Sputterpub's Blog

That’s why Julie and Mark were driving. Unencumbered, Liz could have flown away alone, once she realized how incurable was Pete’s vision and how inescapable were his arms. But Samantha plus luggage was too much for Liz to manage. She and Julie had snuck a dozen other calls by then – Liz’s email wasn’t private – and Julie felt compelled to help. Rescuing Liz and Samantha seemed much more rewarding than trying to solve her own problems. Julie had enough enemies at work and co-dependents at home that lately her life made her sputter; she loved the clarity of Liz’s trouble. And she expressed that love so enthusiastically that she prevailed on Mark to help.

They were halfway there and surrounded by cherries. They didn’t realize when they started that Oregon was the heart of sweet cherry country and that late July is the height of the season. They didn’t read till they were near Salem that a man named Henderson Lewelling had loaded root stock onto oxen in Iowa in 1847 and hauled it there, or that a farmworker called Bing was responsible for the name of the black-red fruit.

They knew they were hungry and they pulled into a roadside café. “Au Temp Des Cerises” was painted in yellow and blue on the streaked wooden arch they passed under to enter the place. They were escorted through four dim rooms to the back porch and seated before a laden grove of cherry trees. They could see the Pick-and-Pay signs near the edges.

Julie was eager like a child. “Let’s pick some” she urged. But Mark was focused on the meal; he smiled at her and opened his menu. On the inside cover was printed:

Life is just a bowl of cherries.
Don’t take it serious, it’s too mysterious.
You work, you save, you worry so,
But you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it’s the berries,
The strongest oak must fall,
The sweet things in life to you were just loaned.
So how can you lose what you’ve never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries,
So live and laugh at it all.
                                                  – Lew Brown and Ray Henderson (recorded in 1931)

There was also cherry trivia, including some medical claims. They read about a study at UC Davis, not far from home, which involved cherry breakfasts for some lucky women. Each ate 45 pitted Bings every morning (Julie offered that she would have been quite willing to pit her own) and enjoyed decreased levels of uric acid for at least five hours afterward. That meant less gout, or less general inflamation from arthritis. Julie thought she had arthritis in her neck already (more than just stress anyway), and if she didn’t have it now she was bound to have it soon, so her desire to eat cherries was justified and heightened.

She contained herself while they dined. She ate a portobello mushroom burger and salad; Mark consumed calamari. She had a beer and she teased him till he added vodka to his cranberry juice. Then she talked him into slowing their travel so they could pick cherries.

“Rapunzel can wait one more day,” she said, and he understood her. They had agreed to think of Liz as locked in a tower with only Samantha to cuddle and only Pete to visit. They were halfway to that tower and determined to topple it.

They weren’t in love but they were together. They snacked while they picked and they gorged when they stopped.

Two travelers rested on a shaded seat
ingesting cherries purchased where they grew,
that grew too perfect to delay to eat:
cascades of flavor so intense they knew
no other sense. They paused to look at one:
a globe of purple ballasted within,
its roundness gleaming in the midday sun,
its ripeness offering to split the skin.
She wondered: is there any way to catch
a cherry just like this, in words or art?
To choose an indigo and have it match
the sparkle in his palm? with ink impart
the ready strength? No words can capture quite
the pop that cherry made beneath her bite.

It was a quixotic escapade from inception, but it was also irresistible. The surreality around Julie triggered a kind of charisma in her that shanghaied Mark, and then partnership dynamics went to work.

Every aspect must have been favorable, for Mark was nothing if not sober, cautious, and deliberate. He lacked impulsiveness, like a tired old pet. He was 58, small-framed, fit for walking, a quiet widower with a tendency to kidney stones and gastric reflux. He drank cranberry juice daily. He never ate after dinner. Many who met him assumed he was gay, and he may have collected his half-dozen female friends as much for the heterosexual aura as for the companionship. Or so thought Julie, who was #1 or #2 of those girl friends.

Julie was 54 but about 15 years younger than Mark in attitude. He lived with two purebred cats while she shared her home with a retriever mutt. He used his television to play rental DVDs of foreign films; she paid monthly for extreme cable and was unembarrassed about the six to eight hours she ran the TV nightly. They both had degrees in English, but his was a serious doctorate after a serious B.A. and before law school, while hers was only a bachelor’s, and even that was selected so she could continue to read and write instead of for any practical application.

They were connected through Liz. She had been Mark’s law partner. She was Julie’s friend. She introduced them because she thought they would like one another and she hoped they’d fall in love. Liz was a dedicated attorney and a cautious individual but she was an incurable romantic. The proof of her ailment was in their errand, for Mark and Julie were on their way to rescue Liz from her impulsive fifth marriage.

Blame it on classmates.com. That’s what Liz did. Her old high school boyfriend never would have found her but for that website. It had been 46 years and she was on her fifth last name. But she consented to be found. She was 64 years old and she thought she ought to know better, but she realized recently that she consented to be seduced by Pete’s emails and phone calls, his nostalgia and his forceful talk, into leaving the nicest, most boring husband in the world, a practice she wanted to retire from anyway, her middle-aged son, and her three close friends.

Pete proved to be forceful and not much else. At first Liz described his controlling behavior as “directness.” Or “linear:” she’d say that Pete had been career Navy and an engineer, so his thinking was very linear. He wanted Liz to visit him and she did. He wanted her to leave Jim and pretty soon she left Jim. He helped her decide to retire and then he wanted her to move to Seattle so badly that she did that too. His directness next led to her divorce and their marriage. She started shaving her pubic hair when he asked, and she took up golf.

Cracks appeared in their romantic union when Pete tried to keep Liz in their bed even though his snoring was destroying her sleep. The morning after that argument she called Julie to ventilate; until that conversation Liz’s friends thought she was deliriously happy.

It was then, just four weeks past, that Julie first heard about Pete’s fierce determination to spend every moment with Liz. He was 68, he kept declaring, and he’d finally hooked up with the woman he should have married in the first place, and he wanted to spend whatever days remained with Liz, always with Liz, doing whatever it was he wanted. Pete’s first passion was to share every moment with Liz. His second passion was to never leave his aging German Shepherd. Back when he adopted Bennett ten years ago, Pete promised that after he retired he’d never leave again, and he was keeping his word. Liz wasn’t supposed to leave Pete to visit her son or friends, and Pete wouldn’t leave Bennett.

Meanwhile, to make Liz feel more at home Pete brought her a dog. Samantha was a rescued Greyhound, and before Liz could get her wits about her she’d fallen in love with the fawn-like creature. So Liz couldn’t fly either, because she wasn’t putting her skittish pet in a baggage compartment.

She’s moving easier now. Younger. Her heel doesn’t hurt and her knee isn’t bothering her. She’s about to open her front door and step south toward the bird tree and east to her newspaper, the dog is beside her and her left hand is on the brass doorknob ready to turn-and-pull, when she stops, arrested by the sight of the small windows in the door. Small rectangular windows. Like blocks well set together.

A week ago she went to a design workshop. A local developer wants to build a high-density low-income apartment building a block away from her house, and that proposal has drawn Natalie into activism. Not that she isn’t for such housing in concept, but she and most of her neighbors worry about the project’s affect on their traffic and safety. So she went to a massing meeting, where they heard what the development had to have and were able to arrange little foam blocks as they wished, trying to fit the essentials into the space. Before they got started, Chris the architect moved the blocks for them, demonstrating various configurations. That’s what Natalie remembers now.

Chris stood before their circle of metal stackable chairs. He’s a tall man, an inch or two over six feet, and he bent his knees a little and hunched slightly to handle the blocks. Mostly he looked at the seated neighbors while he moved the foam pieces, occasionally glancing down at his nonstop hands. He placed the blocks with such authority, and they fit on the cardboard platform so well, that Natalie was flooded with a wash of well-being. She was caught momentarily in a powerful, comfortable body-recollection, and the experience fascinated her. She knew immediately that an early childhood memory had been summoned for her, and she began stretching toward it, hunting around it like lightly scratching near a mosquito bite. Like seeing from the sides of her eyes in the pre-dawn light of her bedroom.

It was a man. A big man but not her father. Moving pale wooden blocks, with authority and confidence. Thunking them against one another with certainty. Building strength and spare beauty, a wall well-meant. Natalie thinks she was under age five. The memory is pre-school.

The dog whines eagerly and Natalie opens the door; he dashes and she walks out into the white light of 6:15 on an August morning, so typically overcast that it won’t be any lighter for hours. She sees movement in the tree and spots the big crow among the starlings. The dog rushes the tree with his tail sweeping in a large happy arc. Natalie watches smiling. She read somewhere that domesticated dogs are like permanent puppies: face-licking, playful, adorable. It occurs to her that Americans are like that; if dogs are permanent puppies then Americans are permanent children. Rambunctious and ready to smile. Hopeful and sunward. Impulsive. Concerned with fairness. She’s always looking for an index to her culture; she thinks she may be on to one.

She likes the notion. Under the momentary influence of exuberance, she picks up her pace along the brick wall to the newspaper. She almost skips. But she’s barefoot and the bricks are rough. She clips her left little toe as she cuts her turn too tightly around the front porch. The pain is immediate and mounting. Even so, she gets her paper before returning, hop-hobble, to the shadows in her house.

Twenty years ago it would have been a simple toe stub. Now it’s at least a sprain. It begins to swell. Discolor. She can’t walk on it. She sits down and gets it up. She blankets it with a bag of frozen peas.

Natalie admits she will have to slow down a little. At least for a day, she isn’t going to move fast or far. As the sun rises on an August Sunday at the western edge of her continent, she sits with her left leg elevated. She takes a deep breath and then another one. She begins, tentatively and inexorably, to feel again.

She checks herself out as she walks to the bathroom. A little stiff in the left heel and knee, in the right hip and lower back, in her neck. She’s a set of bones strung on worn cartilage, covered with fat and skin. She has to stretch the inner edges before they’ll stop their wake-up grating. Heat up the fibers till they ease and move smoothly with her. But she’s not bad, for all the wear. She’s put her body through weight swings from 140 to 190, through two pregnancies and births, through miles of barefoot walking. Sure she hurts some mornings. But if she takes the time to remember, she can recall regular eyestrain headaches in grade school, or how her circulation was so bad in her teens that her legs grew itchy and splotchy if she stood for five minutes. She can remember heavy menstrual periods with deep ceaseless cramping. A wart virus on the sole of her left foot that compromised her piece of mind and sent her to a podiatrist, weekly, for a year and a half in her late twenties. Certainly there have been some carefree, body-wonderful moments, and it intrigues her that the few times she has achieved that state she was usually immersed in water, but mostly Natalie has found life to be a complicated elegant mixture of many simultaneous sensations.

Sitting backward almost falling onto the wooden toilet seat, she relaxes in her supported morning squat. It occurs to her, as it often does, that morning farts don’t smell. Exercise farts don’t seem to smell either. She figures it must be like perspiration: only offensive when there’s an agenda.

Now she relaxes, eliminates, cries. Natalie cries first thing every morning. She sits on the toilet, opens a handy book or magazine, and drips tears onto the page. Spatters the inside of her eyeglasses. Enough sometimes to make her nose run.

Her optometrist has a theory about this phenomenon. He says everyone builds up tears around the eye when reclining asleep, but for most people those tears retreat back down a duct when they rise. Natalie must have a duct a bit clogged. It’s probably easier for the extra tears to flow down the front than to drain out the back. She cries painless water. She thinks of it as cleansing.

Her mother’s mother said if you laugh before breakfast you’ll cry before dinner. Natalie likes to think her morning tears set her up for a humorous day.

Anyway, she smiles at herself while she holds the Sonicare against the four quadrants of her mouth for the prescribed two minutes. Her face sags less when she smiles. She thinks about the many little jobs that await her, and she starts to fret, but she sees her own face in the mirror and she smiles.

It is two minutes after 6 when she puts her foot onto the first floor of her small house. The dog precedes her. The sun will rise in seventeen minutes, but the eastern hills will hide the orb for another hour. Actually, the morning fog will hide it longer than that. But the sky is lightening as she enters her kitchen, turns the dial on the coffee mill, flips the one-armed faucet up to fill the glass carafe with water. She can see the white-bagged newspaper, centered on the bricks between the laurel trees, as she turns her head to the right while pouring the water from the carafe to the side chamber of her coffeemaker. She unfolds a natural brown filter into the black plastic cone, knocks the fresh ground coffee into it, clicks the knob to “on,” and walks out of the kitchen to the sound of the first stammering suck of water up the tube.

Most of the time now, it doesn’t even work when Natalie masturbates. She used to be very orgasmic, but for the last several years it feels like her nerve endings have retreated. She’s still in there, but too deep to reach easily.

Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t take enough time. Perhaps she’s as deficient in respecting the rhythm of her autoeroticism as most couples are respecting their mutualities. Lately she’s so busy she rushes her own sleep.

It’s 5:45 on a Sunday morning, and it appears that she’s awake for the day. The newspaper hasn’t yet even hit the walkway. Like everyone else, Natalie slept through most of her infancy, woke for longer and napped less as she rolled through childhood, became nocturnal as a teenager, and has been steadily retreating from that arrangement back to diurnal and toward napping as she wanders the expanse of middle age. She’s exactly fifty now, and she hasn’t slept past 9 a.m. in two years.

She notices bird chatter. In fact there’s an actual ruckus in the tree outside her window. A raucous ruckus. She almost giggles. It must have just started, she tells herself. She would have noticed it before if it was going on, loud as it is. But would she have? The bird chatter is like one of the cracks that so often appear in the paint on the walls of her old house; she never knows if she’s noticing them as they occur or if they’re there, in front of her habitual unseeing eyes for weeks or months, before some random moment makes her attend.

She stretches. It’s a luxurious diagonal movement in her queensize bed, alone before the sun or the Sunday paper. She detects a dull ache in her right hip and the chronic crampiness in her left knee but she thinks, all in all, that’s not bad. Natalie has friends with daily headaches and nightly heartburn. A bit of joint pain doesn’t seem too unlucky to her.

There’s a loud caw from the tree. The chatter has sounded like starlings or finches but now Natalie hears the authority of a shiny black bird. She can imagine the crow like a negative seagull, an American raven in the almost-dawn light. She hears the coin-sound of tags on a collar as her dog raises and shakes his head on the floor beside her bed.

She opens her eyes. Her room is a graysome dark, a little gloaming from the streetlight poking into her corner bookshelf, but mostly a murk of night and her nearsightedness. She pulls her bedside clock to her face, reads ten or so to 6, and sets it back on her nightstand. She got into the habit of a battery-operated alarm when she first moved in and had too few outlets, but she’s come to appreciate the other advantages. Her clock works when there’s a power outage. Because it’s cordless it’s easy to pull it to herself, like now, and see its clean analog face.

She closes her eyes. She strokes herself. She can’t concentrate. Neither Eros nor Morpheus attend her this morning. She forms a wish and hears it granted: the thunk/slide/swish of the plastic-bagged newspaper hitting her front walk. She rolls to her side and sits up on the edge of her bed, mentally checks her lumbar region, pets the dog, and rises to her morning height of five foot six. By bedtime she will have compressed half an inch. That’s all she knows about today.

Natalie has short curly hair, colored multi-brown over graying dark. She has a fit body which carries thirty extra pounds. She has a synthetic mind. That’s her term for it. But she’s alone, awake early, and exercising her power of self-description, so her term is what she uses. Synthetic. As in what comes after thesis and antithesis.