Sputterpub's Blog

Odd how for cerebral Julie, the epiphanies came through her body. PUSH THROUGH THE PAIN. STRETCH THE EASY SIDE FIRST. TAKE ONE PEDAL AT A TIME.

They all started as vivid, fully physical experiences – childbirth, dance, cycling up mountains – but became metaphors for the hard stuff: the emotional travails.

Or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe instead, Julie already had the cerebral insights when she was young and sedentary. She’d been a hyper-bright child, a voracious reader and a tireless debater. Perhaps by the time she was grown she was immune to most of the intellectual insights – been there/done that – and only the blood-sweat-&-tears of exertion impressed her.

For Julie middle-aged was athletic: heroic. She’d always been ethical, but in her 40s she was inspired to exercise and in her 50s she was driven to action. She ought to have had a costume, she was such a brave character.

Her challenges were emotional. Like someone with a hidden disability, Julie on the surface seemed nothing but blessed. Her parents, siblings, children, and close friends were all alive and at least well. Her spirit dwelled in a healthy skeleton and her brain produced plenty of serotonin. She never had trouble earning enough money, and she lived in the house of her dreams.

But she was surrounded by assassins at work (that’s what she said daily, when frustrated). Her colleagues were either morons or saboteurs. And she seemed to collect stresses at home. She wasn’t comfortable playing cards for money, but she hadn’t hesitated much before marrying (three times) or adopting difficult dogs (four times).

She was a specialist in managing conflicts of interest. Her last husband was still a client. Her business partners were her sisters-in-law. Her daughter had married Julie’s second husband’s first son (they’d only been step-sibs for three years, and because Keith was in college then, they’d never lived together as family).

The office situation was surreal. It was always Julie’s baby but early on she hired some girlfriends. That’s how her brothers met Beth and Sharon, although by the time the weddings took place, Julie had indulged her own liberal leanings and made the women minority owners in her management consulting firm. So Beth and Sharon were business partners as well as family. And Julie, again acting the Pollyanna liberal, had compensated Beth and Sharon more than their work was worth (this was not nepotism – Julie overpaid non-family, too, always with the aim of avoiding trouble).

Two mistakes. Handing over ownership did not partners make. Beth and Sharon enjoyed telling others that they were principals in the firm, but neither of them stepped up and shared responsibility or risk. Even when Julie nagged at them to help set policy they each said something like: “Speak up with my small ownership? My 10%? No way…”

And overpaying them didn’t avoid trouble. In fact it may have caused it. Beth and Sharon understood at the beginning what the deal was – extra money as it came in but no resale value for the shares – but each seemed to forget that as the years passed, and started acting like she was getting away with something, taking money for relatively little work, which led to nervousness and unhappiness that could only be relieved with more money. Or maybe they just felt trapped in their jobs, knowing that they couldn’t earn as much anywhere else, and blamed Julie for the entrapment.

Whatever it was, Julie at 54 found herself overworked and resentful. She was determined to do something so she could have time. After serious contemplation, she decided the only way to exit gracefully was to turn the business over, over time, to a worthy competitor. There would be no sale, because she knew from experience that a sales price for a service business comes out of the employees’ increased sweat or the clients’ increased fees. Beth and Sharon? They’d never brought in any new business, but they resisted change. They wanted to work another five years, and they liked the situation the way it was. If there was going to be a switch they wanted a conventional percent-of-gross buyout. But Julie was determined not to give them more money: dig into her own pocket to purchase her own clients to give them away? She wasn’t going to make the third mistake.

She wanted Rick to move out, but she didn’t say that. Instead she picked at him all evening. He tried to defuse her with sex; he pinned her fists behind her and nuzzled her neck. It didn’t work. Re stropped her leg and showed her his belly, he purred his deep deep purr, but Linda was not charmed.

They went to bed coolly, and each hugged the edge of the kingsize mattress. Linda dreamed again that night that she was falling from a great height to certain death. She experienced the nightmare with ironic bitterness and sardonic disappointment. She woke to find Re’s weight on her right shoulder, his tail around her throat.

Some idiot checked a loaded handgun through on a flight to Miami the next week. When the plane hit turbulence over Georgia the baggage in the compartment shifted and the gun discharged, aimed upwards, into the passenger compartment, where it was stopped in the thick folds of cotton inside a diaper bag under a passenger’s seat. The symbolism was appalling. The local press had a field day.

The following afternoon a passenger to New York vomited blood on the five people sitting closest to him. It turned out that Mr. Boyles wasn’t even that ill – a cough and the pressure change caused a benign throat polyp to rupture – but the incident was vivid and devastating for those who witnessed it. Boyles worked for competitor Down East Air but no one believed his act was deliberate.

Then came the death of Murray the baggage handler. Crushed between a runaway baggage cart and the plane he loved so much! It amazed Linda to later learn that what seemed to be a freak accident was in fact a common cause of death among men in Murray’s line of work. That disaster didn’t make the papers – then – but it demoralized the employees.

It was today’s events that have sent Linda over the edge. First it was Flight 435. Bound for Providence, it dropped its cabin oxygen masks from the overhead compartments soon after take-off. The mandated procedure when that happens is to get the plane on the ground as soon as possible, which would have meant starting over. The pilots couldn’t find anything wrong from the cockpit, so they opted to continue to Providence. The fact that they landed there safely doesn’t mitigate the error. And before Linda could even fire them, the FAA was at her door and threatening to shut her down.

Linda had to think quickly and talk fast to keep her maintenance facilities open. Now she’s flat on her back in her big bed, not asleep, trying to regenerate energy. Generally disgusted with her situation. Tapped out but unwilling to sleep. The nightmare doesn’t scare her but it drains her. It makes her sleep unrestful. It weighs her down like a cat on her chest, like Rick in her every evening.

She’s not that old, yet, and she rented the condominium on a month-to-month basis. She has some money in savings.

She eases her legs out from under the comforter, over the side of the bed. She slide-stands and gropes for jeans, shirt, underwear, shoes. She dresses in the living room and then puts bathroom essentials in her backpack, with laptop and wallet. She adds a US road map and her jewelry. She starts to pick up her keys, reconsiders, decides to abandon even the car.

She’s careful not to let Re out when she opens the door. She prods him gently with her left foot while she eases herself and her pack into the five a.m. air.

Existence, she says to herself. Sex and ice and “ten.” Unfolding the map, she plots: New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, up around the lakes via Ontario, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon. Ten states away and she sees another Portland. She has a destination.

She nods to herself and starts to walk away. She doesn’t think to look back as she inhales deeply, relieved already. She knows she did right to avoid the night’s dream. She’s out from under that oppressive heavy vision, the warm cat, that pushy man.

There’s dew on the grasses at the side of the road Linda walks. It sparkles like ice in the rising light of dawn.

As far as Rick was concerned, they were then a couple. Linda didn’t see it that way. She liked the sex and the ice (she hadn’t met Re yet), but she wasn’t ready for a full relationship. She told Rick so, but she was too busy with her job to reiterate, and Rick was a good encroacher. Before she knew it he had a key to her place and was almost living there. He said he wanted to move in. She held the line.

She felt she didn’t have enough time for him; she needed to work long days and couldn’t afford more than two evenings a week. But he twisted his fingers in her hair and insinuated his knee between hers, and before she meant she was letting him pleasure her incredibly well.

Six months after they met he talked her into letting him and his cat move in. The sex was still good. Other things weren’t bad, either. They discovered they liked skiing together, playing with icicles, resting afterwards. Rick bought her garnet earrings, sapphires and topaz for her wrists. Linda settled into her job and rearranged office administration to suit her; she had more time. Then it started to go bad.

Part of the problem was Re. Linda likes cats as much as the next person who doesn’t live with one; she thinks kittens are adorable and mature cats are graceful and mysterious. She finds it hard to believe that cats can love people. Maybe Re sensed that in her; he was standoffish. Except he slept on the bed. Except he tended to creep up between Linda and Rick during the night, and settle for sleep on Linda’s chest with his tail curled ticklishly near her nose.

That’s when Linda started having the dreams. It’s true that bad things were happening at work; as Rick reminded her over and over, she had ample cause for nightmares. But every time Linda awoke, on her back and sweaty, it was to the oppressive feeling of that large cat on her chest. Dead warm weight. And if she jerked up shrieking, as she did the first two times, Re freaked out and clawed her. Linda agreed with Rick that she couldn’t fault the animal for its waking instincts, but she also told him she did not want the cat on her bed. Rick tut-tutted her, and lifted Re protectively into his arms. He set Re on the bedside rug, where Linda heard the rhythmic tear of claws on wool. Rick said, “Don’t take your bad day out on the cat,” as he turned out the light.

Linda lay there and stewed. About Rick, about Re, about work. Her first six months at MainePlanes had been delightful: the honeymoon phase when every change she made was for the better, when morale did nothing but climb. They quickly upgraded their berths, improved their fleet, and filed for additional flights. They were on their way to relative bigness and then, two months ago, the FAA came in and seized records because an ex-employee contended that not all the maintenance had been performed as was indicated in the files. The ex-employee was a troublemaker whom Linda inherited with the job, but it happens that his allegations were a little bit correct: with the fast expansion, in a very few cases unnecessary checks hadn’t been done, and the planes never would have been cleared to fly if the papers indicated that. Linda hadn’t known about the faked records; she instituted controls to avoid recurrence of the problem. She started waking at least once each night, and finding the cat on her chest.

A week later, Flight 612 crashed in the ocean en route to Boston. All eighty-eight on board were killed as the jet plunged into the cold nighttime sea. The plane’s records were accurate and immaculate but that didn’t change the fatalities. It was the worst event in many lives, Linda’s included. It’s not surprising that her bad dreams then became nightmares: flying/falling dreams in the darkness, with that dreadful catch in the heart as the dreamer understands the moment has come to die. Pressured oppressive dreams that Linda somehow hauled herself up out of, to find a cat dead-asleep on her upper chest and neck.

Then came two minor security incidents, but MainePlanes couldn’t take more bad press. A dummy bomb fell out of a thirteen-year-old’s backpack, after he’d cleared security. Two days later a man tried to assault the pilot and was subdued by five passengers. No one could figure out why the man went for the pilot or how he got that big knife through the metal detectors. It would be months before they learned that the perpetrator was another ex-employee.

That night Linda picked a big fight with Rick.

Ostensibly it was about what he made for dinner. He knew she was trying to lose weight; she sure didn’t need lobster thermidor. But really the fight was about Linda feeling suffocated. She had problems at work and no privacy at home. Rick’s attention was too persistent. Re was obnoxious.

What a run. It’s been an up-and-down airline since Linda took over. It’s been an erratic time since Rick came into her life. She’s thinking she needs a break from both MainePlanes and Rick Jenssen.

Linda likes anagrams. She tells her friends that athletic Rick introduced her to exercise: sex, ice and Re. Re is Rick’s cat. He’s named for the purr tone he made when he was a fluffy yellow kitten. After his alteration, Re sounded more like a Do, but by then Rick was used to calling him Re.

Linda had sex before Rick but it wasn’t good sex. Rick orchestrates the event, erotic and elaborate. It involves making or watching video tapes, mirrors or silk ties or costumes or champagnes or dancing. He talks up fantasies. He asks her to go without underwear. He caresses her in dark places.

He loves ice. He chews it so much his molars are worn. He likes to trace lines on her with an ice cube. He brings her faceted gems. He taught Linda to treat her aching knee with a baggie of frozen peas. He showed her how to chill her stiff neck with water frozen in a styrofoam cup: an ice stick with an insulated tear-away handle. He used ice as a dildo in her during the record-breaking heat wave, and brought both of them to a memorable hot-sweat/cold-water frenzy.

She met Rick when she moved to Portland for her new job. MainePlanes is a boutique airline but even so it was a coup for Linda to land the job of CEO at the age of forty-two. No other air carrier had a female in charge. It was definitely worth the move across country.

She tried to find dinner the night she moved into her condominium. She’d only been in town three days and had been meeting so many people that she hadn’t had time to get her bearings. She walked out of her new complex toward what she understood was the good neighborhood bistro, but she went the wrong way. She knew she wasn’t where she wanted to be when she reached the corner with the two sleazy bars and the view of a block of manufacturing-type buildings, and she must have had a look of confusion on her face because a man approached her from the nicer looking of the two bars and asked if he could help. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why he was there.

She liked his look: tall, dark hair shot with silvery gray, ropy forearm muscles, good teeth and clear blue eyes.

Rick liked what he saw too: a firm figure on a medium-height frame, brown hair that bounced around her shoulders, chocolate brown eyes big and lash-fringed, golden skin with a scatter of freckles across a small nose above a full mouth. He wanted to suck on her curving upper lip. He wanted to nuzzle from her armpit to the underside of each breast.

He smiled and asked if he could help her. Soon he was standing too close, hand braced on the brick building she leaned against, but she didn’t mind. Later they went to the bistro together. Later yet, he almost grabbed her at her door. She almost invited him to stay the night.

She told herself she would go slowly, but there was heat when they were together that needed more than ice. She came home from her new office the next day to find him waiting at the entrance to her building. Sitting on a lawn sign, long legs stretched out before him, grin widening his face as he took in the sight of her, bottom to top and down again. She looked him up-and-down too, but more discreetly. She opened the door and held it for him.

“I don’t have food for dinner,” she explained as she preceded him up the stairs.

“I don’t want food,” he replied huskily.

She turned at that and he continued up to her, arms going around her, face moving into hers. His lips pressed against her mouth, flattening moistly and into her, moving her face back as his hips and shoulders pushed her slowly down on the stairs beneath him. Somehow he managed to have her down and yet hold her to him so the edges of the steps didn’t press into her. Rick pressed into her, and she almost didn’t stop him.

He kept a hand on the small of her back while they walked the rest of the way to her door. He was gently insistent there and inside. Linda who always made the decisions liked his masterful attitude. She didn’t deny him. He ravished her over her own new living room couch.

When Ruby was little, her father was her sun, her moon, the stars. He was a big, capable, educated man, principled about his conduct and devoted to his family, and he doted on her.

She was his oldest child, his only child till she was five, and forever his one daughter. He loved her mother too, so he spent much happy time at home.

He wasn’t a hippie, but he wasn’t overly modest either. Until Ruby was six or seven, she occasionally saw him unclothed. Briefly she eyed his penis a few times. I only mention that for general consciousness-raising – for goodness sakes, Dads, if you’re going to let your little girl see your dick when she’s young, permit continuing glimpses later, or the child will grow up with unrealistic expectations about the size and pendulousness of the generative organ. But that’s not what this narrative is about. Let me proceed.

Ruby’s father-appreciation dimmed a little as she aged. She continued to love him, and he continued to be her dominant parent and life guide, but she learned in junior high that he could be wrong about pronunciation and philosophy. When she was in high school, he thought he had control over what she wore, and in college over what she did with her body. These flaws helped Ruby define herself as an individual completely separate from her beloved dad.

She’ll never forget the day she discovered his vulnerability and envisioned his debility. She was commuting home after a day of work in San Francisco. She sat as usual on the starboard side of the trolley, next to a window, and she gazed at the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Among them was her father. That coincidence had never occurred before.

He was not in distress. He moved jauntily along with the other south-facing walkers, his posture good and his stride impressive, his briefcase swinging at the end of his right arm. He might have been whistling – he looked so well and happy.

But Ruby was struck like a stone hit her chest. She almost choked with sudden grief. She was clobbered by the certainty that her father was aging, that he was alone but surrounded by possible threats, that someday in the not unforeseeable future he’d be infirm, tender, unable to stand tall or speak firmly or take care of anyone.

Ruby was 18 when she rode that trolley. Her father was 45.

If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed. The words repulsed her. They were such an animal assessment of an acquaintance. How could a boy who had been a cohort turn so suddenly into an assessor, a predator? Mag is much older now, and she sees news frequently about cyber-bullying among teenagers, and she thinks: Wow, if that innocuous garage party phrase so affected me, a relatively resilient individual, how devastating and damaging must the current cruelties be? Words can harm. Words are worse than sticks and stones.

Mag’s primary tormentor was her mother. Her mom fed her false judgments along with the solid food she pushed too early, the toilet training she forced prematurely, the cuddling she declared Mag outgrew by age three. Her mother taught her that she was lazy, and unsensible, and not good looking or feminine enough. These were not true assessments, but what did Mag know then? She was a bright child and a little suspicious after awhile. She began resisting and that fueled her mother’s impatience with her imperfections. By the time Mag was six, mother and daughter were fully engaged in nonverbal competition.

But of course they had to keep getting along. Mag was clearly too young then to leave, and except for the tension between her and her mother, the family was well-adjusted and happy enough. So the child endured the mother and all the attempts to improve her. Without those attempts and the name-calling, Mag might have thought herself okay. But at eight her mom began describing the merits of rhinoplasty, to the extent of promising/threatening an adolescent nose job. By the time Mag was ten she knew about the contact lenses she might acquire in high school; soon after that she was thoroughly trained in how to minimize the look of feet she never realized were growing too big. And at 14, right before she (finally) had that first period, Mag’s mom was “this close” to taking her to a doctor, to find out what was wrong.

(So was it cultural pervasion or was it her mother? Mag’s diary reveals that she commenced her very first diet just two weeks before that period flowed.)

Mag laughed. She’d reached the point in her mom meditations where they went from quasi-tragic to glad. She’d come to understand that one can’t grow up without experiencing hurt. No one gets through childhood unscathed. And usually it’s the parents who do the most or the earliest damage; they’re there, and they get no breather. Parents need time-outs more than kids do.

The truth is, Mag was hurt but not so much that she can’t remember. Why, she has friends who lost a sibling or a parent in childhood and were “protected” from the event or otherwise not allowed to exhibit their feelings, and those friends, now rule-following adults, have no clear memories of their youth. Mag knows grownups who were so deprived as children, of material goods but also of affection from their overworked and over-anxious parents, that their world view now is hyper-rational and without room for emotions or creativity or spirituality, and their memories are absent or warped. And Mag understands there to be other categories of childhood-survivors who credit nothing but fundamental religion, and have no truck with science or accurate recollection.

She chuckled a little more as she got up from her upholstered chair and went to the kitchen. Earlier in the day she had acquired a fresh bag of apricots, not yet opened or refrigerated. But she still harbored the damn Life. She had liked Life cereal forever. When she was a teenager and fully resistant about breakfast, Life was the only food her mother could get her to eat before school. She still liked the cereal, with milk because that was the way to unlock the sugar in it. But she still didn’t want breakfast, so Life was a sometime late night treat, and she seldom stocked the stuff in her pantry. A few weeks earlier she had grabbed a box off the grocery store shelves, registered shock at what it now cost, and impulsively purchased it anyway. That night she poured a bowl with nice anticipation, anointed it with just the correct level of cold skim milk, carried it to her chair, and dug in.

It didn’t taste right. Not spoiled, but lacking that slightly sweetened crisp oat taste she craved. She finished it, but without any satisfaction. The next morning she examined the box.

Maple and Brown Sugar Flavor? Good grief, why? The original is near-perfect. The newer cinnamon flavor is understandable. But there’s no need for any other variation under the same name. And the packaging! Now that Mag was looking closely she could detect the slight color variation between the printing on the bad box compared to the good, but there was no way she wanted to pay more attention to packaging. The situation reminded her of those times when she purchased a book she already owned, either because of a change in cover art or, sneakier yet, a new title. Yeesh.

And then she laughed a third time, louder and most sincerely. With a sweet smile on her face, Mag removed the cereal in its waxy bag and dumped it into the compost bin. She folded the box flat and placed it on top of the paper recycle pile. Then she opened the new bag of dried apricots, carried them with her to her favorite chair, and ingested them one by one.