Sputterpub's Blog

From age twenty-two to thirty-three Peg had a few affairs, several friendships and always her family, but most of her time she was alone. She saw her sister daily, but she spent her mornings wandering the fields in search of plants and birds, and her afternoons reading or assisting at the hospital. She visited her brother and sister-in-law when she had to; she welcomed her nieces and nephew whenever they came downhill to her place. Peg didn’t like Sam’s house; she fashioned excuses to get out of visiting there then which she later used to avoid any human connection at all.

She was happy in her house. Really. She just wanted to be left alone.

The fire didn’t start at Sam’s that September Monday, but his big house was in its path. Peg wasn’t spotted near the action, and she never confessed or admitted anything. No one who witnessed that awful conflagration could think it caused by one heartsore being.

For herself, she might have tolerated the situation forever. She was used to Sam. As a child she adored him. She was only six when he first visited her room, rough hand on her mouth, hard weight on her chest. It didn’t happen often. It was better to endure him than to bust him. And he wasn’t sure about their relationship; maybe they weren’t blood. But he couldn’t say that about his daughter. His daughters. No.

Sam’s house was destroyed and his remains were found later. Just his. Mary and the kids were in Wildcat Canyon with Alice and Peg when the fire started; they were nowhere near where it went. They hunted for late blackberries and didn’t notice when Peg walked one way and they another. For her part, Peg’s only target was her brother’s beloved lodge. She wasn’t aware of the hot dry wind even when it hampered her attempts to strike the match.

Alice’s and Peg’s houses were not damaged in the big fire. Their neighborhood was spared, while all of the buildings two blocks east and up were consumed. Their gardens received a coating of soot and looked grayed out for a few weeks, but the ash acted as excellent fertilizer for the highly-acidic soil. The sisters’ houses were fine but Peg stopped going out. She seemed stunned by the devastation.

She wouldn’t even attend Sam’s funeral. Mary and the kids stayed at her little place until the burial, and Mary always maintained afterward that she felt embraced by Peg’s little house, embraced and beginning to heal, but Peg was then immobilized; she refused to see her brother’s corpse into the earth.

She remained housebound until 1930. Gradually she became an old-crone legend among the children in the neighborhood. Her neglected garden was described as haunted.

But her house cared for her. Within that small space she wrote poetry and contemplated creatures and felt safe to feel. It took eight years before she grew strong enough to leave the little place and resume living, elsewhere. Then she used some more time, selecting the new owner for her house. Finally she hugged Alice goodbye. She squatted by the edge of the creek, right knee down, and stuck her hand into the cold water. Felt, heard, smelled the creek. Brought her wet hand to her mouth and tongued her own palm. Looked once more. Left.

By 1912 Sam had established himself as a business magnate and civic leader. He had married a Peralta heiress and bought his creekside mansion near the Kent estate. His sisters lived with him until tension between them and his wife grew uncomfortable. He gave them homes as much for his peace as for their own.

At first he considered a shared house for Alice and Peg. He had a small lodge in Wildcat Canyon and he thought about establishing them there. But he soon figured that wouldn’t work. They’d be too remote. Once alone they’d begin picking at one another. His sisters were particular women, very fussy. And Sam wanted to keep the canyon lodge for himself; it was where he went when he needed a break from the stress of business.

It surprised him that Alice and Peg didn’t marry. He thought Alice was a bit ugly, true, but women were scarce and she had some money; he thought she’d be a wife. And Peg was good-looking. But his sisters were single at twenty-four and twenty-two and they didn’t appear to be looking for husbands. He bought little houses for them.

So the neighborhood formed. Sam and Mary Benedict lived up the gentle slope with a view of the bay and the creek meandering by, in a gorgeous mansion which was in such a constant state of alteration and improvement that it never settled into any style before its demise in the fire of 1923. Downstream from the manor, what would be four and a half city blocks when there was a real city, the little houses of Sam’s sisters framed a big curve of the creek.

Alice’s looked like an English cottage. White stucco with a slate-like roof that curved over the small-paned windows, it stood among its rose bushes as sturdy as a bunker. But it was built of alien materials and, really, it should have faced northwest on the land even though that would have put it at an angle to the street. As it was, the house needed constant and substantial repairs. Maybe the problem was the ventilation; Alice often complained of headaches.

In contrast, Peg’s place was charmed. It was framed and walled with the redwood that had grown on its land, and most of its windows were made of its own melted dirt. It got its roof thatch from the hay field on the other side of Perkins Street. It looked like the witch’s house from Hansel & Gretel. As the years passed and Peg aged from twenty-two to forty she came to be considered a witch herself.

But that took some time. It went in two phases. Of the eighteen years Peg lived in her little house, for the first eleven she appeared quite normal. Except she was rather good-looking and somewhat rich, but she never got married.

It wasn’t that she was a lover of women. In fact, her sister Alice was that type, and Peg helped Alice keep it a secret from Sam. Alice only acted on her inclination once in her life, one summer with a charming woman who visited the area from Brussels, and Peg thought it was Alice’s self-repression, more than bad air in her house, that caused her chronic headaches.

Peg just wasn’t interested in being mated. She was a curious girl and tried sex several times, and she enjoyed it, mostly, but not enough to get married. She had an affair when she was twelve with the son of her brother’s business partner. Jeremy was fifteen at the time and completely inexperienced. In fact she seduced him. The Perkins family socialized often with the Benedicts, and Peg and Jeremy managed a regular and vigorous sex life. She was lucky to avoid pregnancy.

She had a more exciting fling when she was seventeen. The judge’s nephew visited for a month. A college man, from Yale. He was experienced; she was pleasured. But she never loved him enough to go back east with him. Peg preferred her home and her privacy. She opted for poetry and naturalism, and didn’t really have an interest in companionship.

She was quite discreet, and her brother never suspected her activities. Alice knew about some of them but of course she understood the value of a sister’s secrets.

They knew not what they did, when they built the little house. And they did it right.

The lot was rather small, downstream from the Kent estate, where the creek leveled out and zigged right in its year-round run to the bay. The property was dense with native redwoods and with live oaks and walnuts planted by the Kent family, and it just happened that the redwoods were removed to make room for the house. So it was that they built the place out of the trees that had always guarded the property. Even the window glass, bought a mile west on the edge of the bay but made, in part, from creek silica, was at home in the little house.

With that redwood, with that glass, it didn’t matter that the slope was beyond the angle of repose. That the foundation was a cattywampus sampler of different forms, nothing tied together. That the creek would swell every few years to encompass the basement for an hour, so that the little house had to more or less float on the land it covered. The designer was an unhappy unoriginal man, whose best claim to fame was to share a draftsman with Maybeck…yet the little house was built (quick and cheap) out of its own redwood and its own sand, and it stood charmed and charming.

If it were more valuable it would have been altered. It would have been bought and sold, remodeled or restored, had amenities added. If it were higher class it would have been situated to the east, with a view and a peril. But it was a modest little place, hunkering below street level, set back hidden in its oak trees. Its living room was low and shaded by the front porch, cozy and cave-like; its residents all knew they’d waste effort trying to make it light and airy, so no one painted the redwood walls or the brass window latches. It was mostly owned by single women, so no one added on to it, or drilled holes in its walls for speaker wires. In its first century it changed its roof material, added forced-air heat (cage-like around itself, with floor ducts below and ceiling ducts upstairs), and enclosed the back porch: that’s all.

It was built in October of 1912. It was listed for $3,200 but it wasn’t sold at first; it was given to a spinster sister of Samuel Benedict. They recorded a sale as if money changed hands, but Sam just gave the place to Margaret. He and Charles Perkins were the men responsible for the reservoir system that permitted development in the area, so he was well-connected with the builders. He managed to purchase his own mansion plus small houses for his two sisters, for a total of $8,493.

The three abodes were situated between the new Benedict and Perkins Streets, on the banks of the creek at the then edge of town. Sam’s place was over five thousand square feet and upstream from his sisters’ small houses. Alice’s cottage seemed English and Peg’s was like a little chalet.

Sam and Alice and Peg didn’t look like siblings. Maybe they weren’t. Their parents Abe and Helen moved to California in 1888, with eight-year old Samuel and infant Alice, and two years later, after the usual spate of summer visitors, baby Margaret just seemed to appear. No one noticed that Helen was pregnant, but she was a large woman and she wore her garments loose. Like Sam and Alice Margaret was tall, but she was dark-haired and green-eyed to their blonde-and-blue, and she seemed ingenious while they were canny.

Abe and Helen died in the influenza epidemic of 1903. Sam was then twenty-three and took charge of sixteen year-old Alice and thirteen year-old Peg. They lived together in the small family home while Sam built his fortune in reservoirs.

The kids, both boys, were in good care. The younger was rather mellow but her first-born was hyperactive. The name on his birth certificate was Wayne (for Bill’s dad), but the family called him Sudden. He was always getting into trouble. And Virginia’s office was a perpetual challenge. She was in charge of six women who all worked for a property management company, and the problems raised by the tenants, as well as some from her own employees, would have challenged Solomon.

The office. She never would have picked her career. She always thought she’d write novels or teach (at college level). She fell into the financial district, temporarily of course, when she came out of Cal at 21. She meant to move on. She even tried half a year of doctoral work. But she was too old, then, for college speed. She soon discovered that a student only gets one shot at being an undergrad. And the ivory tower simply didn’t pack the punch of her deadline-driven, where-did-the-time-go, can-you-believe-that-asshole place of business.

Even after she quit smoking cigarettes (and admitted, grudgingly, that the prohibitions about indoor smoking worked, and made that terrible withdrawal possible for her), even after the benign little darts of breast pain made her cut back the coffee to three mugs a morning, still Virginia loved the rush of the office. They called her Vee there, and she was always in motion when around, moving from desk to desk with comments and answers, almost never in her own chair.

She made a point of not raising her voice. No matter how frustrated she became, she tried to speak calmly, in questions instead of declarations. But privately Vee judged her co-workers. In fact, she sorted, ranked, and graded them, like eggs.

Vee imagined a busyness meter. It was based on a simple accomplishments-divided-by-time formula. She had herself in mind as the standard, and she put only two of her colleagues near her level. Her gauge for the others ran from 35% to 80%.

No one knew about the gauge, but her co-workers intervened anyway. They ganged up on Vee one Wednesday at lunch, and they told her she had to slow down. They managed to describe her presence as so agitating to them that Vee understood. She agreed to the yoga classes.

They call her Virginia now. She’s calmer in the office. She drinks even less coffee. But she sleeps less too. She’s down to about five hours a night. Even without speed she has to watch herself or she cows the others. She’s only her own busy fast-living self now when she’s all alone.

And she’s not done yet. She had an epiphany recently (or, as she puts it, a penetrating glimpse into the obvious). She was remembering her undergraduate days and she thought of all the games of Hearts she played with friends: how addictive that was, how often she tried to run the cards… She remembered her refusal to learn Bridge, because she reasoned at the time that if Hearts were a problem distraction, Bridge would probably become a degree-killing obsession.

What the heck? she then wondered. Was that avoidance necessary? Isn’t she old enough, now, beyond breeding or nursing or operating heavy machinery, to risk eating tuna even if it’s loaded with mercury? And what about the market? She thought of all the years she avoided researching and trading stocks because she’d already concluded it would take too much of the stamina and attention she wanted to put to other tasks.

Virginia will soon decide to stop restricting herself. She already knows that she’s at her best in the morning. That’s when the markets open, when she can indulge in bursts of almost impulsive deeds, even if they are as sedentary as placing her fingertip on the computer screen.

Virginia will evolve into a solitary day trader (“dawn trader,” will be her phrase), and she’ll succeed at it. She’s even going to meet a few people through her enterprise. She doesn’t want to get ahead of herself, but she suspects that unrestricted she’ll be fine.

Adoring speed Virginia had to watch herself.

She first encountered it in late high school: sweetened milky coffee and stolen cigarettes. She loved the buzz. She quick-addicted.

A year later, in college, she swallowed her first beans. Little white tabs of benzedrine that made her hum with energy. She felt like she could write an encyclopedia overnight.

She diversified into dexedrine and sometimes methedrine and finally, expensively, cocaine. She went from swallowing the pills at night, in study sessions with her friends (where she found she just couldn’t waste the buzz on schoolwork), to ingesting them in the morning, with ice-cold tomato juice and searing black coffee, to start herself spinning into a full full day.

Once she really went into it. She strung herself out for four days and nights, until she exhausted a big stash of bennies. She didn’t sleep and she rarely stopped moving. Her lower legs itched with a fishnet rash of poor circulation. She ate almost nothing. She produced reams of rushed writing and ragged speech. When she came down, she cried nonstop for 12 hours and then slept for 18. After that she moderated her consumption.

Cocaine arrived when she was almost done with college. Like royalty it seemed, appearing pure white on clean mirrors at parties, supplanting the cheaper raunchier stuff. Virginia never really “got” coke. She bought it, snorted it and rubbed her upper gums with it, and she acknowledged that it didn’t upset her stomach or mottle her legs. But it also never packed the buzz of good old bennies and dexies and meth. She eased away from coke before crack or crystal made the scene. She became a young adult. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

She liked to live fast. Tame but fast. She was in her element in the office, smoking a Marlboro while juggling two telephone lines, checking some papers, and nodding her guidance to a hovering underling. She made a game of her walk from office to train station: deliberately lengthening her stride, slaloming among the slower pedestrians. She talked fast and argued faster, sometimes so into it that she quivered.

She raced through days, she savored days, and the days passed. In time, she couldn’t drink coffee as a bedtime beverage. As an after-dinner quaff. Any time after 2 PM. And still she sped. People sometimes made the “T = time-out” gesture at her, or floated a hand in the air before her, palm down and patting, as if to quell her.

She tried to modulate herself. She even wrote the word on the pullout shelf in her office desk, where at first she saw it whenever she used her phone. But as often as she let others talk or made herself be quiet during meetings, that often she grew bored, restless, impatient, and went from liking her job to watching the clock. After a few weeks, MODULATE prompted no reaction from her at all.

She married a relatively patient, plodding man, thinking he was silently strong and that he’d provide a model of calm for her. That only worked as long as she and Bill were experiencing debut domesticity nonstop: the first ten years of their marriage brimmed with new jobs, the fixer-upper house, the pregnancies and babies and must-have cars and appliances. Virginia kept working throughout all that (the office may have been the only thing that saved her sanity during the hormonal storm), but in the final three years of their marriage she faced their complete incompatibility. Bill lived at about one-tenth the velocity she did. He could easily fill his day with a trip to the store for dinner ingredients. She juggled the job and the kids and the nonprofit and also some exercise and painting, while contemplating graduate school. Shortly before she divorced him she concluded that Bill actually processed life so differently that he constituted an alien, compared to her. She decided that compatibility in life velocity was even more important to a relationship than agreement about humor or money.

Divorced at 40, with rights to half a house and joint custody of two kids, Virginia had to admit that marriage had enriched her. She looked around a little for a man more her speed, but she thought she might actually be slowing down, because around then the job and the children were just about all she could take.