Sputterpub's Blog

The end was as simple as catastrophe. When Owen was twenty-two, his mother went from the kitchen to the garage, got comfortable in the front seat of the car with a lumbar pillow and her favorite family picture, started the station wagon engine, and opened the car window. The garage door sealed so well that it only took fourteen minutes for her to asphyxiate herself.

She had called her husband first. But they’d been through almost eighteen years of sporadic counseling and three brief separations, and he was used to her threats by then, and the fact is he opted not to leave work for her. Owen and Sharon and Sheila no longer lived at home, and they didn’t get calls.

Owen’s world fell apart when his mother died. It wasn’t so much her absence as the sudden removal of the foundation of his existence. Because even with all the fights and threats and estrangements, Owen had thought he came from a happy family. His mother’s suicide was an abrupt and undebatable statement to the contrary.

He was just twenty-two. He was a new college graduate, recently single after three years with me, on the cusp of discovering himself as a writer or a graduate student or a stud or all three. Actually, he’d been rather happy in our relationship – he’d only broken up in an impulsive week of wondering what it would be like to fuck someone else – and after two months apart and three unsatisfactory liaisons he’d been trying to patch things up when his mother started her car to nowhere. In the initial, crazy, chest-searing aftermath Owen made a dozen desperate telephone calls to me, and two fevered proposals of marriage.

I was moved but not toward a wedding. I first fell in love with Owen’s way with words on paper and stayed to appreciate his unruly passions, and I’d had several rough weeks after he left me. But I also had time to notice how peaceful the evenings were without his frequent attempts to discuss dissertation ideas, and how restful the weekends were without his plans for our improvement. I was shocked and sympathetic, but I rushed neither to his side nor to acquiescence.

And in the ensuing silence Owen’s insanity was first heard.

He mostly stopped sleeping. The dining habits of the whole household were off, so no one noticed that he wasn’t eating. And by the time I got there, for I did get there after a few weeks, Owen was no longer functioning as a man.

The house was a mess. No one had cleaned since the funeral four weeks earlier. The family had two cats and the place reeked of them. There was hair all over the kitchen counter and stove.

The refrigerator was stocked with canned drinks and the freezer held stacks of casseroles from neighbors. I couldn’t find fresh fruit. The potatoes had sprouted in their drawer.

I had to take charge. Somebody had to do it. I put nineteen year-old Sharon and eighteen year-old Sheila to work on laundry. I set Owen to vacuuming. I dispatched their father to the grocery store, with a list. Then I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I turned on the water, pulled down my jeans, and sat on the toilet. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, I sobbed for a minute into my own hot palms.

Then I peed and flushed and used the running sink water to splash my wet eyes and cheeks. I patted my face with the cleanest towel I could find. I think I even squared my shoulders before I returned to the family.

Within a day the place showed improvement. Postures straightened and glances were met. It wasn’t a profound turnaround, but restoring a little order to the household had a beneficial effect. Except on Owen.

Those first nights we tried every technique we’d ever used but he wasn’t able to come. I even offered to attempt a few ideas we’d heard of and not yet dared, but Owen was frustrated and self-conscious. We said goodnight but he couldn’t relax on the mattress and I couldn’t ignore his tension. We talked, caressed, hassled and wrestled most of the night.

His life might have been different. If his mother hadn’t killed herself, Owen probably would have married, produced, and reproduced. Instead he labors alone.

It’s not a bad life. He shrugs his shoulders when asked if he’s happy, twists his lips before speaking, and says like any fifty-four year old that it’s good enough as long as he doesn’t expect too much.

His home is a plain one-bedroom apartment near the campus where he studies philosophy. Its only ornament is a bronze bust of Newman. He gets by on student loans and teaching assistant stipends, so he doesn’t spend much money. His old friends claim he lives like a monk.

Owen rises from his twin bed at six every morning. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and then he makes his coffee, sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar and tanned with a plop of half-and-half, which he sips while he reads his Bible. He makes such a ritual of the procedure that it’s like a morning prayer.

At 6:45 he showers and shaves. He breakfasts on cheese and bread and he’s usually out of his place by 7:30, to his small office on campus or his spot in the library. He contemplates categorical imperatives and tries to develop new Christian ethics. He reads the same material again and again.

He tries to exercise but his knees are too worn for the jogging he used to do; most days he doesn’t get more than the walks to campus and back.

He’s usually home by 3:00. He resists the urge to nap then; he tries to correct papers or work on his dissertation till evening Mass. After that he makes his big meal: meat and starch and vegetables. He rarely goes out nights or weekends. He’s friendly but doesn’t have friends where he lives. He’s busy enough, though, and he sleeps okay.

His vacations are trips north to see his father and sisters, or backpacking alone in the mountains. He does the former out of obligation and the latter for his own punishing satisfaction. He doesn’t mind being alone but he still has a hard time around his dad.

You might say Owen’s doing all right. Things could be much worse. That’s what most people claim. Some even maintain that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. They’re wrong. He didn’t choose all this. Things could be much better.

Owen grew up thinking his family was normal. He knew his parents fought a lot, especially when they drank, but his father was smart enough and his mother was pretty enough, and the Learys fit rather well into their integrated Bay Area neighborhood.

He was a rambunctious kid. Mischievous and very active. Owen was his parents’ first child and only boy, and his energy intimidated them. His two younger sisters were more agreeable and easy. Sharon and Sheila were a year apart, looked alike and shared a room; often they were treated like twins. They had their father’s wavy dark hair and stocky build. Owen stuck out in that family: lanky and impulsive, solo in his bedroom, flame-haired and potential as a match.

His gender permitted him to ignore much of the bickering. He tuned out and wandered away, usually to the fields beyond the houses and into investigations concerning caves and trees and rodent traps. It was left to Sharon and Sheila to watch their mother, gimlet in one hand and Chesterfield in the other, peel their father’s satisfaction away with her list of little bitters. Then they saw their father turn his attention inward, hunching, or else he straightened up, hissed “bitch” with nasty eyes, and stomped out of the room.

And drank. Often while their mother slammed kitchen cabinets and finished her gin their father continued sipping Jack Daniels, in his study. He worked for a newspaper, and he imagined he was like Hemingway, or Steinbeck. Or Salinger. Not J.D: Pierre. Owen’s father once worked for a man who assisted Pierre Salinger, and sometimes he tried to derive some status from it. He often emerged from his study petulant and sentimental. But Owen was usually away then, outside or in his room.

Owen grew up in that family, with his mother getting progressively sadder and his father responding with ever cooler concern and a self-protective hesitation, and he didn’t mark his parents’ degeneration any more than he noticed the aging of the family’s golden retriever or the fading in the color of the house’s exterior. He was devastated when the marriage ended.

I knew we were headed for sex days before we did it. We chatted while we worked and we flirted while we chatted. So even though some of our conversation was about his wife and three kids and about my husband and baby, most of it was full-body language about him being male and me being female. I was made to understand he found me beautiful. I became convinced that some of what I liked least about me actually appealed most to him. He loved that I was a mother; he said he didn’t want a girl.

His fucking was not exceptional but Cisco really knew how to hug. The first time we did it we were standing up in the new-painted bathroom, and he managed somehow to embrace me fully, chest to hip, while his thrusting pelvis made sweet pressure against mine, and his small erect penis poked.

The second time we had more time. Mark had taken Aggie to the zoo for the afternoon and I felt secure for at least an hour. Cisco and I talked more, intimately, and he almost flattered me enough to put me on top. But I had seen my hanging-forward face; there was no way I’d assume that position. We fucked missionary style after elaborate foreplay, and once again I was most impressed by the man’s ability to scoop me up fully between his big forearms. I felt hugged instead of humped.

The last time we did it I climbed up on Cisco and let me all hang down. He reached up for my dangling cheeks and pulled my face to his wet smiling mouth. He murmured to me how gorgeous I was while I came to nice agreement with his prick. Even afterwards he called me luscious.

He left when the window work was done. That was all we ever expected; in fact, I was surprised when he returned one Monday afternoon a few weeks later, to ask if we were satisfied with his work. I told him yes of course and sent him on his way, and only later realized that he smelled like beer, and that he knew Mark always worked on Monday afternoons, and that he’d probably dropped by, boylike opportunistically, just to see what might transpire.

I didn’t tell Mark about Cisco’s visit. I remember we had a peaceful dinner that night and then I took a bath with Aggie. We were in one of our seasons of drought and water rationing, and bathing with my toddler was a way for me to take a bath myself; otherwise we grownups were advised to shower in short efficient bursts. I’d created a little ritual with Aggie, where I got in the tub first and then she climbed in and lay face-up on my lap and legs with her head against my belly, so she became EIGGA, with a toothy forehead and bottom-lashed eyes. EIGGA was strange compared to Aggie, but by squinting a little I could adapt to her and see her beauty, while EIGGA in turn giggled non-stop, with the top of her upsidedown face bubbling in merriment.

There I was, leaning over my obversed daughter and it finally hit me, or floated out above me like a lightbulb igniting, that Aggie was seeing me not only upsidedown but hanging down, and she was loving what she saw. I can’t convey my epiphany as profound – it wasn’t – but it along with the memory of Cisco served to get me over my life-wasting reluctance.

I’m not saying I’m healed. I still avoid looking downward at my reflection, whether in a pond or a purse mirror. But I see that bath as a turning point for me, when I began to like a different kind of diversity. And it was the first time I learned from my child.

Not long after that I found myself possessed with a powerful desire to charm Mark. I’d been thinking a lot about his body and pleasure and babies. One Sunday afternoon while Aggie napped I looked at him and felt like it, and I took him to our bed. I laid him down and stripped myself, and then I climbed on him and began a horizontal dance. My face was hanging above him when he exploded silly/proud.

The first time I looked down at myself in a mirror I was snorting cocaine, and the view wasn’t bad. Sure I was gazing up my own nostrils, with a coiled $20 bill distended from one, but my skin was still prevailing against gravity, so the perspective was odd but the face wasn’t. I was twenty years old.

The next eight years saw changes. I graduated from college, married Mark, and we bought our first (fixer-upper) house. Then we had Aggie and started the fixing up. Actually, we stripped the black-and-white vinyl tile out of the entryway when we first moved in, and we power-sanded and Varathaned the entryway floor and the one in our bedroom. Then I got pregnant. We didn’t plan that but it felt like we should go with it. And of course I never regretted her. But she sure brought changes. It hadn’t seemed so serious, getting married or buying real estate. Nothing felt permanent; there were always other options; if need be I could take some consequences and change my choice. As moved as I was when Aggie was born, as awed as I became when I watched her discover the world, it wasn’t till she was about a year and a half that I realized I’d been trapped. It no longer mattered how open I was about my past or how earnestly I argued my ideas; someone could actually get at me and hurt me, through her.

About then she was old enough for us to start on the bathroom. We spackled and sanded and painted and curtained and ornamented and personalized the space from yellowy beige to sparkling blue and white, and though we had to live with it disordered for nearly three months while we worked on it around our day jobs and Aggie, we were very pleased with it at last.

Before we were done we bought an unfinished wooden medicine chest to hang above the sink. It had a mirror on its door and four shelves inside, and we painted it white. We also set it, mirror-up, on the bed in the spare room while we prepared the bathroom walls. For the better part of a week I had to go to that room in the morning and lean over the mirror in order to see my face or hair.

Well that was my first aging shock. Two years before my thirtieth birthday (when according to my cousin a woman’s upper arm will begin to sag over her elbow, no matter who she is), I leaned over and saw my hanging face in that mirror, and at first I leapt back in horror at the sight.

My cheeks … bagging around my mouth and nose, foretelling the lines that twenty more years would etch. My eyelids … pouching intimations of incipient drag. The pluckable fuzz above my nose that would be exchanged, too soon, for gnarly long brow hairs cobwebbing above my eyes.

I felt so trapped and unattractive I had a mean affair.

His name was Francisco, and my husband brought us together. We’d reached the window replacement portion of our fixing up and we decided not to try to do that ourselves. Cisco was a glazier; he was the tradesman Mark found. Since I was in charge of wall decor it was appropriate for me to follow Cisco around the rooms with rotten windows, priming and painting behind him.

He wasn’t at all my type. He was short and powerfully built, barrel-like, and it turned out that his penis was neither pretty nor impressive. Mark was tall, not-fat, and comparatively well hung. We’d had an active creative sex life back when we weren’t tired all the time. Lately it seemed we were just partners in parenting and pals at pastimes. We never had the energy for flattery; we never had the time for exploratory kisses.

Cisco wasn’t circumcised. His organ looked like a cow’s teat when it was flaccid, and erect it didn’t amount to much either. At first I briefly wondered if I’d even be able to feel it

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.