Sputterpub's Blog

Valerie’s time then was spent in a cycle of size-limited classes at her neighborhood school, afternoon lessons in music, riding, and art, and family time filled overtly with quality TV and national-park vacations and covertly with bickering. Her father was always passionately happy about a successful venture or miserably self-pitying about a failure, and he was then experiencing a string of bad choices in business ideas. There’s no doubt he was a challenge to his wife. But Sandy seemed to lack even the most basic emotional connection to him; she earned her living as an accountant and she approached everything with dollars-and-cents pragmatism, and as far as Valerie is concerned, her mother never understood how to just love Wayne and let him have his feelings. Even when he began to assert his unhappiness Sandy debated with him; Valerie will never forget the night she overheard her father beg for couple’s therapy. “Don’t be silly, Wayne,” Sandy reasoned in that grating calm tone of voice. “We don’t need that. We’re just going through a rough patch. All couples do. It’s not so bad.”

The next morning, on her two-block walk to school, Valerie saw the raccoon. It was in the far corner of the schoolyard, beyond the playground, where the trees and tall grasses hid empty Dorito bags. She’d seen animals there before but this one behaved differently: it walked round and round in a four foot circle, tail down, chirping lowly and wobbling now and then. It paid no attention to Valerie. She stared fascinated at a pale cloud of smoky lavender near the raccoon’s eyes.

“Oh,” she mouthed silently toward it. “I’m sorry. I hope this is not painful for you.” The animal paused and then wobbled on in its circle. Valerie felt it would be disrespectful to leave.

She remained at the spot until after the Animal Control truck arrived and the uniformed lady got out, until after she’d watched the raccoon roped around the neck and pulled over the chain-link fence and into a wire cage, until after she’d heard the lady say, “a lot of these fellas showin’ up lately with the Distemper.” Then Valerie resumed her walk to class, arriving late, wishing the raccoon a good death.

She tried to tell her parents about the event that evening, but Sandy and Wayne were distracted by their enmity. Her father’s latest venture had taken off and he was riding a wave of self-confidence again. He wasn’t needing a mate. Wayne had suffered a childhood contaminated by the toxin of parents who hated one another but stayed together for the child; he for one did not believe in toughing out a bad marriage. “Better,” he said that night and almost out of nowhere, as Valerie passed him the potatoes, “to split up now than continue to subject Valerie to this.”

“Excuse me?” Sandy sputtered in surprise. Her normally pale cheeks flushed red.

“I think we need to separate.”

“I think we need to talk about this somewhere else,” Sandy countered, and Valerie watched as a pale blue-gray cloud formed between her parents’ faces and then seemed to tumble upwards dissipating like smoke. Wayne became impassioned and began to yell, Sandy grew more didactic and efficient in tone, and still Valerie saw it fade away between them.

Valerie’s nightmares began that night and continued until she was twelve. Purple blue gray visions of death, everywhere to everyone she loved. During that year and a half she went to five psychiatrists, seven psychologists, an acupuncturist, and a herbalist. Sandy and Wayne divorced and each bought new houses and arranged shared custody. Valerie considered bulimia but really didn’t like to vomit. Her self-esteem wasn’t quite low enough for anorexia nervosa. Catatonia appealed, but she couldn’t figure out how to induce it. Her diagnoses were non-specific.

A lot of kids grow up early – old people would know this if they paid attention or remembered – and girls mature sooner than boys. But Valerie was exceptional; she was born old.

Her infancy was observant and her toddlerhood was deliberate. She used to unnerve Sandy, the way she would gaze at her and Wayne when they smoked and talked or drank and talked: little baby in a Johnny Jump-Up, slowly twirling on a toe and staring at her parents, instead of bouncing with glee like a normal child.

Valerie didn’t stand until she’d already figured how to get back down. She didn’t take her first steps until she’d mentally mapped out a run. She wouldn’t talk until she could converse in paragraphs.

When she reached the age of articulated magic, when other five- and six-year-olds were describing imaginary friends and comparing ideas about how each of them would use three wishes, Valerie began to sense death. Of course she didn’t recognize her ability at the time, and didn’t name it until she read her first vampire novel at twelve, but she could sense the imminence of soul-departure or, as she later came to call it, the inexorable dissipation of spirit.

The initial, incomplete event, on which she cut her psychic teeth, took place in the local hospital right before her tonsillectomy. She was five and totally unprepared for the operation; neither her parents nor the doctor had seen fit to explain surgical procedures to such a little kid. After prepping her with a rectal temperature reading (!) and a few perfunctory injections (ouch), and before laying her out on a sheeted table and covering her face with the ether-soaked, color-screaming metal cage, between those two hideous events, some nurse parked the little girl in a wheelchair in a corridor, placed her own chart in her lap, and told her to watch the man on the gurney across the hall.

That was undoubtedly a keep-the-child-busy strategy, but Valerie took it seriously. She focused on the immobile man, assuming that the papers on her lap concerned him. It seemed to her that there was a vague cloud around the edges of him, hinting of purplish-gray and more apparent near his chest and face than anywhere else. It was a sight better detected from the corners of her eyes than from the fronts, and it seemed to be dissolving away from the man, like smoke, while she watched.

Two people came then, dressed all in white, and they began to push the man on the gurney away from Valerie, down the corridor. She couldn’t get out of her wheelchair, but she objected vigorously. They ignored her and kept pushing. They hardly noticed that she was upset – it was a hospital after all, and she was a patient – and they never dreamed that her complaints were attempts to warn them that the man on the gurney needed help.

Another nurse appeared, and she spun Valerie’s chair around into the tonsillectomy chamber. While a crew of grownups restrained and anaesthetized the struggling child, the man on the gurney coded and died down the hall.

Two years after that, when she was seven and a half, they found the hurt bird. Valerie was in the back yard trying not to hear her parents argue and she noticed fluttery panicked movement in the leaves under the big oak. She investigated, moving away from her father’s hot complaints and her mother’s cold reasoning. It was an immature robin, cat-mauled but alive, and Valerie’s attentive posture distracted her parents from their vehemence. They came to her and put their hands on her shoulders, but neither Wayne’s optimism nor Sandy’s practical attitude got through to her. She gazed at the bird and tried to make out the pale blue-gray edge that flickered around it. She helped her parents bed the animal in a rag-lined shoebox, but she was neither upset nor surprised that it died.

Death and other manifestations of life come seldom to the suburbs; it was another three years before Valerie had occasion to experience her strange sense. Three years of school and car-pooled enrichment outside the house, and eddies of parental tension within. Valerie didn’t enjoy those elementary times. She knew she was supposed to be carefree and happy but she didn’t feel that way, and as she looked around at her classmates and playmates, she concluded that many children were not enjoying childhood the way the adults thought they did. The more athletic ones had a better time than sedentary kids like Valerie. The fuckups got more attention than the well-behaved. But what Valerie and the other kids hated most was the impotence. They abhorred the directives about what to eat, when to sleep, and whom to respect. It was nearly as oppressive as being told how to breathe. And those discomforts were exacerbated by the strictures of safety: the cul-de-sacs (dead-ends!), the sidewalks, the escorts.

She had lined up eight interviews for a two hour period. Since she never completed a job interview in less than 20 minutes, she had as usual doomed herself to fall behind. She wasn’t able that morning to pay attention to the interviews anyway; by the time she got to the office her swollen knee was starting to throb, and even with her foot elevated on an open bottom drawer, the pain was too distracting to let her to listen to the pale responses.

An hour after Connie’s office morning started, Cafeen walked in her door as applicant number three. Cathleen Lewis, actually, but her baby brother crowed “Cafeen” at her with shiny teeth on his infant lip and the nickname stuck. Especially when she grew up to have a major coffee addiction. She drank a 10-cup pot of fresh ground before leaving the house each morning, and continued with mugs of coffee all day. Cafeen even drank espresso as a bedtime beverage: nightcap in a demi tasse. She loved to talk fast and move quickly. She adored a buzz.

She liked to turn an interview around, so she attempted to convert Connie’s first question into her own inquiry about the nature of the job. She had spent the better part of the commute rehearsing how to ask natural-sounding questions that would get the interviewer talking. But as soon as she really looked at Connie she noticed pain graying her face. Cafeen became interested, and Connie almost collapsed into her care.

It was a management assistant job for which Connie sought an employee, but Connie confused any people ability for management skill; it was inevitable that she would hire a counselor for the job. And Cafeen was a counselor. That day she gave Connie candy (“for the pain. Sugar for pain. Really. Natural anesthetic”) and coffee (“you need a pick-me-up, honey. This is harmless stuff. Try it. Come on…”). Within weeks she gave Connie a diagnosis (“You have ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s probably rife in Mormons, with that closed gene pool. I don’t care how many wives which man had; there just weren’t that many of you, and you had to marry in the church. Made for inbreeding. And ADD’s inherited. There’s even a test for it. You watch for how much glucose the brain takes up, and if the patient has ADD their brain doesn’t use as much glucose. Tired brain. Needs a little stimulant. That’s why Ritalin works on the kids. That’s why the anti-caffeine prohibition for Mormons is stupid and ironic. The original taboo was against booze. Some zealot just mindlessly expanded it to include all ‘spirits and stimulants.’ Thereby depriving his people of the natural medication most of their brains need. Leaving them only with sugar. Which is why so many Mormons make, manufacture, and gorge on good old sucrose candy. Which is why you, Boss, are going to keep drinking real coffee.”) And so on. That’s how Cafeen rapped.

She wasn’t a good manager, because she hated to confront anyone but a stranger with criticism (Cafeen could never have stopped speaking to folks with whom she lived). But she was a pretty good counselor, and she became Connie’s friend. While Connie recuperated they got her more awake, more what they called “upright.” Before Cafeen Connie was always leaning just a bit too far forward; it was as if she were compelled to keep moving her feet, fast and almost stumbling, lest she tumble headfirst and top-heavy to the ground. There was a frantic tempo about her. In speeding her up Cafeen slowed her down. Connie became a bit graceful.

She stayed with Bill. Even with improvement Connie was concerned that if she left him she might never have sex again. But she found herself a little less ordinary. She liked her life a little more.

She worried about Megan though. Maybe it was like Cafeen argued – all the hormones in the meat and milk, all the chemicals in the air – but Megan at 12 was physically as mature as Connie and Cafeen had been at 16. It seemed to Connie that Megan chattered too much or spoke not at all, and she was impulsive. Like she wanted an existence more exotic. Attention more eccentric. Bill said Megan needed discipline. Cafeen said Megan needed fun. Connie didn’t know what to think. She made a cup of ordinary coffee, and brought it with two sugar cubes and a small spoon to the door of her daughter’s room.

The winter when Connie was 47 (and Megan 12 and Bill 53) was a harsh one. They had almost twice the normal rainfall, and high winds. There were more power outages that season than in any of the ten years since the family moved to northern California. Connie temporarily crippled herself. And coincidentally met Cafeen. The two events together made it Connie’s best winter.

There was one particularly brutal Wednesday night. The wind howled, the rain pelted, and by 8 p.m. the lights were flickering. They lost electricity on and off for a couple of hours, and gave it up at 10. Connie plodded to her room with her head full of thoughts about her diet and the next day’s interviews. Try as she often did not to rate her day, it was always convenient to fall into her habit of judgment, and the monosyllables felt blunt and honest. She had a good day, or she had a bad day. Most of the days were bad. She was bad. She ate too many sweets. She tried forbidding and she rebelled. She tried limiting and she exceeded. Licorice. Candy corn. Spice drops. She was bad. She walked to her room slumped as usual, her uncolored hair hanging in lank sugar-and-chocolate waves by her cheeks, as she mapped out a morning of interviews for the morrow, and pictured her plate at the management luncheon afterwards.

Bill went to his room not tired enough for sleep. He had a business trip the next morning and he was nervous about it; he almost reached for the comfort of his magazines. He briefly considered a conjugal visit but his body remained quiescent, and he remained in his room.

Megan was the only one of the three of them who went immediately to sleep. She wasn’t particularly tired, and the storm noise freaked her out a little, but with nothing to do she soon inadvertently meditated, and slipped from trance to sleep.

Two trees came down that night in their neighborhood, but no houses were damaged. One big oak sprawled like a giant broccoli stalk across their normally busy street, and Public Works diverted traffic all morning. Everyone was a little edgy with excitement, Connie chatting and Bill not, Megan alternating between eager child and blasé pre-teen. Connie’s voice made Bill so irritable that he left on his trip without checking the house over, and Bill’s sulkiness made Connie not ask. When she ran out of hot water in the shower after he left, she went to the basement herself to determine the problem. She was reviewing her day’s menu intentions, so she didn’t realize that the sump pump had failed until she slipped in the slimy flood and wrenched her left knee a quarter way around.

She went to work anyway. Most people would have recognized the inevitability of recuperation and elevated that swelling knee at home, but Connie didn’t think once about altering her day’s plan. She just moved more slowly, less gracefully, into the rain and wind, and by the time she got to work she looked 60 and felt 80.

She was a very ordinary person. Five and a half feet tall if she stood up straight, Connie usually slumped to about 5’4″. She weighed 165, which on her frame looked like 20 pounds too much. Not enough for obese drama but too much for a dramatic diet. She had medium brown-and-gray medium-length hair, and her complexion was middle-white.

She was 47 years old. About halfway through adulthood. She had just enough gone wrong in her body that she knew her age, but not enough that she was challenged to effort. Increasing allergies, slower healing, hard periods, heartburn. A stiff neck, an aching back, a weak wrist from computer solitaire. A tendency, grown noteworthy of late, to forget what she was about to say or do. But no near-death encounters with heart attack or stroke.

Connie used to wish she were Catholic, or from the South, or had alcoholic parents. She thought any of those qualities would have made her life interesting. But she hailed from a boring Colorado family whose greatest dysfunction was a familiar silence, and if familiarity wasn’t ordinary in a family Connie didn’t know what was.

She flared with a little originality and passion in her early 20s. She spoke then about how she’d raise her children differently: open door and open mouth. But by the time she bore her only child at 35 she’d settled into boring. She’d grown almost as silent as her mother.

It wasn’t that Connie didn’t talk. Actually she and her mother were chatterers at times; Connie’s father learned early to tune them both out. It’s more that their talk was aimless. Each was totally unaware of her auditor’s response. Neither would even notice a big yawn. They threw words into the air with no intention of communicating, thinking aloud and out of a chaotic brain.

“Oh yeah,” Connie’s mother would say, apropos of nothing. And then words would issue from her mouth which were of interest to no one else, phrases which revealed nothing except the random thoughts then passing through her head. “I hope he makes it,” might be about her father getting home in time for dinner to be served without reheating, or a reference to Connie’s rebellious, delinquent youngest brother, or even a wish that Uncle Ethan would cook his famous potato soup for the Christmas Eve family get-together.

In Connie’s family, language was either meaningless or absent. Sometimes words filled the air and made ears nervous. But nothing important ever got said. Connie’s parents never spoke about birth or death or feelings. When her father became angry he stomped off to his garage and inserted his fury into turns of the vice clamp or rips with the table saw. When her mother was mad she stopped talking to them. Often for half a dozen hours and once even for two days, Connie’s mother ceased to speak.

When Connie was a kid she said she’d never be the way her mother was. She figured she’d be no more successful at giving others the silent treatment than she was at trying to lose her appetite. It was difficult, after all, not to speak when others were around. But Mormonism teaches nothing if not how to endure difficulty. Connie learned.

By the time she was 47, her daughter Megan was 12. Her husband Bill was as serious and dour as her father had been, and as distant. Although neither Connie nor Bill went to church or considered themselves Mormons any more, the heritage had stuck. They were both hard-working responsible people. They drank coffee but it was decaffeinated. They drank alcohol but not well. They didn’t like to dance. They had sleepy brains. They loved candy. Bill was generally quiet, getting fat as he aged, wanting sex twice a month, handy around the house. They slept in separate rooms because, as Connie explained to some, they had the space and Bill’s snoring disturbed her. Connie would smile with her mouth closed then, and murmur something about knowing the way to one another’s room, which information was deemed unwelcome by everyone to whom she gave it.

Connie chattered or sulked at home, and was always busy but never organized. As often as she recited her intentions to herself to accomplish one task, she distracted herself with thoughts about two others. Meanwhile, her daughter Megan spent as much time in her room as possible. She sneaked stale jelly beans or cellophane-wrapped caramels, and she entranced herself with her bookshelves of fables and folklore. Or she borrowed one of her father’s Playboy magazines, and fantasized to the pictures. Bill didn’t know about the borrowing; he didn’t even know that Megan knew he kept a stack of old magazines in his closet behind his gray suits and winter shoes. But Bill was a packrat and a masturbator, and his collection went back to 1961.

It took almost 40 years, but Kinsey’s brain blew up last week. I’m always going to wonder if that glass-smashing concussion weakened something in his head.

Anyway, he’s not dead yet. That’s why we’re gathered around him, although we’re kind of a second tier. Kinsey has had a pretty good run: enduring marriage, two grown kids who still like him, business success and social adequacy. His prognosis is not good, but most of the folks standing around his hospital bed are immediate family. A few of us old buddies see him for a bit in the afternoon.

We can’t share pot with him. Kinsey never liked edibles and his respiratory system can’t take even vaping. But we promised to bring him a peach.

It’s not impossible. We can find Frog Hollow produce and pay $3. But we thought the errand would be easy. A peach, in July, in California. Turns out they’re not so common, these days.

It turns out that, while demand for good pot drove the quality and prices upward in the last 40 years, demand for good peaches dropped. To keep prices from rising, quality was sacrificed, and apparently few realized this.

Why, I was in a small market a month ago, greedily popping Santa Rosa plums into a produce bag. They’re so sweet&sour delicious, and they’re never around for long. A fellow shopper edged up to my side and put her hand forth to choose plums. “Aren’t they wonderful?” I voiced. “Oh yes,” she replied, and her face lit up as she added “if you slice them, they make a fabulous fruit tart.”

“Really,” I remember replying. “I just eat them out of the bag.” A cloud of disconnection passed over her countenance as she turned her attention back to the plums.

The next fruit event that struck me was at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, two weeks ago. They have a productive organic garden in their backyard. My sister-in-law spends time working in it every day. I came for a home-grown dinner, and the salad and stir-fried veggies were just picked and excellent. But my sister-in-law harvested over a gallon of fresh berries right before I arrived, and she bragged to me about the quantity that she had immediately frozen, for morning smoothies. Not for a minute did she consider offering fresh berries as part of the meal.

And yesterday, behind a well-built young man who was paying for a large bag of loose carrots, the cashier smiled and said, “I guess someone’s going to make some juice.” The young customer didn’t agree. “I just like to eat carrots,” he stated to the then-uninterested clerk.

How the mighty has fallen. Not only have California highways and schools collapsed in our lifetimes, but the state managed to peak as a produce provider and then decline. I was surprised a few years ago to encounter much better fruit in Paris than in Berkeley. I was disoriented by the custom there of having the purveyor select and bag the items for the customer. Why was I surprised? Agribusiness toxins are not allowed in Europe. And who is better qualified than the merchant to know the best fruit? But most of us in the States won’t phone in a produce order, because we don’t trust the seller to send us the best. We are cynics. We expect our merchants to be interested only in a quick profit. And then we engineer our culture to make that cynicism justified.

We persisted. We splurged on a dozen peaches. We went early this morning to the farmers’ market and we asked the seller to help us find the best fruit for a significant event. Her face lit up. Her smile pushed her cheeks toward her eyes and made those orbs sparkle at us. We came away with some magnificent specimens.

And we shared the peaches with Kinsey this afternoon. He’s degenerated quite a bit since yesterday. He seemed to recognize us, but he wasn’t talking. And he opened his mouth when we held a peach slice to it, took it in, chewed a little and swallowed, but he didn’t act like it was his idea or like he wanted more.