Sputterpub's Blog

On top of those, there developed the issues of Kelly’s weight, Kevin’s headaches, and Peg’s bones. It’s obvious to me even if not to Dr. H that Kelly grew fat to irk Peg, and Kevin’s sport- and job-preventing headaches served as excuses to avoid everything that Jim advised, urged, demanded.

Peg broke her right wrist when she slipped on the Bay Ridge trail. That was weird; anyone else would have maybe sustained a sprain. She and Jim were about halfway through a level weekend walk and she had the bad luck to fall just wrong. That injury slowed her at work more than at home. I discussed osteoporosis with her but she said she tested normal.

A few years later she and Jim were working in the garden one Saturday and Peg’s ankle broke. The orthopedic surgeon said she again fell exactly wrong. She missed more work and her habits became even laxer.

Our friendship flagged of course. When we lunched together we mostly talked business. God I grew to hate those lunches, with me begging for any kind of help, despising her. She always ate white food – potatoes, Caesar salad, mayonnaise – and she invariably spoke with her small mouth full, a glob of bad white caught in the corner.

To the extent she discussed her marriage she reported it good. She enjoyed Jim’s company, she said, and the sex was as great as ever. I didn’t believe it. Her face said otherwise, tighter and twitchier all the time.

I guess it was inevitable that we’d squabble when the business failed. Even though we both understood it was her mistakes as much as the law changes that did us in, even though she never argued when I asserted that she’d been overpaid, she came after me for money. Or Jim did. I don’t imagine she argued with him either. And when I saw that my name wasn’t spelled right on the demand letters, I knew Peg hadn’t even read them.

I remember now that odd conversation we had on her last day in the office. We didn’t know then it would be her last day, that Jim wouldn’t let her come back. Cash flow had been bad – for the first time ever I’d delayed her draw as well as my own – and after lunch she came to my desk begging for her check. She promised she wouldn’t cash it; she just needed to be able to say she had it. “Or what?” I asked before thinking. She hesitated for a moment with a trapped look in her eyes, and then she muttered something about peace in the kitchen and no one stomping out of rooms. I thought about bones.

I might have been able to salvage something out of the business if I hadn’t spent all my energy on the lawsuit. And Peg and Jim might have salvaged their marriage – even though they got some money they also got slapped over and over with how incompetent she was at work and he was at representing her, and as the illusions fell the veils were stripped away from their home life too.

I used to say everything bad that happened to me turned out to be good. Now it isn’t so. Or not exactly. Now it’s more like the badder gets the gooder. Because Peg got the worst of it. Her marriage collapsed and her relationship with both of her kids has suffered. And yet …

Her move to Rohnert Park is actually looking good. I can’t imagine living there but it’s her home turf; it must be working for her. Her new job has energized her and living alone seems to be bringing her back to herself. She doesn’t deserve it but she appears to be happy.

I had an escape route. I could retreat into my house and use the old transcription skills. Put in the hours I want and make enough. But it’s not working for me yet.

I lucked into the connection with Dr. H. Seems I’m developing a specialty in transcription for psychiatrists and my clientele is now ranging into Solano county, but what were the odds of getting Peg’s shrink?

Not that I agree with some of his assessments, but it’s interesting to hear them. As far as I’m concerned I’m not breaching any confidentiality deals. Peg broke all those herself.

No, I do okay here and I’m sure I’ll be happier once I complete this. It’s giving me a perspective on the course of my own events. I’ll finish it and then I think I’ll take a walk. I can do that. Just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I can’t. It’s easy to order in, and I’ve been busy.

Contrary to what my brother said last week, I can do it. And I know it’s been awhile, but I doubt it’s the months he claims. I just haven’t had the time or the need.

Besides, I feel safer here. And I don’t appreciate his nagging me about it. I need to take care of myself. It’s clear no one else will. So I have to set limits. I won’t read his e-mails. And I’m sure as hell not going to answer the phone. Not till I feel better.

Peg stayed home with Kelly only three weeks. Then she started part-time in my office. There was never any doubt that she’d be a responsible, caring, diligent mother. It was more a matter of feeling relatively unsuited. Peg wasn’t a good cook or a smart housekeeper, and as she said herself, she was no Nurse Nancy. Home time irritated her, and she’d rather be patient and loving with Kelly for six hours a day than edgy and anxious with her for fourteen.

That was fine with Jim. He was around most of the time anyway, and he was besotted with his daughter. From the moment he held her he felt a connection more profound than any he had ever imagined. He was fascinated by everything about her, and he soon built a bond with Kelly that Peg would have had difficulty entering even if she wanted to.

But she didn’t. Peg properly discharged her duties as mother and wife but she got her gratification from the office. There she solved problems and received kudos. At home she felt adequate but not successful.

That’s when the Whiteheads began going to church. My once-agnostic friend not only started attending every Sunday; she went to the Wednesday pot luck meetings too, and she even signed Kelly up for the preschool program.

That’s also when Peg stopped shaving her privates. She and Jim were as exhausted as any new parents; they couldn’t find time for sex. Jim took to masturbating again. He fell asleep at that once, and Peg came downstairs after awhile to discover him snoring on the couch, Levis around his ankles and diaper-clad hand around his dick, which image did nothing to revive her desires.

They only found the time to do it when they went away. If it hadn’t been for Jim’s parents’ willingness to take Kelly, they might never have made her a sibling. But Kevin was born when Kelly was four.

And the family regained some symmetry. Peg was flooded with all the love that hadn’t come to her with Kelly. It was as if her original maternal passion had been locked up somewhere and the son-triggered labor found that place, loosed it, and deluged her with a double dose of connection. Her soul expanded. She promised that baby every good.

Maybe Jim’s parental passion was already spent. Maybe he just reacted to Peg’s overreaction, the way I become crazy-generous in the presence of a tightwad. He felt responsibility and interest and satisfaction in his son, but he just didn’t warm to the kid the way he had to Kelly.

Meanwhile Peg was still valuable in the office. We neither knew it then, but that was just before she began to slide. We hired a few support employees and I never noticed her move away from substance and toward supervising. We both had kids and domestic demands on us and we stood in for each other frequently, and although I knew she was getting more from that arrangement than I was, I didn’t see then how lopsided it was.

Peg’s family got sick more than mine so she missed work. They had problems and went to doctors all the time. Like when Jim got the mysterious stomach pains. Kaiser never diagnosed the problem; he suffered or at least complained for almost two years before it subsided. Peg had to run home more during those months.

Or when Kelly got molested. That was a bona fide tragedy, requiring substantial counseling and even a change of church. I remember my shock at the time: learning how common it is in the church environment, for the simple reason that many marginal individuals find “control” in the church, so they hang around for that control, and then when they relapse (for the rate of relapse is much higher than the rate of successful control), there they are, trusted among the vulnerable.

Now there’s another slant on that story. As I transcribe Dr. H’s notes I see it in a different light. There’s no question that the guy who ran the after-school group should not have taken those pictures. But I always wondered why the church didn’t support the Whiteheads more at the time … why it was necessary for them to find a new church. Hearing and typing now, slowing my fingers to take in the words, I think about the hyper-close relationship between Jim and Kelly, about the gap between mother and daughter … did that dynamic set the little girl up to cooperate with the church perv? Yech.

Jim Whitehead at 23 was short, smart, and always horny. Sex was his favorite activity and he went for it every chance he got.

When was the miracle age between the introduction of the Pill and the advent of AIDS. Where was the venue of college – San Francisco State in fact – so there was no dearth of opportunity.

Jim wasn’t handsome but he was cute enough, and he knew how to talk smart and loom studly. Before he met Peg he knocked up three girlfriends and sired two sons. He had even been married once, because the first pregnancy and birth occurred in high school and all the parents made them. They never lived together though, and that baby was put up for adoption after all. The other son, James Whitehead Jr., was raised by his single mother. Jim’s support obligation was $85 a month, which he paid, but he never got to know the boy.

There was something about Peg, or maybe just about the season in Jim’s life, that made him stop tomcatting. He met her his last semester in college, seduced her, cleaved unto her, and proposed marriage.

She was no more beautiful than he was handsome. She had thick blondish hair but that wasn’t uncommon. She was short and well-proportioned – “more than a handful,” Jim used to say – with a trim ankle and foot. But her posture was atrocious, her skin was freckled, and her mouth was small and tight. All of which features were okay with Jim. He saw her curved back as vulnerability, and the freckles and tiny mouth were markers for youth which, truth to tell, really turned Jim on.

Some latently gay guys go for boyish women. Some with pedophiliac tendencies like them girlish instead.

Jim married Peg with all the celebration that his first wedding lacked. It was a church affair well-guested by both families. The bride wore white and the only eccentric feature was her attendant. She had girlfriends of course, and three of them served as bridesmaids, but her maid of honor was a man of honor, her best friend Nick. They’d been pals (mostly Platonic) since high school, and Peg couldn’t imagine going through the ritual without him.

It was a fine wedding and a fun honeymoon. Jim and Peg ran a vigorous bedroom, and their kinkiness flowered at the adult all-inclusive Jamaican resort. That’s where Peg first let Jim tie her up. That’s when he shaved her pubes – “the better to find you, my dear” – and Peg enjoyed the airiness enough to continue the style for some years.

Marriage didn’t change them immediately. Jim stayed in school and Peg went to work, which they each would have done anyway. Peg and Nick enjoyed a final fling of non-Platonism before their old friendship faded. Jim never found out.

The young Whiteheads flourished those first five years. Peg made decent money at her bank job and Jim did okay with investments. They bought a home (a Daly City condo) and acquired a small boat. They traveled when they could. They drank easily. They had excellent sex. Jim was the oldest of five sons and two daughters, so he saw the Playboy magazines before his father learned how to hide them well, and he carried serious lingerie fantasies from those early visions. Peg had the love and the legs to wear garter belts. There are probably still some Polaroids around from that era.

No, the decline occurred with reproduction. Peg got accidentally pregnant and then miscarried, and those events made them realize how much they wanted children. They conceived again, deliberately, some seven months later, and they told no one till Peg began the second trimester. Then they began to get excited.

They moved to Vallejo. They bought a house and painted the baby’s room before their own. Three months later Peg was delivered of a plump perfect daughter.

Kelly was pink-skinned, golden-fuzzed, with deep blue eyes and exquisite toes, but Peg felt nothing for her. The maternal urges didn’t bloom. Even four days after, when her milk began abundant flow, Peg sat with her babe in arms, calmly gazing at the upturned face, savoring the uterine twitch and release as the sucking triggered her let-down reflex, but she felt no passion, no lust to protect. The retrospective diagnosis was postpartum depression, and of course there’s no ignoring hormones, but I’m sure there was a giant shadow cast by Peg’s mother: dead when Peg was 20, their unresolved issues scattered like her ashes.

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.