Sputterpub's Blog

Sex would be fun, Rosemary thinks. Rick would be fun. He’s grown a little plump and more suburban, but he still laughs well. He’s surprisingly nervous, she knows. He has an acid stomach and hand rashes. He’ll ever be married and bored with good Charlotte. He’ll ever be attracted to Rosemary, or to a woman like Rosemary, who won’t be true to him. But he’s boyish, self-deprecating, fun. And he knows how to get into making love.

Rosemary would like some fun. She’s generally pretty happy but she’s often too responsible. Thinking about it, she can only remember a few days in her life that she can call purely fun. The first wasn’t just a day; she remembers a full week of it. When she was seven. When she and her brother Hank were the only children of her parents, two years before the twins. Their family of four went with another family to the shores of Lake Winnepesaukie, in New Hampshire. They had a cabin right on a pier which stretched out over the crystal clear water, and the kids were free to run down that pier and jump into the lake any time of the day. Rosemary remembers swimming underwater as long as her breath held out, opening her eyes to that fresh cool water, scanning the sea of big boulders on the lake bottom. Her father called her a mermaid when she surfaced with her seal-sleek head and sparkling eyes. He called her a pearl fisher when she brought him little treasures from below. She remembers her dad so happy that week. He was usually too busy being a father and an architect to laugh. But that week he joked around with his friend Jim. They smoked cigars together. They played tricks on their wives. They drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and carved birch walking sticks for the kids. They hooked arms and danced around the cabin porches, singing. Rosemary had never seen her father carefree before. And she who with her brother Hank was so closely monitored by parents, she’d never felt so free herself.

She remembers another purely fun occasion: her brother Hank’s wedding. She was with her second husband Ray then, when Hank married her friend Carol. That night, Rosemary danced with Ray, and Rosemary had fun. She and Ray could really move together, fighting a bit for the lead, pulling and swinging one another so hard that their armpits ached pleasantly the next morning. They danced so well that the rest of the wedding guests backed up into a circle around them and applauded when they were done.

Ray was usually an uptight man, very high energy and nervous. He had a lot of responsibilities and he took them with military seriousness. He was a suburban patriarch. Rosemary used to say that Ray couldn’t relax without losing consciousness, and the one time that wasn’t true was when Ray was dancing like they did that night. Dancing hard and knowing they’d have good sex later. Ray relaxed. Rosemary felt so free she laughed with joy.

That was ten years ago. Ray and Rosemary have been divorced for six. Rosemary’s thoughts shift back to Rick. Should she or shouldn’t she? She doesn’t consider his wife Charlotte. Rosemary and Rick had an affair 20 years ago, when she was with her first husband, and their antics didn’t have anything to do with their marriages. Her time with Rick was sideways-time: sweet warps out of their normal workaday/parental/marital schedules, when they only paid attention to each other, when they only had to be perfect for a set little amount of time. Why not? It was fun…

It’s taking her forever to figure out her life. Rosemary is more than half-way through her expected span. She likes to think she has been paying attention. Most of the time she feels like she’s making her way with her eyes round and her mouth open. Yokel-like. Astounded.

When she was younger she was sure she’d have a handle on it by 50. She was always a people person and quick to read others. It was a useful skill in business and at parties, being able to separate the rats from the rabbits. But it didn’t help her get herself.

Now Rosemary is 51. She is five and a half feet tall and weighs 150 pounds. She exercises regularly because it helps her manage stress and it keeps her muscles firm. She has her curly hair professionally colored and cut, but she hasn’t yet signed up for the facelift.

She has a quick mind and a fast mouth. She grew up in an articulate household, where debates were polysyllabic and loud. She early learned to organize her argument and deliver it with decibels. She sometimes makes what sound like bigoted comments, but her insertions of ethnic or other descriptions are really just fast speech from a large vocabulary; she grabs adjectives for emphasis, and blurts them before considering.

Taken all together, she’s attractive and interesting. She would have no trouble finding a boyfriend if she got out in the evenings, but she likes to stay home. As it is, she has recently re-attracted the attentions of an old married lover, and she is about to decide whether to do it with Rick, or not.

She had drinks with him last night. Rosemary normally doesn’t drink; alcohol makes her want a cigarette or a man, and she gave up one five years ago and the other two. She meant to give up tobacco. She didn’t mean to give up men, but she hasn’t been with one since she broke up with Stephen, weird Stephen. He was brilliant, tall, slim, with good teeth and deep blue eyes. He had a very nice penis. But he tended to be unfocused, and he was an acolyte in search of a guru. She stopped seeing him when she lost all respect for him when he joined a cult, and she hasn’t really missed him. She meant to find another man. But at her age two years flew by, and now here she is, considering sex again at last.

She had drinks with Rick from 3:45 to 7 PM. Five wheat ales and two shots of tequila. She didn’t get drunk, but she got warm. When Rick drove her home she let him kiss her. She kissed him back. He put her hand on his crotch outside his pants. She didn’t stop him until he slipped his hand into her jeans, between the denim and her panties. She squirmed her bottom away from him but leaned her face toward his. She kissed him goodbye. He looked at her with his warm brown eyes crinkled in the corners, smiling. He showed her the face she loved 20 years ago, older but still his. “Am I going to get lucky?” he asked. She told him she’d talk to him next week.

She didn’t feel drunk after that, but she also didn’t feel hungry. She skipped dinner, skipped her customary joint, removed her makeup and her contact lenses, and got into her bed. She drowsed from 8 PM to 8 AM and because she didn’t smoke dope, and because with that much down-time a lot of her sleep was light, she remembered some of her dreams.

Stairs. She dreamt of stairs. Her house has a single pine staircase, but in her dream there was a short half-set of stairs in addition to the main flight. She has no idea where the half-set went (in her mind’s eye the day after, it seems to her that there were only four steps and they led to a large window), but she knows that in the dream there was a tread missing from the half-set, and another tread missing from the full flight. Missing pieces. Missing steps. That part of the dream was easy to interpret. But the other part, the part with Stephen walking toward her up the entry steps (what entry steps? her house doesn’t have entry steps): what did that mean? He wore a turquoise T- shirt, a bit tight on his firm chest, and a pair of soft corduroy pants, too loose on his thin body, hanging beltless from his narrow hips, showing the plaid waistband of his boxers. Stephen walking toward her, shabby as ever, gray-haired, gray-faced, with those deep gray-blue eyes, smiling warmly.

Mitch has made his way to them by now, and Natalie begins to simper, at least in Phoebe’s eyes. It isn’t jealousy. Phoebe isn’t gay, and if she were she wouldn’t want Natalie. No, even though one friend tried to accept Phoebe’s love-reluctance by giving her “permission” to be gay (“I just want you to know it would be okay with me if, I mean I wouldn’t respect or honor you any less if …”), she knows she can’t change her orientation (sexual disorientation is more like it, she thinks). And Phoebe just isn’t lonely enough, or needy enough, or poor enough, or young enough, to be willing to give much for another one of those woman-man relationships. Apparently, Natalie feels differently about the issue, but Natalie is ten years older than Phoebe, better shaped, less bright, more vain. She had her first face lift three months ago, and she thinks she’s looking good. Phoebe thinks Nat’s face is okay, but that the process made her hair appear older by contrast. Phoebe doesn’t think she’d have a face lift for love or money.

“So when are you going to run away with me, good looking?” Mitch is speaking directly to Phoebe now, so she has to attend to him. He’s short and insincerely jovial; he reminds her of one of those dolls with a spring-floating head. He also reminds her of boring alcoholics she talked to in bars, twelve years ago when she was married and restless. Mitch may be a psychotherapist, Phoebe thinks, but he talks, looks, and acts like a hound. His nails are buffed, and his watchband is too thick and too gold. He wears a pinky ring on a stubby little finger. He holds a scotch-and-soda in his fat hand.

“How are you, Mitch?” Phoebe counters. And “How long will Tim be with you?”

“Just fine. Just fine. Always looking for a tennis game: you know me. I’m still planning on moving here soon, so Tim and I are scouting condos this weekend. Gotta have courts. We like that Watergate.” He swallows half of his drink. “Tim and his mother are having a bit of trouble right now. He’s finding her too restrictive, and she’s, well, I think she’s too controlling. Always was. Anyway, he’s at that age, you know, 13. Needs to have some freedom. So we’re working out a way for him to be with me more.”

“What’s going on with you two?” Natalie descends on them, smelling of tobacco, and really wants to know. She sidles up against Mitch, and Phoebe gets away from them as soon after that as she can. She moves into the living room, tries and eschews the ersatz-chicken, and gets sucked into a tangle of attorneys. They’re talking about audits, wines and lawsuits, and each is trying to be hipper than the others by clever necktie or wristwatch or one-liner.

Phoebe moves through the room and does her best to be gracious and interested, but this afternoon is her idea of one of the circles of hell. Her eyes start to cross with fatigue. Her jaw is sore from stifling yawns. She would never wish ill on her friend Natalie, but after it was all over she had to admit to herself that she was relieved when the smoke alarm went off and started the chain of events that ended the party. Anyway, Phoebe thinks the “ill,” if there turns out to be any, was brought on Natalie by herself.

Natalie was the one who wanted the kids to get together. It was her cigarettes they swiped. Neither Tim nor Emily would say why they opted to do their smoking in the windowless bathroom (the fan advantage?), but it was Natalie who put those artificial flowers in there. The kids say they didn’t mean to ignite the flowers; in any event, no one knew the things weren’t silk after all, or that they would melt so quickly and noxiously. And the kids might have gotten out of there before the alarm was tripped, except it took them a few extra moments to find the door, because it was so well-papered it camouflaged with the walls.

Even with all of that, Phoebe thinks the embarrassment could have been contained if Natalie hadn’t made such a fuss about the lipstick. The stuff was very bright red and did look like blood. But if Natalie had given herself a moment before starting to shriek, she would have seen that Emily’s mouth wasn’t injured, and the marks around Tim’s waistband weren’t from any cut.

Phoebe has to return to the party. She’s some kind of co-hostess for her mateless friend. But there’s a reason she usually doesn’t give or go to parties, and it’s keeping her here for a few more minutes. She touches the silk lilies. She chuckles quietly. Nearby is a Unitarian church, with similar silk lilies placed in the glass-fronted display that lists service times and ministers’ names. The silk lilies there are just as silly as those here; sealed in an airless shelf, the viewer knows they can’t be alive. What makes her chuckle is the name of the place – 1st Unitarian Church of Kensington – which switched to using the number instead of the word “First” in its name as soon as the local teenagers started calling it by its natural acronym.

Amused, she leaves the bathroom. Happily the door is where she expects, because it’s so well-papered it would otherwise be hard to find. She emerges into a window-lit butler’s pantry, moves to the right into the square kitchen, and collides with Natalie backing away from the refrigerator.

“Ooooh,” Natalie flutters as she turns around. Then she smiles and sets trays of canapes on the tiled counter. “Have you seen my daughter?”

“Not since your argument.” Phoebe last glimpsed Emily when the 11-year-old stalked away from her mother. Natalie insisted on lipstick removal and a wardrobe change, and Emily was having none of it. She stomped off in her mini-skirt and big sweatshirt, her tangled curls and baggy socks bouncing with each emphatic step.

“God, I need a smoke; that child wears me down,” Nat comments as she smoothes her print skirt over her hips. She shakes her streaked blonde hair and makes her earrings twinkle. They’re zircon studs, nearly half an inch in diameter, and they’re like holes in Natalie’s lobes. “I just wanted her to look nice for Mitch and Tim. Did I tell you Mitch has him for the weekend?”

Phoebe shakes her head as she helps carry hors d’oeuvres to the tables. “What is this food I’m serving?” she asks by way of non-sequitur.

“Tim is with Mitch through Monday. He’s 13, and from what I hear he’s cool, so I’m hoping he will interest Emily.” She straightens her skirt again. It isn’t nearly as short as Emily’s, but it’s tight and well above Nat’s knees. “And the food is the latest in vegetarian appetizers. ‘Faux’ meat, formed from tofu. Unbelievable, huh?”

“So this isn’t bacon around the water chestnuts? And it isn’t chicken breasts on the wooden skewers? That’s eerie. It calls to mind an old movie. Don’t look now,” Phoebe says as she cranes her chin toward the front door, “but I believe Emily is opening the door to the dark-haired man himself.”

“Mitch doesn’t color his hair,” Natalie says. Then she grins and gives Phoebe her sly look. “The hair on his head exactly matches the hair elsewhere, if you know what I mean.”

Phoebe makes a gagging motion. “Of course I know what you mean. And I know plenty of men with different colored body hair in different places. Beard and head, for instance. No, your argument is completely flat. If anything, it suggests Mitch brings in a pubic hair sample for his colorist to match. He’s 54 and his hair looks colored. It’s a safe bet that it is colored.”

“You’re impossible. But look at Tim and Emily. They appear to be hitting it off.”

The two young people are speaking to each other. They stand apart from the rest of the gathering and may even be enjoying their conversation. Phoebe thinks they look cute: he all in black except for a white shirt, his brown hair pulled into a ponytail, she in her red lipstick and dark grunge, both of them about five feet tall. As Phoebe agrees with Natalie about them, the youngsters walk outside into the yard.

Phoebe remembers being a Camp Fire Girl. Her name there was Netopu, pronounced phonetically and translated “makes friends,” but that phrase seemed to her as untrue as the achievements for which she was awarded ugly beads. She liked it that they sold candy instead of the bland cookies the Girl Scouts peddled. And she liked it when they made artificial flowers.

Before then, Phoebe tried making flowers out of bathroom tissue. She’d poke white or pink tissue into the hole that formed when she made a fist of her left hand. The result was flower-like, but still a tissue. She wasn’t satisfied.

In Camp Fire Girls they used real tissue paper, crepe paper, pipe cleaners and green gardener’s tape. Careful folding of fringed tissue could produce a good carnation. By curving crepe paper around her thumb, Phoebe could form a passable rose petal, and cluster that with its fellows into a bud or a bloom. Either would unfurl from a tape-wrapped pipe cleaner stem. They looked good.

Did she learn anything else in Camp Fire Girls? She can tell the temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit) by counting cricket chirps for 14 seconds and then adding 40. But she learned that from a fact-a-day desk calendar. She can find south, by pointing the 12 on her analog watch at the sun, and locating the midpoint between that number and the hour hand. But her father taught her that. She can write out the formula for photosynthesis, or build a DNA model, but those are facts she memorized, from TimeLife books in her parents’ home. All she can remember learning from Camp Fire Girls are how to make credible artificial flowers and how much she despises group-type activities.

She’s looking at girl memories through a 25 year scope. Phoebe is near 40 now, and she’s spending a few minutes in her friend’s downstairs bathroom. It’s one of those windowless rooms, with two switches on the wall beside the doorway; the closer provides light and the other turns on the fan. Natalie has accentuated the small darkness of the room by having it papered everywhere in stripes. Even the back of the door and the switchplates are covered in vertical bands of blue, black and silver. On the far corner of the lavatory counter, near where a window would be if the room had an exterior wall, Nat has placed a blue glass vase of silk flowers.

They’re rather lifelike. Fashioned to mimic lilies, they’re almost realistic enough to invite a finger-stroke test. Except they’re unnatural. No real flowers could grow in a room like this. They now seem more like ribbons than like flowers: lovely useless fabrications.

Phoebe can’t figure this room. Nat and Bill bought their house in the hills when it was under construction. It was built to look old, which is some kind of attitude Phoebe doesn’t understand. True old can be charming, she thinks, but it will be drafty and have dust-collecting corners. It will have idiosyncratic creaks and exude history. False old appears nothing but contrived. This particular false old house is built to resemble the two story boxes of the 1920s. Many of the genuine boxes in the flatlands have been converted to what the style affords: sensible upstairs and downstairs units. Those that are still single-family dwellings have the unspectacular floor plans and exteriors that their simple shape permits. The real boxes sit on the flat lots between the hills and the bay, pinned to their property by mature trees. This false old box is perched on top of the hill ridge at the border of the park, and it sits awkwardly on its land like it was dropped there by a Kansas tornado.

Phoebe figures the architect tried to dress up the old design by placing the grand staircase in it. The true old box has a staircase running up one of the side walls; when the house is broken into two units, the entry door to the upper flat opens directly from the front porch to the stairs. This false old box has a wide set of steps rising from the central entryway, turning halfway up at a charming plush window seat. It’s a very nice staircase, but it creates a windowless space under it and in the center of the first story: hence the dark bathroom.

When Natalie and Bill purchased the house, they got to pick carpets, wallpapers, paints and appliances. So no one but they can be blamed for the way the downstairs bathroom was done; then it was magenta, green and gold, with filigree accessories and magenta towels and shower curtain. Phoebe just assumed it was Bill’s project or some private marital joke, and didn’t comment. But after Bill left, and after Nat determined that she couldn’t do better with another house, she redecorated most of the place. This house re-warming party marked the end of that eight-month project. And while it’s true that Natalie changed the bathroom colors from magenta/green/gold to blue/black/silver, it’s also true that she retained the hideousness of the paper-everything concept.