprises her. She’s spent so much energy not being embarrassed by her weird friends, learning to overcome the humiliation of her mother’s loud opinions, she never thought she’d be embarrassed by conventionality. The fact is, he’s just too suburban, too pot-bellied, too jowly, too white for Jill. She doesn’t like what she senses is assumed about her, when she appears in public as his mate.

Jill hopes to keep him as a friend. She always hopes that. She’s known Kevin so long and they’ve had a lot of practice at it; it may work. Then again, she’s puzzled lately about what friendship is, and her conversation with Kevin, about Anita, hasn’t helped.

If nothing else, Jill wants to see what happens next, to Kevin and his buddies. Because now they are on the cusp of retirement, and suddenly they’re wondering what’s next. For forty years they’ve been married to women who bore them, and mostly they’ve said they stayed married so they’ll have someone to grow old with. Now here they are, about to do that old-growing, and they don’t want to enter this phase with the person they thought all along would be their partner for it.

What will they do?

Kevin has already left his wife and once he accepts the idea that Jill won’t marry him, he’ll look elsewhere. Bruce is probably wobbling in his bad marriage. At least that’s what Kevin figures, but Bruce isn’t talking to him (as usual) and Anita isn’t talking to Jill (as tragic). The only act Kevin and she have ever taken as a couple was the lunch they organized that reunited Anita and Bruce. Kevin had watched their early affair fold in the face of the mean gossip and he felt some responsibility. He told Jill he wanted to make it up to them. She went along with the idea. Three months ago they arranged the reunion lunch.

Anita and Bruce fell right back into sex and love. Anita was ecstatic. Jill thought she was secure. A few weeks after that lunch Anita asked Jill when/why, her face gleaming across a restaurant table with the heat of fresh infatuation, and maybe Jill should have sensed it was no time for heavy truth. Maybe she should have found a way to giggle and coo. But Jill was relieved to finally be able to talk; she told Anita about those long ago libels.

She didn’t expect Anita’s response. “You just can’t stand me being happy, can you?” was the accusation. “You never have taken responsibility for what you did,” Anita blazed. They stayed at that table of pain for at least an hour, alternating between attempts at reconciliation and spears of long-suppressed resentment. In Jill’s opinion, Anita was forgetting how malicious the now-reformed gossiper, fast Eddie, had been. Anita had rewritten the history so that Eddie was always honorable and Anita had never been promiscuous. As far as Anita was concerned, Jill had a warped perspective about sex, always had, and still couldn’t be trusted near the subject.

Anita is incorrect. Jill’s sexuality is no more warped than the next person’s. And it’s waning as she ages. It’s not that she’s uninterested. She hopes she isn’t finished. But the perspective is different.

She saw Kevin last night, and she thinks it may have been for the last time. What pleasure his company provides is getting overrun by his banality. Jill feels tired when she thinks of him. Weary when she contemplates the situation with Anita. Ready for some hibernation time.

She can feel herself retreating, but she understands it’s a temporary condition. She’s pretty sure she’ll come out of it, and then she’ll be ready to re-up with Anita. There’s too much love there to forsake.

It doesn’t hurt that Jill’s more confident now. She looks good. Better than Kevin does. Better than she did. She comes from a family that appears to look older when young and younger when old. She’s finally growing into her features and her personality. Kevin, on the other hand, was a normal cute guy when she met him and he was thirty-five. He dressed in a suit for work and jeans for home, he drove a yellow roadster, and he moved his body well. Now he’s got a paunch. His knees are shot so he walks with a rolling stiffness. The candy-apple red Corvette is embarrassing in any neighborhood. He has spent so many years in the suburbs that he doesn’t even notice how poorly his perennial weekend shorts fit. He must have forgotten that it’s just wrong to wear socks with sandals.

And Jill weighs less. She’s always been a shape-changer, and her last project removed 20% of the body she’d been carrying around. Couple that with the effects of increased regular activity, and she’s wearing a smaller size than she ever wore (or even imagined). It used to be she always watched what she ate, and Kevin could be careless. The situation is now so reversed he actually urges food on her.

But also she feels weightless, without the elephant. As natural as it has always felt to spend time with him, as easy as the laughs have sometimes been, as hearty the affection, they’ve had the shadow of Anita with them. Jill has usually decided not to let Anita know if Jill had any plans to see him, because Anita wanted it that way. She asked for silence, so Jill hasn’t told her about whatever was said. As often as Anita and Jill spoke, it was odd – avoiding a subject like that. And it was awkward for Jill, watching Anita avoid too. Because the fact is, Anita was never open with Jill about sex, after 1978. They’d try to talk about Kevin, to settle the subject, and Anita would quickly maintain that Jill had no right, ever, to an ex of hers. Jill would remind her that she had given Jill permission – had in fact pushed the flirtation – and Anita simply denied that. “You just should have stopped,” she’d say. And “I’m not going to discuss it any more.” And so the elephant grew between them, and grew until it recently became their whole world.

Except the elephant no longer visits when Jill is with Kevin. She is old with him but she feels lovely and carefree.

She isn’t surprised that Kevin is boring. Even in the beginning, when he regaled her with stories about his philandering exploits and partying triumphs, she remembers marveling most at the idea that he’d already told these exact same stories a hundred times, to a hundred lovers, in a hundred dusks. It was always dusk because he was always married and they weren’t, and he didn’t travel. So all of his trysts were from when he could leave work to when he had to be home. Except with Jill. She was his only married lover. They had to make it work at lunch. He’d pick her up in that Porsche and they’d buzz over to her friend Karen’s apartment, where somehow they’d manage to do it twice, and shower too, and talk like maniacs, and still get back to work by mid-afternoon, ready with excuses like addicts (“just let me get away with it this one more time”). He had a steel-trap memory and no hesitancy to reminisce, and Jill remembers thinking that he must find it tiresome, hearing himself narrate the same old tales.

Maybe not. Maybe Jill is just projecting. She hates boredom more than just about anything – even when she bores herself. But now she’s spending time with Kevin again, and what’s more familiar to her than the sex is the impatient boredom she can feel swelling in her, when he lengthens a recollection, even one about them, or drags out some banal question, like “Gee: what do you think we should say when our kids ask us if we used drugs?”

So they’re having sweet free times, but he’s boring. They’re finally both single and they can associate openly. Anita has hung Jill for the horse so Jill might as well ride it. They can meet with easy minds and spend time together without having to call someone and tell a lie. They smile honestly when they see each other and they like to be together. But then Kevin gets intense and starts nagging Jill with “Isn’t this great? Aren’t we having a good time?” Or he retells a story she’s heard too often. And Jill finds herself checking her watch and calculating how soon she can be back at her place, alone.

But she is doing that with Anita, too. She loves her, she loves seeing her, her heart warms at the sight of Anita’s face. And after an hour of conversation she realizes she’s bored; she’s distracted by thoughts about how to get free.

Part of Jill’s boredom may be anger. These are friends who opted for the paths of least resistance, while she was early thwarted and rewarded and so stubborn about blazing trails. Jill remembers noting mistakes her parents made, and knowing that she could have stayed angry with them for a long time, but opting instead to forgive them; they meant well. Anita went a different way: she stayed angry and hid herself. Jill kept blaring who she was at her intimidated parents and while they don’t know all about her, they know much more than they could have. Anita always advocated playing a part. Act the good daughter but then do what you want. And so in his way did Kevin. Ever the apprentice: that’s what he was taught.

Now Anita has friends and relatives and a social life but she also has nervous ailments and profound insecurity. She feels that if she really shows herself, her loved ones will leave her. Or Kevin – he acts the gregarious sport but alone is angry and agoraphobic. His biggest complaint now is about the lack of intimacy and spiritualism in his life. He reads Joseph Campbell and craves a sum-more-powerful-than-its-parts relationship. More than anything else, that goal establishes his incompatibility with Jill.

Because she doesn’t want that relationship. And she doesn’t want to act like whom she isn’t. That makes as much sense to her as cheating at solitaire, or wearing falsies around a guy she hopes to bed. She started blaring her separate identity when she was a child, and she’s still blaring it. See me. Hear me. Touch me. Feel me. This above all: know me.