Sputterpub's Blog

With the kids getting older and Carol not earning, I had to find a better-paying job. I fell into the extermination business for about seven years. I don’t know why I stayed in it so long; I hated it. But then, I’m just starting to ask why I stayed in the marriage so long too; maybe I get paralyzed by my own discontent.

I hated the extermination business for two reasons: the customers and the rats. People generally only called us when their home remedies had failed to take care of the problem; by then they were beyond obnoxious. Ants were easy; I didn’t mind getting a call to take care of a formicarian infestation because I could spray the property perimeter and make the customer happy for at least a year. But rats? Rats! If they die in the walls (which is where they tend to go if poison works), they smell bad enough that the wall has to be opened up to remove the corpse. But most of the time we can’t kill them. Not in Berkeley.

Rats are smart to begin with. But there’s a big old university here with a big old psych department. Most of the experiments have been done on rats. Over time the animals have been born smarter and more resistant to toxins. They escape and mate with the locals. The resultant offspring are poison-resistant, tough, and clever. They take bait without springing traps. They go through steel-wool attic barriers so fast and well that they must use the metal to floss their rodent teeth. They fight back if cornered. Rats drove me out of that business.

But I wasn’t stupid about it. The job paid pretty well, and I didn’t leave it until I had something else. The last couple of years I went to school nights and some Saturdays, and I became an oral hygienist.

I got interested after my mother had all of her teeth pulled. Mom has diabetes, and her blood sugar ran very high back then. When her periodontal disease was discovered it was severe and advanced. Only by removing her teeth were they able get rid of the infection. Of course now we know that the high blood sugar caused the infection at least as much as the infection caused the rise in sugar. Now we know that Mom’s three-pack-a-day habit and the stress of her relationship with Dad contributed hugely to her gum disease.

I’m my mother’s child. Even though I get the best of care and pay daily attention to my gums, I can see the age in my own mouth. I look okay on the outside. Younger than my 53 years. But the inside of my mouth looks like 80.

So I studied, and then I made the career change. Meanwhile Carol stayed home. She went to whatever group she attended. She got into making friendship bracelets out of silk embroidery thread but she never sold enough to pay for her supplies. Between my exterminator job and school, and then the extra work as a hygienist that I did to try to boot me up, with all of that I didn’t have much time to pay attention to Carol. Even our infrequent sex life stopped. I was too busy to figure out if I missed it.

The kids are out on their own now. Twenty-eight and twenty-five. I make good money. I scrape. I pick. I poke with odd little brushes. I floss with Glide or with toothpaste-coated white baby yarn. Carol still fools around with crafts.

I have to admit it: I just don’t respect her or her activities any more. I’m tired of hiding my contempt. I know I made a commitment, and I’m sure if I stuck it out it would get better. But lately I’m tempted to fantasize about her death.

She’s at the sink now, pulling cornsilk off cobs before she boils them. She has no idea. She hasn’t asked and I haven’t told her how minutely I’m examining my life.

Scraping off the plaque. Flossing out the rotting matter. I guess I’ll talk to Carol. We can afford to live apart.

Looking back on it now, I know there’s a momentum to life that no one warned me about. Teachers and TV shows and even my parents told me not to pressure myself, that there would be plenty of time to make up my mind about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to do it with. That wasn’t true.

It turned out there was a nesting urge that started to peak when we got out of Cal. Maybe it was aggravated by the post-college identity crisis – that pressure about going to (real) work that kept so many of our fellows enrolled in school as long as possible – but there was a tendency at 21 or 22 to settle into an acknowledged marital-type relationship. And there was a likelihood after that of babies. Or a baby got started and then a marriage took place. Either way a lot of us found ourselves married to someone we didn’t love as much as either of us wished, parenting people who taught us ambivalence. I married Carol. We birthed Jessica and Jeremy.

In the course of all this we had to earn a living, and we had less than useful college degrees. Carol decided she was an artist, but an art degree from Cal doesn’t get one anywhere toward making or selling objects. And since I didn’t want to teach, my BA in English was about as helpful as a shadow. I worked in a few bookstores before moving up to the relatively lucrative world of clerk typist in a succession of small San Francisco offices. I managed to make just enough to disqualify us for food stamps or other assistance, but we didn’t mind scraping along then. We agreed to let Carol pursue some crafts for awhile.

She tried silk-screening first. She sold but didn’t make a profit. She moved from that to batik, and her designs were okay, but she didn’t like working with cotton, because it was hard to gauge the color when applied and it was impossible to get all the wax out of the fabric, and she had trouble selling silk. At that point a rational person would have faced facts and moved to another material or maybe even a paying job, but Carol’s opinion was that she wasn’t aiming high enough. She decided to try to raise silkworms and weave her own cloth.

I knew it wouldn’t work. I should have spoken up. We wasted more time and money on that venture than on any other. The facts are that Carol didn’t have the requisite knowledge or patience, and northern California doesn’t have the right climate. The fiasco reminded me of the time she tried to graft hops onto a marijuana root, or would have if she’d managed to grow the hops plants. We’d read that the plants were botanical cousins except that hops was a vine, perennial rather than annual, and legal. If a hops scion is grafted onto marijuana rootstock, you’re supposed to get a long-living trellis vine with all the THC of the root plant. Just think of the beer you could brew; that’s what kept me in it. But the problem was that we couldn’t find any hops plants around. We bought seeds but they have to sit in cold winter ground before they will germinate. We had terra cotta pots of seed-laden soil in our refrigerator for three months, and nothing ever poked up above the dirt.

She was slightly more successful with the silkworms, in that she managed to keep about ten percent of them alive long enough to move into cocoons. But no way was there enough thread produced; all she got was the waste silkfloss that isn’t worth twisting.

Carol gave up trying to make money. It was then her opinion that she should spend her time on our kids and her psyche. Jessica was eight and Jeremy five when Carol began with the first encounter group. In the ensuing 20 years she has explored the Gurdjieffian approach, another scene known to us only as “Henry’s clan,” EST-spinoffs, a few direct-marketing schemes, and now this Portals thing. Each time she attempted to recruit or enroll me and the kids, but that only worked with me the first time, with Jess for one season of Henry, and never for Jer. Each time she attempted to clean and fine-tune our auras as well as her own. It hasn’t worked. Carol always gets something out of it, and that something lasts in some way for anything from a month to a few years. But the programs do nothing for the rest of the family except insert that little distance of incomprehension between her and us.

Cornsilk is how her hair looked when I first met her. We were 16, and the century was 66 years old. Now we’re into a new millennium, and Carol’s hair isn’t long or silky any more.

It’s still blonde. She sees to that every month or so. But it’s gone from that soft-sun color to lemony then streaky all over and now this butterscotch. It’s gotten shorter every year. And it’s somehow thinner but coarser. Carol’s hair isn’t pretty any more.

I liked the way her hair looked when I met her, but I didn’t like her. She talked too much. She had opinions about everything and made them sound like facts. Her face was nice enough, I guess, but she had thick ankles and no breasts; at 16 I wasn’t sure whether I was a leg man or a breast man but I sure wasn’t an opinion man. I can’t even imagine how my life would have been if I’d stayed with that first impression.

We hung out on the edges of the same crowd the last two years of high school, and I must have gotten used to her, because I’d moved from dislike to indifference by the time we ran into each other at Cal orientation. Finding an acquaintance there was a comfort; we went to a few parties together. And she must have been working out or something; her body had more shape and I kind of started noticing. I did admire that hair. She usually wore it hanging straight down her back, but sometimes she twisted it up on top of her head and these wispy tendrils looped and curled down around her neck and ears. I liked that.

Still, she had all those opinions. When she got wound up, she became loud and strident. I’m not sure anything would have happened if it weren’t for the fleas.

Back then school life was looser. Students could smoke in class. Shoes weren’t required. Pets were allowed. A lot of us had dogs. Our dogs had fleas. Our mattresses had fleas. We had fleas. There was no Advantage or other miracle-medicines then; we had ineffective powders and sprays.

That’s when I found out that I have an allergy to one type of flea. It’s a West Coast native and I was born in New York; the Cal doctor told me my immune system finds that intolerable. The rash got worse with each bite.

Carol solved my problem. I remember her saying the only thing that really worked on an infested mattress was oil of eucalyptus. We looked it up and read that the tree has strychnine in it, which is why nothing grows in eucalyptus groves except eucalyptus. She suggested that we make my dog a flea collar out of eucalyptus nuts. The idea appealed; the nuts look nice and smell good, and the concept was natural and organic.

We tried stringing the seeds on cotton and on sisal. No go: either the rough edges of the nuts or the scratching of the dog broke the strand. A leather thong of sufficient strength would be too thick to pull through the big seeds without drilling them, and we didn’t have a drill. No one had fishing line. We finally succeeded when we used dental floss. The collar held and the fleas died.

We were 18 then. Our acquaintance led naturally to sharing drugs, treason and of course sex. Before I knew what had happened, Carol and I were an item.

“Oh Brad – I felt like a piece of shit. It didn’t help that she was young and lovely. I mean it would have been awful no matter who slipped and fell, but it was of course easier to feel bad about Aisha because she was so pretty and nice.

“I asked her if I could call 9-1-1. She said no; she had contacted her supervisor and wanted to wait for him. I helped pull her to a better sitting position, got her some water, talked to her. She told me she’d just bought a new motorcycle yesterday. She said she thought she’d heard something snap when she fell. At one point she looked at me with her big brown eyes and asked “Didn’t you hear me yelling?” and I just said no, and mumbled something about working in the back of the house, about music, about weird acoustics. I felt terrible not letting her know that her cries were heard, but it didn’t seem like the time to go into issues about what I thought and why I did (or didn’t) do what I didn’t do. I know that’s chickenshit but I remember thinking it wasn’t about me right then; it was about getting her help and help could come any time and that would interrupt a conversation, so we’d better not be having a complicated conversation.

“But like I said: that’s chickenshit. I was ashamed of myself and didn’t want to go into it. I can do all sorts of rationalizing…about how Aisha got to learn that desperation cries don’t get answered but quiet ones do…or how I thought it was bitch lady…or why didn’t any of the drivers go to her aid, but the fact is I didn’t put myself out, rise to the occasion, do the right thing. I pride myself on righteous behavior, and this morning I failed.”

Brad tried to reassure her but Susan wasn’t having any of it. She was part way through processing the event, and she knew that she’d have to run outside the next time she heard a cry for help. No matter who she thought it was. She didn’t want to feel this way about herself again.

It didn’t take long to settle the tab and get out of the restaurant. Brad and Susan exchanged nods with the waiter and good words with the bartender; they were making progress as Friday regulars.

In the half block to the office they caught up with the demonstration. It was pro-Palestinian and clogging their intersection. They waited at the corner. Brad thought he’d use the time to smoke a cigarette. He pulled an Export A out of the box and was trying to work his lighter when a scuffle occurred. From somewhere right in front of them an Israeli flag appeared and suddenly several young men were attempting to tear and trample it.

Something snapped in Susan. She watched as if she were outside herself while she dashed into the melee and began jerking the flag away from the boys. Boys? That’s what they seemed. She yelled at them like they were her sons, and they relented just enough that she almost had the flag. It was off the ground. She got a good grip on a corner. Then she realized someone else had an equally strong grip on the opposite corner. She pulled, downward, determined. The person at the opposite end pulled just as hard. She started to pull again but then she looked up, into a cop’s eyes, and just released her hold. The flag went with the cop.

Susan is Jewish but no Zionist. That wasn’t it. Maybe it was the Pinot Grigio or maybe the need for a karmic shift or maybe something else, but at that moment Susan, who normally is no respecter of symbols, couldn’t bear to see any flag trampled.

Brad was astonished. A little scared after the fact for his sister, as if she had jumped in to break up a dog fight. He forgot to smoke his cigarette.

Susan relished the adrenaline coursing through her neck, down her legs. She hid the high like an extramarital attraction but she walked with more vigor.

“So on a lighter note,” she said as they finally crossed the street, “let’s talk exact terms about this work arrangement.”

Brad shifted mental gears. “I’m really excited about the possibilities,” he said, “and even though everyone warns that odds are against you when you try to work with family, I’m pretty sure this will be good for both of us.”

“Don’t worry about the odds.”

“Oh yeah. That’s right. Spoken like an actuary.”

Susan giggled. “For what it’s worth, the probability of our success and the probability of our failure are bound to add to one.”

“The same old One?”

“Just One.”

“Well, I guess that’s better than zero,” Brad opined as he opened the door for them.

Susan smiled and cast her reply back like salt. “Way better,” she said, striding forward.

It was a demonstration, but they couldn’t tell if it was for Haiti, Palestine, or janitors. They were so accustomed to Friday financial district activism that they hardly paused. The waiter nodded toward the street with a fond look on his face, and left. Brad asked about the wine. “I think you’re being too empathetic here,” he observed. “Looks like you’re drinking extra when my life’s a mess. Or maybe you’re already having second thoughts about the work thing.”

“Oh no. I have my very own stresses.”

“Yeah well…”

“No. Really. Even today.” She looked for the wine but it was too soon to expect it. “I didn’t behave well this morning.”

Brad sat back, attentive. “The PG&E meter reader slipped on my path at around 9 today, and broke her ankle.”

“Shit!” Brad blurted impulsively. Still without thinking he added, “But I’ve warned you about that path…”

“I know; I know. Don’t start with me. It wasn’t even the main part of the path.” There was a brick walkway from the sidewalk to Susan’s house. It was probably as antique as her 90 year-old abode. The land sloped down from the street to her front door, and the brick path lay on the land. It was picturesquely edged with moss, and after rain it could be as slippery as ice. Susan often swept, brushed, hosed, or scrubbed at those bricks, in an effort to make them less slick. Sometimes in the wettest part of the winter she looped a rope across the pathway where it started at the sidewalk, so anyone approaching her place would be encouraged to tread the lumpy asphalt of her driveway instead of the slick bricks.

It wasn’t a straight walkway. It headed directly for the center of her house from the sidewalk, but it forked six feet short of her porch. The left branch led to her front door. The right side went nowhere: to the part of the house outside the kitchen, without even a yard. The only thing there was the electric meter. It had never occurred to Susan that she should be scrubbing the right-side path.

“Well I’m sure your homeowners insurance will…”

“Oh that’s not what I’m worried about. For all I know, there may not even be a claim. I mean, isn’t this kind of an occupational hazard for a meter reader? They have to come on people’s property under all sorts of conditions, so maybe they take responsibility if they fall down. That part of the path was very slippery, especially after last week’s deluge, but it looked slippery, you know? An experienced person should have known to step off it onto the dirt alongside. Ahh,” she interrupted herself as the waiter set her glass of wine on the table. She nodded her thanks and took two sips. “No. That’s not the part that’s bothering me.”

Brad looked attentive. His spoon hovered over his custard.

“She screamed like crazy when she fell. And I ignored her.” A gulp of wine. “Worse, when she asked me later if I had heard her, I lied.”

“Hmmm.” Brad was surprised but tried to hide it. When they were kids he took all the merit badges. Susan was notorious for lying, cheating, even experimental stealing, while Brad was the good neighbor and excellent sport. Their mother still treasured the letter of commendation from the local police, written after Brad turned in a cash-stuffed wallet he found on the street. But as adults Susan was the honest sibling. Brad’s teasing and story-telling sometimes crossed the line. He waited to hear more.

“Of course I heard her. She was amazingly loud. I was in the middle of doing an aerobics tape and suddenly there were these shrieks: ‘Help! Help me! Somebody! Please! Help! Me!’ My immediate responses were ‘Oh shit, I don’t have time for this’ as well as ‘Nobody in real distress could yell that strongly, that lustily.’

“To be honest (now, anyway), I didn’t think she was for real. And I had no idea she was on my property. I thought she was one of the walking crazies in my neighborhood. I’ve described Tim, the barking man. And I know I mentioned the tall guy with the red helmet who kneels and genuflects at every corner. He’s harmless, and now that I’ve gotten to know Tim I don’t see his barking as all that provocative. But the bitch lady is a whole other matter, and that’s who I thought was yelling.

“She looks clean enough. Fiftyish and dowdy. Carries bags of bags in each hand. Likes to yell at residents if she thinks their dogs should be inaudible or their yards altered. Every time she sees me she curses me. Loudly. Once she even thrust her middle finger right in my face. If I try to be friendly she mimics me and then yells at me. If I ignore her she just yells. I’ve never heard her do a ‘Help Me’ yell but she’s who I pictured as I endured those screams. I thought she was one or maybe two houses away, on the sidewalk. It was sunny this morning, and there was a line of cars edging up the street, and I remember thinking that some of those drivers had to be hearing the screams, with their windows open and all, and since they weren’t reacting, my assumption that it was bitch lady, acting out, was probably correct.”

Susan swallowed more wine. Brad pushed his dessert plate toward the middle of the table and drank the last of his coffee. The waiter stopped by their table and slid their tab in its vinyl folder onto the well-laundered cloth. Susan didn’t look at the total before covering it with her card.

“It got quiet after that. Actually, I’d paused the tape and I went downstairs then for more coffee. I thought I heard a voice and even wondered if bitch lady had gone into the neighbor’s front yard and was mock-calling the police about something; that would be her style. I carried my coffee upstairs and finished my tape.

“Then I went into the bathroom to shower. I opened the window to see if the traffic was still as bad as it had been. ‘Hello?’ I heard from immediately below. ‘Please?’ came quietly. And then ‘Can you help me?’ I leaned out the window and looked down. I was horrified to see a young woman sprawled on my brick path.

“‘Omigod! Just a moment! I’m coming!’ I yelled. I raced downstairs and outside and over to her, where I slipped on the bricks and nearly went down myself.

“So how does a pension actuary differ from the other kind?” Brad asked. He leaned forward in his chair and the buttons pulled across the belly of his blue shirt.

“Actually, it’s just an alphabetic matter,” Susan explained. He heard the smile in her voice and saw it in her eyes. She’d just spent most of their entree time describing what an actuary does. Her brother was trying a career switch – after 25 years of moving around the world with his wife’s job in the State Department, he was newly-divorced, cut loose, back home at 48 and needing a plan. His kids were grown and on their own. His ex was in Cambodia. He’d read that the profession with the lowest stress was that of actuary, and he’d come to Susan to talk.

Their desserts arrived. He was two bites into his creme brulee and Susan tasted her grapefruit soup before she continued. “See, it’s all a matter of statistics. And probabilities built off them. You start with 100,000 people born in a year and count how many are alive each year after. The difference is simply the number who died. The number who lived, divided by the starting number, is the probability of living that year. The number who died, divided by the starting number, is the probability of death. The two probabilities always equal one.

“The insurance actuary deals with probability of death. The functions he uses happen to be expressed with the letters C and M. The pension actuary takes the opposite – the probability of life. His functions are D and N. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same math. Two parts of the ultimate One.” She patted her mouth with her napkin.

Brad eye-flirted with their waiter, two tables away. It wasn’t sexual; he just wanted his espresso before he finished dessert. Also he wanted the staff to recognize him. He and Susan had been there for lunch two Fridays in a row and they were personable and generous; it shouldn’t take long before they were greeted with familiarity and seated with what felt like priority. All his life Brad had been an outgoing hospitable guy. The years abroad, with house servants and an expatriate cocktail life, hadn’t slowed him down.

For that matter, and for an actuary, Susan wasn’t a social slouch either. Their family of origin was argumentative and passionate, and they’d had to learn to get along and get a word in or they wouldn’t have been allowed words at all. Both of them could put people at ease, make them laugh, or get them talking.

Brad caught the waiter’s eyes, who in turn signaled with his brows and chin that coffee was the next task he’d set himself. He mimed a run toward the bar and soon returned with the double macchiato.

“Maybe I should give it a try,” Brad ventured as he stirred in his foam.

“Actuary?”

“Yeah. It looks like you could use some help in the office.” He had been working there over the past week and a half, cleaning Susan’s server and defragging her office PCs…generally tweaking her electronics. He couldn’t fail to notice that she labored longer and harder than her three employees and still had too much to do. “Not like I’d be any kind of actuary any time soon,” he continued. “But you seem to have to do a lot of non-actuarial shit, too…maybe I can help with some of that.”

She put her spoon down. “I’ve always said I wanted a manager,” she stated. “Or a wife.” They smiled across the table. “What the hell: let’s try it.” Picking up her spoon again, she added, “Keep you off the street.”

She considered her accidental career. She hadn’t even known what an actuary was when she took the clerk/typist position at age 22. She was a hippie who thought of herself as a beatnik, who’d turned her back on her math aptitude to be avant garde and write, who landed while awaiting grad school (English, for the writing) in a small stressed office, who quickly came to like the job more than the school and the numbers more than the words.

“Hanging with the Hassids,” was what one of her college friends said when Susan told him she was going to be an actuary. And it’s true that the field drew as many of that Jewish sect as the diamond industry in New York. Some of the professional conferences looked like rabbinical schools. But actuaries also were made from computer-oriented math nerds, from school-age bookies and pot head hackers. There weren’t many forelocks and black hats among the small-plan pension actuaries, and that was Susan’s cohort. There weren’t many women either.

Their waiter paused by their table and offered her more regular coffee. He was at least ten years older than Susan so she knew he’d understand her hesitation at 2 p.m. He told them he worked 12 hour days – 10 to 10 – so caffeine was still his friend, but he pointed out that espresso packs less punch than brew, and suggested a drink like Brad’s. She thought about it. She opted for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead. That made Brad raise his brows, because Susan was the least inclined in their family to drink. He was about to comment when they were all distracted by parade-type activity in the street.