Sputterpub's Blog

They stand like insects amid all the carved stone. Mary looks at the box hedge planted around the large empty traffic circle; the way the lights shine on it, the hedge appears more like an institutional-green textured short wall than a living thing. Claire considers sculpture. She couldn’t resist touching one statue in the Musee d’Orsay: a marble woman draped in a lovely onyx robe. “S’il vous plait,” growled a seated guard she hadn’t seen. She shot him a sheepish look but his face was as stony as the sculpture. He was not amused. That event set Claire to pondering sensory pleasure and art. Of all our senses, Claire thinks we derive the most pleasure from touch.  She knows we’re very sight-oriented; she remembers a time in fifth grade when her teacher played a record for the class and then pointed out afterwards that all of the students watched the phonograph, even though they could have listened while looking anywhere in the room. And Claire certainly appreciates the pleasures of music, and the strange potencies in our olfactory systems. But there’s no question to her that touching and being touched bring the most actual pleasure. So she wonders why there isn’t more tactile art. It strikes her as incorrect to restrict people from touching most sculptures. There’s another idea for an editorial, she grins to herself.

The dog tags jingle again as Mary goes into her pocket for a cigarette. Her face is lit and shadowed by her lighter, and aromatic smoke mixes with breath condensation as she exhales. “What the hell: let me have a hit.” Claire makes it sound like she’s succumbing to something as she reaches out her gloved right hand. She takes the cigarette, white with a flecked tan filter, inhales deeply, closes her eyes while she tips her head backward, opens them slightly as she exhales to the velvety sky, and hands the smoke back to her friend, hot and long-ashed. “Oh, that’s nice. I’d better watch it. You want to walk to the Eiffel Tower?”

“Goodness no.” Mary’s response is not hesitant. “I’m cold and very tired. Let’s get coffee or a drink.” Their relationship began in the coffee house at their community college, and the two can always find pleasure in coffee together. They turn back toward their favorite bar and brasserie.

Claire is a little disappointed. She’d love the long walk. She thinks her ankle will heal faster if she works it more. And she’s fascinated with the tower. She finds it beautiful, compelling, majestic. She’s the true daughter of an engineer. She knows that the French respect the profession more than do Americans; her father taught her that the word “engineer” is French-derived from “genius.” But the non-engineering French seem to her to be incurious about science, at least compared to Americans. That puzzles her.

Claire puts her disappointment away. She knows Mary is having a hard time sleeping, and with reason (beyond the recent 9-hour time shift). Mary had always planned to spend most of her one-month sabbatical here, but until a month ago she didn’t know she’d be dealing with the question of where to put her mother. Mary’s mom had a stroke then, while receiving a shampoo. They’ve since learned that salon stroke syndrome is the medical community’s name for that not uncommon event. Her mother is doing well, but she won’t be able to live in her apartment any more. When Claire leaves in a week, Mary will have another half month to find a home and move her mother here, or bring her back to the States. Mary knows how hard it was for Claire to arrange two weeks off from family, work and school, so she is trying to postpone most of her family affairs until Claire leaves. But this trip has deepened their friendship, and Claire is starting to insist that they spend some time on Mary’s obligations. Claire is beginning to rebel against the date on her return ticket. She may just stay another week or so.

She puts her gloved hand through the triangle of Mary’s pocketed arm. This is Paris; it’s allowed without question. Mary presses that hand toward her bundled body in a moment of mutual unambiguous tenderness. They cross over to the left bank.

Claire starts building another editorial. These considerations used to take the form of imaginary speeches with Greg. Over 31 years, a strong habit developed of talking to him in her head. But lately, she finds she’s talking inside to no one. She can still hear the words. She still rehearses the indignation. But the imaginary audience has faded and diffused. It’s not Greg any more. It’s no one or many. It’s hard to see and it doesn’t matter.

She and Mary cross the last busy street before the brasserie. Small cars dart along lanes that seem too narrow for any motor conveyance. Claire marvels; for all the complaints about traffic and drivers, it amazes her how often humans don’t collide. She may not talk to Greg in her head any more, but he still speaks to her. He has always traveled in his job, and he has collected tips for how to get places. Greg says the important things to remember are to keep moving (even if the movement is temporarily not in the direction you select), to eat when you have an opportunity, and to never pass up an opportunity to use the toilet. Claire almost laughs out loud as she realizes that life is of course a journey, the journey, and it too can use travel tips. She begins to compose the end of an editorial as they enter the brasserie.

The top of Mary’s head appears first, her short dark hair tousled, glossy, and slightly silver-streaked. Then her French face and slim body rise into the room, both looking younger than her 45 years.

“Have you seen my – oh there they are…” Mary begins to ask and ends almost humming. She has located her father’s dog tags on the table near Claire, and she smiles at them as she moves to a chair, picks them up with her right hand to lay them in her left palm and then begins to play the silver-toned chain like a deck of gaming cards, or a rosary, as she turns her attention to Claire. “How goes the writing?”

Claire stretches her legs under the table. She flexes her left ankle. She pushes her hand nape-to-crown through her heavy blonde hair, and then sits forward to pour more bourbon into her small tumbler. She has a fleeting vision of Lillian Hellman or Dashiell Hammett. She wishes she still smoked cigarettes. “I started well but I petered out,” she answers.

Mary pulls the chain up out of her palm again, and lets it run like water back. “Let’s take a walk,” she suggests. “Maybe that will jump-start you.” She weaves the chain around her fingers. The dog tags were her father’s, and they used to be a talisman for her but now they’re more of a charm. She carries them with her in France, just as she carries her mother’s old I.D. bracelet when she’s in the States.

“A walk sounds good.” Claire stands and tips the bourbon in her glass. It catches the light like liquid amber. She drinks. “Let’s dress for it,” she says as she glances around for her scarf. It’s colder than they expected, colder than the locals expect. October in the Seine Valley is normally around 60° F, but they’ve had days in the high 40s since they arrived. They don’t mind. Their lips and thighs tend to get chapped, but their hair doesn’t frizz, the sky doesn’t rain, and the air is cold and dry and bright like a mountain top. They layer their torsos with sweaters and jackets, equip themselves with mufflers and gloves.

Unexpected is the whole experience. Mary and Claire didn’t expect to become friends, let alone make this trip or have this weather. They’re about the same age and nearly the same height, and that’s where similarity stops. Mary is the daughter of an American soldier and a French shop girl, born in New Orleans to a war bride and an outgoing mechanic, only child of divorce when she was six, alternately raised after that in Paris with her mother or in Atlanta with her father and his current wife. She looks French, with her big eyes, short upper lip, nose not-small and bent as if she used to box. She’s completely bilingual and can teach French in the States and English in France. Claire and other Americans always expect her name to be “Marie” instead of “Mary.” It’s “Mary.” But she pronounces it charmingly; instead of a long “a,” she makes it sound like the “a” in “apple:” Ma-a-a-ry. She has been married and divorced twice, has no children, and now teaches English at a community college east of San Francisco.

Claire is blonde and getting heavy-set. She’s the daughter of a stay-at-home mom and an engineer dad, both American and still together. She has been married to Greg for 24 years and they have children in both genders: 21-year old Annie and almost 18-year old Jason. Greg works for the EPA and Claire has been employed by a large insurance company since she re-entered the workforce seven years ago. She’s bored with her job, which is why she signed up for the journalism course at her community college. She’s bored with Greg, which is why she’s now in Paris.

Mary turns off the apartment lights while Claire makes sure she has the keys. Unlike California light switches with their up-or-down obviousness, French switches are two-inch by two-inch toggle plates; Mary punches them lightly with the side of her soft fist. They make their way downstairs to the apartment house door, across the cobblestoned courtyard, and out the big doors to the street. The wind off the Seine is biting. Mary pulls her wool muffler up over her nose and mouth; with that and her black tights she looks perfectly Parisian. Claire tugs her coat sleeves over her wrists and puts those gloved hands in her jacket pockets. They cross the street against the signal and have to run the last few steps to the curb. The dog tags jingle in Mary’s coat pocket.

“As frantic and crowded as these streets are, you never hear horns honk,” Claire marvels. “There’s a busy sort of patience here (or maybe a patient sort of busy-ness) that I admire.” They are crossing the river, and what with the cold wind and her muffled mouth, Mary gives her agreement with smiling eyes, raised brows, and tilted head. Then she speaks through her wool. “Maybe that could be a subject for an article,” she suggests.

Claire looks appreciative and exasperated. “I don’t seem to lack ideas. I just don’t know where to go with them. I guess it could be worse. At least I have ideas.”

Mary’s answering look is almost merry. “She has it too,” Claire thinks. She’s half French and she has the quality Claire is trying to describe. “Come to think more of it, it doesn’t seem to be patience exactly. I don’t know…you French seem to be able to find some humor or good in every situation. Whether or not you make the motion, there’s a kind of shrug and smile.”

“The Gallic shrug? It’s true. But it’s also true that Americans are wonderful. So mobile. So filled with energy.” They are approaching the Louvre plaza, and sculpted buildings shelter them from the wind. Mary pulls her scarf away from her face. Claire looks toward the glass pyramid, while Mary turns her gaze the other way, trying to sight through a close arch down the Champs Elysées to the big Arc. The distant traffic makes lines of white and red light, like neon airport art. The plaza is deserted.

My home computer monitor acts like a seismograph. The smallest vibration will set the screen swinging a bit on its swivel base. The monitor stands on a big hard drive, on an old oak desk, in the sunporch off my bedroom, in my 85-year old house, in the seismically alive San Francisco Bay Area. I’m sure it sometimes shakes because of a bus going by outside, or in response to my heavy-footed offspring thudding around the house. But I’m also sure my monitor shakes because of little tremors in the earth. It’s a monitor, after all.

Shaking it warns me that comfort is fragile. Its vibrating shows me that nothing is still. I grew up in the 50s-60s, in California, in the time and the land of forever prosperity. Walt Disney stood at the top of our pantheon, smoothing the bright plumage of the NBC peacock. Disney meant perfection: clean, organized, planned, color-coordinated, safe entertainment. That mythology generated two expectations for the middle-class members of the baby boom: that productions could, should, and must be perfect; and that one will be safe if one stays in line and rides the ride the way it was designed.

Our safety myth was like a force field, and it was short-circuited by the turbulence of the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam conflict, the assassinations. We medicated ourselves with the free sex that was available between the invention of the pill and the discovery of AIDS, with loco weed, and with booze. We lived fast and very seriously.

But in time we forgot the lesson that there is no security, and we slid back into the safety seduction. We’re now of an age when shit happens – cancer and fluky accidental deaths, discoveries about divorce or dementia – and we seem to find each tragic event outrageous. We’re still that young. We whine for fairness.

It’s not fair to find a pimple on a face old enough to have wrinkles. But our generation keeps breaking out.

At least, that’s the way it seems to me, and I’m not a complete alien. I’m willing to believe that we on the coast see life differently than those in the middle of the country. And I know I’m not mainstream about many things. But I don’t think I’m alone in this perpetual identity crisis. I think I’m one among millions who were born into a culture with sufficient leisure to discover its own unhappiness.

“And I’m an alcoholic,” Claire thinks as she reads her typed words. “I’m obsessive-compulsive. I’m addicted to work, solitude, exaggeration, and exercise. I’m about to divorce my best friend. I don’t know what to write next.” She pushes her chair away from the round table as she hears Mary moving downstairs. She saves and closes the file as Mary climbs the tight spiral steps from the bedroom to the living area of their apartment.

Claire figures Paris could just as well be called the City of Spiral Steps as of Light. She can’t recollect seeing an uncurved inside staircase in the week she’s been here. All living areas are small relative to California, but the buildings are so ancient that they were made without inside plumbing. In retrofitting them for toilettes, the space had to come from and reduce the other rooms. That makes sense. But the structures always had to have stairs inside, Claire reasons. Even though spiral steps occupy less area than straight stairs, space considerations probably weren’t an original issue. It must be a style thing. And spiral steps are pretty; no one would contest that. But they certainly are more hazardous than the space-gobbling linear steps of home.

The apartment has the tightest spiral they’ve seen. The steps are made of an attractive wood that doesn’t match anything else in the place. They appear not more than a meter in diameter. Their geometry is lovely, especially when viewed from above. But they’re so tight, Claire is tempted to descend them backwards, as if they were a curving ladder. Her attitude is influenced by the early tumble she took, on the day of arrival, carrying an armload of towels downstairs. She forgot to walk at the outside of the steps. She trod too close to the center pole, where the step isn’t wide enough for any adult foot, and she slid. She could have caught herself if she had just let the towels go. But the habits of motherhood die hard; she’d long ago trained herself not to release the bundle in her arms no matter what. She came through the accident pretty well. She knew right away that she didn’t break anything, and in the course of the next couple of days, her middle-aged body informed her that she’d twisted her left ankle a bit and banged the back of her skull. She necessarily increased her consumption of Jack Daniels.

It got to where Abigail even witnessed herself. She floated like a spirit above her own right shoulder, noting herself in act or word. Many engage in this sort of self-examination, especially girls especially in adolescence, but few are as adept and distinctive in the disconnection. Without any pathology or problem, Abigail managed to watch herself and even enjoy her own embarrassments. (She was able to retain the separation well into adulthood. It passed unremarked, the way a headache does, sometime in her forties. That spirit at her shoulder merged into the rest of her without fanfare, but she retained some ability to laugh at herself.)

She was surprised but not shocked when Selena’s mother killed herself. It was only a few months after Abigail saw her with Kevin, and things had always been volatile in Selena’s household. The family was from the South, with wonderful traditions about music and hospitality, but the parents drank strange cocktails, and fought loudly and often. Their back porch faced Abigail’s bedroom window, and she often heard the arguments.

She knew about suicide from “Madama Butterfly.” It was her father’s favorite opera, and he’d had her watch it with him, on television, when she was five. She hadn’t minded the odd loud singing, and she rather liked the music, but she’d been completely blown away at the ending. She couldn’t understand how something called “entertainment” could have a sad ending.

So she wasn’t shocked when Selena’s mother killed herself. But she was very sad. And she wasn’t at all prepared for Selena to show up pregnant, by (spitball) Pete of all people. Selena and her father moved back to the South.

Abigail didn’t do much steady catching after that. She went to junior high school, and bigger fields of play. Perched like an angel on her own shoulder, she watched others, she watched herself, and she took notes.

She became a counselor for her peers. Something about her invited confidences; girls and boys both came to her with their stories, and she gave advice about sex and romance, studies and cheating, philosophy and science. She soon realized that everyone else was at least as insecure as she was, and trying to hide weakness from others. What mystified Abigail was the way everyone else seemed to believe the weaknesses could be hidden.

She read voraciously. She took her models more from books than from people, because the people around her seemed amnesiac or timid.

There were no worthy girl examples in her environment, and by fourteen she gave up any idea of being a boy. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that she had her first period (finally) three months after her fourteenth birthday. It certainly wasn’t a coincidence that, according to her lockable diary for 1964, she started her first diet two weeks before she saw her that menstrual blood.

She read several books a week. She despised the story characters who responded passively to life (Candide) or who whined (Hamlet). She loved challenged individuals, like Howard Roark or the circumscribed Lizzie Bennett. She tried imagining and building the female she wanted to be.

In time, Abigail even fell in love and married. That she didn’t do these things with the same individual is probably the only deep disappointment in her life. She fell for Owen in college, but she couldn’t keep him after he broke apart. His mother’s suicide precipitated his own psychosis, and Abigail turned to the easy comfort of her friend Bill, for marriage and (memorable) parenting and (amicable) divorce.

She is still taking notes. She continues to observe. She writes some of her own story now, and then she reads about a young woman called Biga or Abigail. She knows the character lived her days with attention and passion, but on paper Abigail seems passive and reactive. This disturbs her; it makes her wonder if she was incorrect about Candide and Hamlet, or inaccurate about portraying herself. She’s beyond middle age but lately she feels like she’s stepped behind a dedicated batter, and she’s steadily catching herself.

The next wrong thing she noticed was how the world and even the parents treated her and Barry differently, based on nothing but the shape of the well-concealed area between their legs. It didn’t seem to bother anyone but Abigail that all girls were supposed to like dolls and hate bugs and all boys were supposed to like getting dirty and making noise. No one else commented about how the women always congregated in the kitchen and talked about food and diseases and babies and fashions while the men hung around the fireplace or the radio and discussed more important, interesting things like politics and history. And her comments were largely ignored.

By the time she got the position of steady catcher, Abigail had developed quite a facility for witnessing, and Biga had learned (mostly) to keep observations about the witnessing to herself. She was nine years old.

From behind the batter, she watched Pete from up the street pitch spitballs. She watched Selena flirt with Kevin, and she saw Kevin respond (Selena was fourteen and adorable, and one of Abigail’s most regular role models, but Kevin was seventeen and a sophisticate even in Selena’s eyes).

Her skill at witnessing improved, and sometimes she followed up with a bit of following around. Selena and Kevin never noticed when she snuck after them into the berry patch near the market. There she watched them suck on each other’s faces and necks and sometimes grope each others’s laps, and received impressions which she carried into her dreams.

As steady catcher, though, she witnessed most, and drew conclusions about kids. She saw that a lot of the neighborhood girls really did act scared of bugs, and apparently liked rainbows and dolls. She observed that most of the boys were more rambunctious and seemed to get a kick out of messing things up. She didn’t feel like she belonged with the girls, who tended to squeal and shriek and even bounce with joy about small things. She didn’t feel like one of the boys, either, because she didn’t care about being chosen for a team, and she had no desire to set fire to things, or to chase birds or rabbits.

Abigail felt alone outside, and Biga felt alien when she was in her family home. She kept watching. She took to writing notes. Her birthday was in January, and every year her parents gave her a diary with a little enclosing flap and a lock. Each was a different color, but they all had the year stamped on their vinyl bindings. Abigail wrote almost daily in them through 1966. After that she disdained diaries but kept journaling in a spiral notebook, until midway through the 1990s, when she switched to a computer.

She watched Selena and Kevin and sometimes just Selena or just Kevin. Witnessing Kevin led her to observe him in completely inappropriate congress with Selena’s mother, who was lovely and vivacious and exotic in their neighborhood, but who was also married and at least forty. The autumn she was twelve Abigail happened to see them doing the actual it, in the screened back porch of Selena’s house. It was a schoolday so Selena was away and her father was at work. Abigail was home recovering from a flu. She was quite well, actually, but her mother believed in keeping her home for a full twenty-four hours after her body temperature returned to normal, and the twenty-four hours wouldn’t be up for another six. Her mother left her alone while she went grocery shopping or something, and Abigail couldn’t resist a little backyard snooping. It was so easy to see into Selena’s porch next door. In fact, as Abigail realized that she was watching the shape of Selena’s mom’s butt against the screen, as Kevin pounded into her and nuzzled her so Abigail could make out the top of his head, it occurred to her that the pair was being so indiscreet as to invite discovery.

In the beginning, little attention was paid to community space. The Levittowns were built on farms that were subdivided into sleepy plots of box houses with attached garages and symmetrical yards. There were no plans made for mini-parks and no land reserved for playing fields.

Cars didn’t have seatbelts, or padded dashboards, or traffic. It was 1950.

Post-war couples left the cities. They moved into the houses in the new suburbs, and they reproduced. Their oldest children watched the roll of development compound like a snowball; through the split rail fences in their backyards they saw the sprouting wood frames that became split-level ranch houses in any of three different floorplans.

Kids were born, and kids play. With no fields nearby they had games of baseball in the street. That was safe because every third road was a dead end (later called “cul de sac”), and its bulb made an adequate diamond.

A decade later, after communities created places for the ballgames, a lousy player would be stuck in the far outfield, like Lucy in the “Peanuts” cartoons. Abigail was a lousy player. In those dead end street games, the spot for someone like Abigail was immediately behind the batter. Her position was steady catcher. No matter who was up, that’s where she was.

It’s not like there was any trick to being catcher. No one bunted. The rules didn’t allow the batter to advance on an error. There was never a close call at home plate. She didn’t even have to squat. She stood behind home plate and tossed the unhit balls back in the direction of the pitcher.

Being steady catcher meant she didn’t have to bat or field the ball. That made everyone much more comfortable.

There was no referee in those games: no cheering squad or audience. She was the only nonplayer present. The steady catcher was a witness.

Abigail already had plenty of practice at witnessing. She was the firstborn of infantile parents, and she’d developed the idea at an early age that she’d better pay attention, because she couldn’t be sure her mom and dad were. It wasn’t that they were stupid or disadvantaged, either; it’s just that her parents were young, romantic, and without a clue about caring for kids. Both had been the youngest of large families, and neither ever babysat. Her father delegated most of the day-to-day parenting to her mother, and her mom was unconfident at the role, impatient to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and shop, and susceptible to anyone else’s advice about childrearing.

So Abigail knew, when she was two years old and her father gave her an enema, that her parents could do wrong. The penetration offended her so much that she remembered the insult as repeated, when in fact her parents, terrified by her reaction, only had the nerve to do it once. She’d been balky about toilet training, and they were advised to try controlling when she went, and therefore where. It was an ill-conceived idea, and young Abigail instinctively knew that; she was very angry at her parents, but they seemed as upset as she was, and she forgave them.

She knew again, when she was five and a half and dropped off at the hospital without explanation for a tonsillectomy. Much later, her parents informed her that the pediatricians really had advised them not to tell her anything about what was going to happen. She accepted that, although she never understood how anyone could have followed such clearly unsensible advice. But at the time, Abigail knew her parents should have told her what was coming, just like she knew the first nurse shouldn’t have called her Annabel and the other nurses, the ones around after she woke up from the horror and had to keep puking in the bowl by her head, shouldn’t have spoken about her so she could hear them. She forgave her parents, because she loved them and they loved her, and because she believed they needed her, but she didn’t trust hospitals or nurses after that.

By then her brother had arrived. Barry emerged when Abigail was three and a half, and as soon as he started talking, she became Biga. Her mother refused to call her Abby or Gail, so Barry made Biga from what he heard of Abigail. Her parents went along with it. They even made “biga-sister” jokes. Abigail never liked it and even protested against it, vehemently at times, but the nickname stuck, around home.

Mom and Dad and Biga and Barry. They made a magic square. Two old and two young: two female and two male. Except that three of them were babies, and then there was Biga. The others went along with the world as it was and seemed to have no trouble understanding its rules, and then there was Abigail.