Sputterpub's Blog

Tom has shaved off his beard. Corey remembers the last time he did that – traveling for work and needing to get into protective gear, he had to remove the whiskers for the headpiece to seal right. When he returned from that trip, their daughter (then five) didn’t recognize him and freaked out at the stranger walking into their house. That was long ago. So Corey may have failed to recognize her ex even if she’d been looking at oncoming faces.

She isn’t pleased to see him but she can’t miss his motioning to her. He indicates the overhang of the building they had each been about to pass, and she steps out of the rain for a moment.

Tom wants to continue an argument from two nights ago. He’s peeved because Corey hung up on him. He had initiated the call to their old landline number, and she’d tried to keep it pleasant. She thought her conversation was friendly and amusing when she reported to him that the subject of her annual client newsletter was praise of couch potato time. She told Tom she’d finally stopped berating herself for unproductive evenings – she did more than enough from dawn till dusk to earn her downtime without guilt.

“I haven’t experienced any guilt,” Tom said then, “since we broke up.”

That was a boldfaced lie. Tom had been busted (by Corey) abusing their son. She hadn’t known about the punishments the poor kid experienced when at his dad’s, until she witnessed Tom’s out of control rage one afternoon when both parents responded to the school’s complaints. Tom came with them back to Corey’s house, and she had to put her body between her ex and her son to get Tom to stop smacking the boy on the head. Tom had always had anger issues, but no one took them seriously when they involved defacing a detested Bozo record in kindergarten, or yanking the windshield wiper off a jitney bus after the driver honked so loudly at Corey on her bike that she collided with a car. Those events had seemed spirited, or protective, at the time.

Tom had felt plenty of guilt, about that and other deficiencies.

When Corey went quiet after his no-guilt telephone declaration, Tom got riled. He must have sensed her disdain through the phone wires, and clearly he’d been drinking a bit anyway, but he started in with epithets. And Corey listened for a moment. Until she realized that she was voluntarily holding the telephone to her ear. It was like she was complicit in her own verbal abuse. She almost laughed.

Then she removed the phone from the side of her head and set it in its cradle. Tom could call it hanging up if he wanted. For Corey it was plain and simple disconnection.

She has no interest in continuing the guilt or hang-up conversation with Tom. And she has no time. “I can’t deal with you now,” she states. Her damp determined strides brook no argument. Tom lets her go.

She experiences a millisecond of pride. She feels a flash of self-confidence. She enters the bookstore in a relatively happy moment.

And crashes as soon as she sees all the books and all the shoppers. She’s been there hundreds of times, she knows what category of books is shelved where, but at this moment she can’t seem to find anything she seeks.

She takes a deep breath. And another. She decides to ask for help. She approaches the Information Desk.

The customer in front of her is satisfactorily aided in a minute or so. Corey confronts the young man behind the counter. He appears receptive. She tells him she’s looking for a 2006 translation of The Three Musketeers. The e-book sellers don’t mention the translators’ names or the translations’ dates, she explains, and she can’t remember the name of the translator herself. The young man searches his data base but doesn’t come up with anything now in stock.

Next she asks for a book called Altered Genes, Twisted Truth or maybe the other way around. It’s about the dangers of genetically modified food, she says, and as far as she can tell, its publication keeps getting postponed.

The Information clerk can’t add any facts. His resource indicates that the book was published two months ago, but it can’t clue him in on how to acquire it.

This is when Corey begins to leak. Usually when she cries her tears are preceded by other conditions; her eyes will feel hot and swollen, and it’s like a mass develops in her throat that doesn’t make her choke but is unsettling anyway. At the Information Desk, and to Corey’s profound embarrassment, tears stream out of her eyes and straight down her cheeks. Some even drip off her jawline.

And then a movement like a miracle occurs. From every direction, swiftly and silently, it seems like all the employees in the store converge on Corey, protectively, surrounding her and creating a space where she can have time to recover. She stops crying, and starts breathing smoothly, and begins to feel sufficient and clean. Afterward she will say that it was like the end of The Red Balloon, when all the balloons in Paris come to Pascal. But at this moment it’s more like she floats above the scene and sees a Busby Berkeley dance: herself enclosed in people petals, which open like a blossom when she’s ready to fly.

December is always a challenge for Corey. She was born two weeks after Christmas; as far back as she can remember, her birthday has been a time of party-fatigue, fresh inhibiting New Year’s resolutions, and gifts bought at post-holiday sales that can’t be returned. Everyone else seemed to have birthdays half the calendar away from winter.

Her family was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. In Protestant San Diego that made young Corey feel left out and ripped off. She didn’t get those net stockings filled with hard candy, let alone a living room with a decorated tree and a pile of wrapped packages and tinsel and music and fudge.

As she got older and more retrospective about the past, and more likely to make vows of improvement for the coming year, her approaching birthday cast a tone of review and resolution into December that always resulted in low spirits and often in a head cold.

And to cap all of her complaints, she’d landed in a tax consulting career, which she liked in general, but which meant every December was so busy that she couldn’t find time for the social scene even after she grew old enough to have one of her own.

Viewing Corey in any December, she seems beset and bothered. She tends to forget good posture and scramble from errand to task. She’s often up before her alarm and it isn’t because she’s sufficiently rested. Each list is longer than the one from the day before, mostly because of the items on it that have been moved there from earlier, acquiring a dash, an arrow, and finally a solid underline as they become crucial. Seeing her from above, she resembles a large scrabbling bug. Or a hermit crab, except her burdens are packages and files instead of shelter.

Today is particularly irksome for her. There are less than five shopping days till Christmas/Chanukah, which are coinciding this year. She’s done what she can with gift cards, and she still has at least four presents to acquire. There are three new plan documents to draft before she tries to close the office for the last few days of the year, and there’s one large error to resolve unless she wants to refund a few thousand in fees or face an E&O claim (she has to resolve the issue to everybody’s satisfaction or she’s going to be ashamed of her ability). All those, plus she must do the year-end planning to close her own corporate books, and she has tweaked her lower back again, so she stands like an elderly person and takes initial steps like a spastic toddler.

She’s embarrassed about her back. She knows that’s inappropriate, but it’s true. She acquired the diagnosis (herniated disk between L2 and L3, left side) a year earlier, along with some excellent oxycodone experiences and several sessions of physical therapy. She knows to roll to her side before getting out of bed, and she would never lean forward from a chair and twist at the waist to pick up a weight off the floor. But two days ago she sneezed, first thing in the morning and with some violence, and that’s when she felt the dreadful release of warmth at the base of her spine. She said “oh shit” at the time, she stretched side to side and back and forth and kept moving, but there was no interrupting the consequences of whatever happened. She sensed the inflammation a day later, yesterday, and ibuprofen isn’t easing it. And it’s too much hassle to add narcotics acquisition to her list of projects; O is so controlled that a prescription can’t be phoned or faxed in, and there’s no way she has time to travel cross-town to her doctor’s office for it.

She soldiers on. She figures she has about twenty shopping minutes before she has to get back to the office. She doesn’t think online will work this week; she has to see and touch the gifts she is about to acquire. She regrets the disappearance of stores like the Nature Company and Rand McNally; she’d always been able to find items in shops that featured artifacts and maps and globes. She concludes that the only option now is the big bookstore ahead of her. She waits for the crossing signal while it starts to rain.

She’s wearing a water-resistant jacket but she left her umbrella in the office. The forecast threatened rain later in the day, but the pathetic fallacy seems perfect to her. “Sure,” she thinks sourly as the first drops frizz her hair: “just what I needed to make the day perfect.”

The signal turns green. She steps into the intersection with a crowd of people. She is the only one of them whose shoe slips on the now-moistened streetcar tracks. She goes down.

Like any other pedestrian who falls on the streets of the financial district, she jumps up immediately, refuses the assistance offered by a few strangers’ arms, doesn’t even meet their eyes as she thanks them and hustles to the sidewalk, and keeps walking to get away from the scene of her clumsiness. She brushes at the wet smear along her right thigh. She’ll figure out if any damage was done later.

She is so distracted by her fall (envisioning what it must have looked like from the overhead wires, with herself splayed on her side on the tracks and convulsively contracting her limbs to regain verticality, something like a long-legged insect impeded by a web), that she doesn’t look at any of the oncoming pedestrians. She almost collides with her ex-husband before she recognizes him.

Annie wasn’t having any fun. Not that she’d use the word to describe time with the old Karen, but at least then they could walk, they could argue about business philosophy in the privacy of the street, and they could give one another ideas that sometimes worked out to be productive afterwards. At this lunch, Annie felt like a caretaker. Her volunteer work was about building inclusive housing, which meant meeting a lot of disabled folks, and lunch with Karen was feeling like volunteer work. She looked past her companion’s fat face, out the bistro window onto Shattuck Avenue. She was startled to see her old friend Philip.

He was walking, poorly, with an escort. The escort was his friend George. George recognized Annie, spoke several times to Philip, and they turned toward the bistro entrance. Within a minute they were at Annie’s tableside.

Annie knew Philip wasn’t doing well. Up to a few years ago they used to hike on weekends, share dinners out, attend opera together. Philip was a Britishy bachelor-type even though he’d been married for twenty years before Susan died of cancer. He had finicky ideas about food and wine and fine art, and very little sense of humor. He looked like Don Knotts but with a sparse beard on his retreating chin. Annie remembers being startled once by his wit – in response to her recommendation that he get more exercise than walking, he stated that sometimes he felt the urge to exercise, but he found that if he lay down for a bit, the urge would pass. Annie was tickled. It was a few months later that she happened across the quote he’d lifted, from Robert Maynard Hutchins or J.P. McEvoy, or maybe from the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Anyway, it wasn’t original to Philip, and he acted like it was. Annie didn’t approve.

George and Philip only spent a minute at the table. The brief encounter didn’t allow time for her to introduce Karen to them, but that was just as well. Neither Karen nor Philip was particularly conversant, and George looked beset by friendship responsibilities.

Philip seemed as slight, inhibited, and womanish as ever, but unsteady and confused. He managed a little smile but stumbled over “how are you” and misplaced the word for “weather” when he pointed through the window at the perfect sunshine. Blocky George reminded Annie, as always, of a leprechaun built of Lego bricks. After the men departed, Annie briefed Karen.

“He’s the man I used to travel with sometimes,” she said. “A few of our mutual friends thought or hoped we’d make a couple, but that was not happening, for me at least. As far as I know, his wife Susan was the activist in their relationship – maybe if I’d told Philip it was time for us to be together, we would have been. But there’s no way that would ever work for me, even if I found him attractive (not). Anyway, he’s developing some dementia now.”

“He seemed a little off,” Karen commented.

“More than a little. And the poor man is losing his ability to speak. He had the biggest vocabulary I’ve ever encountered – he taught me how to pronounce ‘desultory’ and he’s the only person I’ve ever heard use ‘excrescence’ in casual conversation – now he gropes even for simple nouns. You know,” Annie introduced, “I think the end of our friendship was connected to his slide.”

“What happened?”

“The last time we were in Santa Fe, he complained several times that he was misplacing his words. It seemed to the rest of us like normal middle-aged slippage, although I’ll admit I was struck when he lost ‘usher.’ For a well-educated highly articulate patron of opera and symphonies, there was something disturbing about the moment when his face flooded with confusion and he stammered out ‘you know, the person who seats you.’

“Anyway, the next day we were driving somewhere and got lost. Philip attempted to use his new phone to find our way or even a phone number, made mistakes, and ran out of patience. I tried to assist a few times but when he grew snappish I said ‘fuck yourself.’ That was it. He tightened up, I didn’t apologize, he didn’t forgive, and he then degenerated so rapidly there was no room for reconciliation. I’d get news about him occasionally, even saw him a few times, like just now, but our old intimacy was dead. He’s not doing well. He’s losing his mental faculties, but he lost language first. Acute progressive aphasia was the Mayo Clinic’s diagnosis. His sister and friends have moved him into a care facility, for the rest of his life. What we just experienced was surely an outing, arranged by good old George.”

Annie thinks Philip brought some of his illness on himself. She theorizes that if he’d been looser, more flexible, more active – if he would have just learned to laugh or sneeze without inhibition – if he weren’t so damned tight and self-protective and controlled, then he wouldn’t be degenerating yet. He always disdained her recommendations; he wouldn’t even try crossword puzzles, or writing poetry. She thinks he let some important parts of him atrophy. She told Karen about him partly to keep the conversation going but also in hopes that she’d learn something about her own cause and effect. But Karen wasn’t connecting stories. She acted semi-attentive and soft and sad and grateful and like she didn’t have a clue that her own decisions caused her present condition.

They refused the dessert stamp and left the bistro soon after. Karen insisted on paying the tab because she’d initiated the get-together. Annie would have rather split the bill, so she wouldn’t have to feel she owed Karen a followup meal, but Karen wasn’t having any of Annie’s cash or credit card. They walked, slowly, back to Karen’s SUV and drove, slowly, back across town to Annie’s place. Then Karen went on to her apartment and Annie walked inside and smoked.

Annie won’t have to reciprocate. She’s going to experience one of those interruptive life changes. She’ll soon see her dentist about the bump that has developed on the right side of her tongue, and that visit will start her on the nightmare cascade of oral cancer.

She will become a bit disfigured. The quality of her speech will change. It won’t be accurate to describe her as a kinder or gentler or humbler person. But among the other new skills she’ll learn, Annie will develop an ability to turn the critical and causal glass on herself.

They hardly conversed in the car. The few sentences they exchanged concerned where to eat (Karen picked Liaison) and a place to park. As further evidence of divine caretaking they found a meterless space one short block from the bistro. Karen couldn’t walk far but she was able manage that distance.

They were seated immediately. Annie winced when she saw the table; they’d eaten at the bistro many times in the old days when they walked together, and this was the table they were often given. The sight of it reinforced some unpleasant memories. Karen had always been a trial in public. It seemed she was either arguing with Annie about a business practice, in which case she’d let her volume increase and salt her phrases with fuck and shit and other words that made neighboring diners cringe and parents cover their toddlers’ ears, or she was laughing in apparent pleasure at the conversation, which meant she loosed a loud witchy cackle across the room.

Karen took the banquette. Annie draped her purse strap over the back of the chair and sat facing the window to the street.

The waitress stopped by their table. She rolled the aperitif stamp onto the paper, but the women had already selected their food. Karen ordered iced tea and quiche. Annie disapproved but said nothing. It was better than the old days, when Karen would have gone for the eggs Benedict and finished all the potatoes too, but it wasn’t good enough. Annie asked for a glass of Sancerre with her salad Nicoise.

Karen had been on a collision course with disease for as long as Annie had known her. From the beginning she’d had the emptiest refrigerator Annie had ever encountered. The woman stocked nothing but bottled water in there, and her cupboards didn’t hold much more than jelly beans and some chocolate. She breakfasted at Starbucks, on drinks that had a bare acquaintance with coffee and pastries that contained more sugar and butter than grain, tended to go most of the day on handfuls of sweet snacks, dined late and without regard to nourishment, and kept crazy solitary hours. Annie wasn’t perfect on personal health herself, but she was light years beyond her companion. She exercised every day. She didn’t eat meat or poultry. She drank in moderation and got lots of water. She didn’t color her short silvery hair and she managed to look a decade younger than she was. But she still took drags on other people’s cigarettes, and she smoked almost as much pot as she used to do tobacco. She was addicted to the sensation of inhaling burning material, her peak flow was down around the level of untreated asthma, and still she didn’t quit. She knew she shouldn’t criticize others. But that didn’t stop her.

Karen had been so stubborn about her unhealthy habits that Annie had been certain there would be consequences. Not wanting to witness them is the main reason she’d backed away from the relationship. She was surprised that her old friend still had all of her limbs.

Karen had acquired her Type 2 diagnosis just three years earlier. Annie remembers a walk they took shortly afterward, when Karen declared that she’d sooner die than take insulin shots, and vowed to improve her diet. She did buy some yogurt and a few frozen meals around then.

But she degenerated rapidly. The oral meds didn’t control her sugar and she didn’t seek attention for a troublesome foot until it swelled too large for any of her shoes. She learned in the ER that she had broken it, but she hadn’t felt the pain signals. She had to go on insulin. She learned to inject herself, and by this lunch, of quiche and potatoes at Liaison, she was up to four shots a day. She was also just released from six weeks of wound care at the hospital and then a rehab facility, because she had developed a sore in that troublesome foot, ignored it till the infection had dug into bone, and now her walking-for-pleasure days were over. She was glad to be out of a chair, but she really couldn’t amble more than a block or two.

So Annie watched her old acquaintance make her way through egg pie and fried potatoes, and felt sorry. But she didn’t comment. She didn’t argue. And Karen was mostly slow and calm, eerily so. The only contentious moment was when she described her goddaughter’s recent diagnosis of Type 1. Isabella was 17. Karen reported that Isabella and her mother had just returned from a session in San Francisco where Isabella had an insulin pump implanted.

“They don’t implant pumps,” Annie stated.

“Yes they did.”

“No. Really. You wear the pump, and a tube from it is inserted into you. But you have to change the insertion site at least once a week.” Annie spoke from actual knowledge. Her best friend and former college roommate had developed Type 1 when they were both 35, and Annie had taken on the science aspect of Mary’s disease. That’s how work had always been allocated between them; Mary was the sociologist and Annie’s strength was math & science. So Annie had been a member of the ADA and a reader in the subject for almost 30 years. She knew how a pump works.

Karen reasserted the implant idea and started to raise her voice. But then she closed her eyes for a moment, shook her shoulders a little, and calmed herself. They changed the subject.

The new Karen did not seem to get angry or yell or use obscenities. She acted warmer and humbler and more appreciative. She laughed readily. Unfortunately the laugh was still a startling loud cackle.

Karen called Annie at 12:25 but she didn’t speak any words Annie could hear. The connection abruptly ended. Annie knew it was Karen from the caller ID. She pressed the green button on her landline, but all that came through was two clicks and some static.

She expected confusion from Karen. She waited a minute and then tried again, this time with her cell phone. Karen picked up.

“I’m outside your place,” she informed Annie, “but there’s no parking.”

“That’s weird; I was just out front and there were places everywhere.” Annie couldn’t see the street from her garden cottage, but she knew the block wasn’t busy. “Are you in front of 2611?”

“Twenty-six eleven? Oh. I must have read my phone wrong. I thought your address was twenty-eight eleven.”

“I get it. I know where you are.”

“Right near Russell Street.”

“Sure. Let’s see: You’ll have to turn around, and …” Annie paused as she considered the traffic barriers. What a muddle. “On second thought,” she concluded, “stay right where you are. I’ll come to you.”

“You sure?”

“Oh yeah. Stay there. Just give me five minutes.”

Annie locked doors, picked up her keys and sunglasses, draped her bag across her torso, and left her yard. She took her weekday route, south toward the BART station. Within a few minutes she crossed Stuart and began looking for Karen’s car.

“A boxy silver SUV,” was Karen’s description. Which meant Annie was looking for one of the commonest cars in Berkeley, and a major difference from the Mustang convertibles Karen used to drive.

Annie perused the street as she paced south. She saw a few SUVs, all boxy and silver, but most of the parking spaces held Priuses. She was reminded of pop-beads – same-shaped car bodies of every color, all parked parallel and appearing bumper-connected. She glanced into the driver’s windows of the boxy few and didn’t see her friend. Then she shifted her focus from curbside to street center.

She saw what she concluded must be Karen’s car. Not parked but idling. Not at the curb but in the middle of the southbound lane, at the stop sign, immediately before the right turn onto Russell.

As Annie approached she was overtaken by a moving Prius. Of course she didn’t hear it, but she glimpsed the blue body in her peripheral vision and then watched the vehicle edge up, dolphin-like, behind Karen. The Prius driver hesitated only a second before pulling left and around Karen’s car.

“Wow,” Annie murmured. “I guess she took me at my word when I said ‘Stay right there.’ Wow.” She went right and opened the passenger door.

“Hey there,” Karen said. Karen always opened a conversation with “hey there,” and concluded with “bye now.” The phrases annoyed Annie but there were other qualities about Karen that annoyed her more. Annie’s friends marveled that she still spent time with Karen, but she had no skill at breaking up with friends, and she and Karen went way back. And it wasn’t like they spent much time together, any more. It had been three months since they’d conversed and almost a year since they’d been together without others.

Annie looked her old friend over as she strapped herself into the passenger seat. Karen had reported that she’d lost some weight, but to Annie she looked as large as ever. She’d aged ten years in as many months. She still wore big tops and loose pants, still sat like a truck driver and walked like a cop, had traded her old sensible oxfords for truly orthopedic footwear, continued to pull her hair straight and have it colored pale red. But the freckles that had concealed her face wrinkles had given up the battle; now her round spotted face was fully lined and her light blue eyes peered out from sagging lids. The skin on her hands looked a little shiny. Her always trimmed and unvarnished nails showed ridges and discoloration. She was halfway through her 60th year and she looked 80.

She drove like an 80 year-old too. Karen used to enjoy fast cars and aggressive maneuvers, but on this cross-town jaunt she never reached the speed limit. She didn’t pull into an intersection to start a left turn until the traffic had cleared: like she was navigating the streets of Eugene instead of Berkeley. She was eerily calm and oddly slow, and no one honked at her. It was as if the other drivers knew she was “special,” and gave her extra room. The short trip reminded Annie of the adage about the Lord taking care of fools.