Sputterpub's Blog

Ostensibly, Peter called because he was seeking his stuff. That was a transparent device; the only items he’d left at Lilah’s were some ratty old exercise clothes. Peter is inattentive to apparel. He is accustomed to leaving bits of himself behind as he blunders forward. Lilah knew he didn’t want his coffee-marked sweatpants or tank top.

They saw each other and it wasn’t unpleasant, so they did it a second time, and then each considered the relationship differently. Peter wanted to deem them a couple again; to the extent that she acted like they weren’t, he compromised and adjusted to permit her actions. He shrugged a lot. He wished she would support his deepening commitment to the Portals program.

Lilah was careful to allow him no physical intimacy. That hadn’t been a particularly satisfying part of their former relationship as far as she was concerned (pleasant and not malodorous was the best she would say) – she didn’t want it back. She never invited him to spend the night. She tried to keep him downstairs even though the best place to watch TV was from her bed, away from kids in the living room. Her friends asked her why she continued to see him – she asked the same thing herself – and she said she thought she still enjoyed their talks and walks; she said she was interested in the welfare of his sons. Lilah was an indulgent parent but selfish enough to set limits. Peter was a rabid believer in aggressive expressive love, and his delight in his kids’ actions was so thorough that it was interpreted as unconditional approval no matter what they did. Saul and Warren were masters of their own destinies, with regard to sleep and all behavior. Each was small for his age, delicate of feature, often dirty and always tired. Peter was their fountain of love and approval – or like a perpetual big brother, a willing conspirator in all play.

Saul now lived full-time with Peter. Seven year-old Warren continued to stay mostly with his mother (except for every other weekend), but Saul had moved from Judith’s to Peter’s less than a month after Lilah stopped seeing him. Judith’s feelings were so hurt about this that she rarely spoke to Saul. Mother and son were civil to each other, but neither sought the other’s company.

Saul wasn’t going to school much. He was supposed to be attending eighth grade at a middle school in Albany, but he wasn’t there more often than he was. He and Peter had already met once with the principal and the school counselor, and Saul had entered into and immediately violated the behavior contract that always arises from such a meeting. Peter has an anti-school bias he has never concealed from his children. School was not good for him. Lilah suspected he supported Saul in insolence. She was sure that Judith acted more parental; after all Saul was only 13. School attendance was probably one of the issues that made him want to move in with his dad.

Lilah didn’t get these items in any narrative form. Peter wasn’t ever likely to narrate; his conversation was more like talking to himself out loud. He tended to interrupt a silence with the phrase “Oh, yeah…” as if he were continuing some dialogue, and then launch into a nonsequitur, any nonsequitur (there are an infinite number of nonsequiturs). This irritated Lilah but she tried to view it as a disability she should accommodate and she mostly succeeded at that, except when it seemed to be the sort of baiting that Peter, a bright middle child, would have perfected while growing up. He was so informed and organized about astronomy, geology, anthropology – so retentive with those stories – that his incoherence about people sometimes seemed to be an act. That winter Peter told her bits and pieces, mainly when Saul’s behavior was so bad that he couldn’t avoid talking about it, and so Lilah’s concern grew with her amazement.

Saul went to the Saturday midnight movie every week by then, and sometimes he didn’t come home at all. Lilah learned that he had refused to go with his mother one Saturday night when she came to pick him up outside the theater. Judith had then called Peter for help, which is something she would only do in desperation, and Peter told her he’d take care of Saul. He sent her home to Warren. But Saul wouldn’t go with Peter either. Peter ended up leaving Saul at the theater and didn’t see the boy again until Sunday afternoon.

“What could I do?” Peter asked Lilah when he told her about that night. “Force him into my truck?”

“Yes!” Lilah was emphatic. “I’m not advocating abuse. You just grab him, hug him firmly, and sit on him, if necessary, until he gets some sense.”

There was no point to Lilah’s emphasis. By the time Peter gave her the story the events had occurred months before. In fact, he only told because Saul was then missing again, and longer, and he was filling her in on precedents.

Coincidentally, Duane made the decision to try to get home at just about the same moment that SuddenJim knocked on Deirdre’s door. Connie had been nagging Duane about how important it was for him to be home that night, for their as-ever-childless Christmas eve. So even though the admiral opted to stay in Las Vegas, Duane decided to fly home in the nasty weather, filed a flight plan, took off alone into the stormy dark. While Deirdre opened her door to jolly old Jim, Duane taxied and lifted off toward lightning.

Deirdre thought about sending Jim home but would have felt small-minded doing it. She sent him instead into her TV room, where he played some video games. She tried to recover her lovely solitude but the mood eluded her. Eventually she answered the door to Connie, gathered her scarf and her son together, pulled Jim away from the game, and left for the pageant.

They walked. Three blocks downhill slipping a little on wet sidewalks that had iced up in the cold night air. Left and level for another two blocks, but into a face-chapping wind. Around the corner, gust-sheltered, happy to get into the school auditorium just ahead of the rain. They walked to four seats together, pulling off gloves and tugging scarves loose from their throats.

Abundance of wool. Red mufflers and blue hats. Poofy nylon jackets in spinnaker colors. Rosy cheeks even on African skin. The place sparkled with December.

The music was awful. Flat out of tune. Deirdre and Ian squirmed a little in their seats. Jim and Connie were sedate with satisfaction. They sat hunched slightly forward with smarmy grins on their faces.

From out of nowhere, between a marginal rendition of “Silent Night” and a gathering of the whole troop for what was to be “Jingle Bells,” came a tearing crash, a thudding shudder…lights out…screech…

Hole in the sky. Metal glinting. Smashed and sliding. Screaming…

Connie and Jim were stunned. Unhurt they sat in dazzled amazement. It was Ian who leapt to action. He raced to the stage, pulling classmates away from the smouldering wreckage. Before the remains of the plane ignited he and a few others had evacuated that stage. Deirdre ran to help. Past ripped metal, sliding on blood, to cushion the heads of terrified children.

Duane died on impact. Long afterward, when they analyzed the flight recorder and replayed his last words, some of them suspected suicide. But the plane was clearly hit by lightning. It’s almost certain Duane would have looked for an uninhabited area in which to crash. There’s no way he would have aimed for the school; it was tragic that he hit the auditorium. His final words were garbled and must have meant something else. Must have been two partial sentences or something.

Three teachers died along with Duane, and a dozen parents in the audience were injured. The music instructor, the man who kicked Ian out of the production for passing around those kitchen matches (“bringing a weapon to school,” were the words on the suspension report), was decapitated by the port wing. Miraculously, no kids were hurt. But Ian got them all away. He and a few others. Deirdre helped.

Ian was a bit of a hero. He learned how it felt to admire himself. It was easy and obvious for Deirdre to mark his evolution from that night.

And Deirdre? she tried to reserve judgment. But she watched Connie and Jim motionless in the auditorium that Christmas eve, and she knew then that they were full of shit. The worst kind of solidarity, she couldn’t help thinking. Certain images wouldn’t leave her memory. The sight of Ian running to help, sliding to his knees, pulling with small bulging man-muscles, his face shining and intense. The blank look on her sister, like she was coming out of a dream. Jim’s big blue eyes blinking as he sat immobile, blinking like he was surprised by light. The remains of the music instructor.

Deirdre grew a little more knowing. She smiled a lot and although she spoke more softly, from then on she tended to hum “whatever” and do whatever she wanted to do.

Connie called about nothing that night, and Jim didn’t call about something. Without any warning he showed up nearly half an hour early. It was nothing personal; in his perpetual fear of forgetting or being late, SuddenJim often arrived early. He tended to push everything, to fidget everywhere, eagerly, boyishly, naggingly. Connie found it attractive, probably in contrast to her dour husband Duane. To Deirdre it was exasperating. She thought she spent time with Jim because her character was ready to develop that next step, the step that would enable her to say no to a sweet puppylike male, dancing on her doorstep singing wordlessly “Let me in. Oh let me in. Let me in and I will be happy. Let me be happy.”

So Jim showed up early, looking eager to be happy, fidget/dancing on her doorstep like he needed to go to the bathroom. Deirdre had to get dressed and drag her son to the school pageant, and Jim and Connie were coming along. They wanted to come. Neither Deirdre nor Ian understood that.

“Why are we going to this thing again, Mom?” Ian asked through the knit cotton of his favorite black T-shirt as he pulled it over his head. Next he’d be putting his hooded sweatshirt on, pulling the neck up so he spoke through that cloth, letting the stretched cuffs fall over his fingers. Ian would chew on his hood strings as he talked to Jim, to his Aunt Connie or Uncle Duane, poking his thumbs through the holes in his cuffs, shuffling.

“Some people like this stuff, Kiddo,” Deirdre answered. “Lights and noise and all. Jim seems to thrive on it. Something about hating school when he was a kid, y’know? He wants to like school now. And I guess we have to go because I would have gone if you hadn’t gotten kicked out of the assembly: I would have been proud to watch you perform.”

“I’m sorry,” but they both understood he said it just to make his mother stop talking about his misbehavior. And Deirdre knew she wouldn’t have wanted to attend the Christmas pageant even if Ian hadn’t fucked up and gotten suspended. Again.

She looked at his hair, peroxide-orange over dark-brown, remembering their coloring session earlier that week. Jim didn’t approve: thought somehow the consequences for Ian’s misbehavior ought to be hair hell. Deirdre didn’t mind coloring his hair. They talked while the bleach worked; she well remembered being a kid, so she always gave her son information. “You’ve got to like yourself,” she told him. “There’s no point in retrospective guilt, but I use what I call prospective guilt to guide me.” Ian uplooked a question at her through his lashes. “I mean that I imagine how I’ll feel about myself tomorrow, or next week, or next year – whatever’s appropriate – when I decide about my behavior today. I always choose the thing that will make me like myself more in the future. Because there’s nothing better than liking yourself. And nothing worse than disliking yourself,” and she saw that heartbreaking answering glint then in his eyes. She watched his face congest but he held back the tears.

“And Aunt Connie’s coming to the pageant,” she resumed, “partly for love of you but also because she’s lonely. Uncle Duane has to fly tonight.” Duane was a navy pilot, nearing his 25-year retirement mark, and it was true that he was working that night, but he was due in any time. Connie always tried to make Duane sound exciting – career navy pilot and all – but her husband was a humorless boring bitter man. He was an undiagnosed dyslexic and he never learned to read well, so he’d hated school as much as Jim did. Connie claimed he was very bright, but Deirdre thought you wouldn’t know that by knowing Duane. And although she bragged he was bright to others, Connie nagged him like he was a forgetful child, so that Deirdre and Ian preferred seeing Connie or Duane alone to visiting them together.

W(hate)ver. Deirdre liked the T-shirts and tractor caps at first. She bought an XL, green-letters-on-white, as a sleepshirt for her 12 year-old son. Afterward the phrase came to represent for her the essence of passive-aggressive response. WHATever. WhatEVer. Not nice, really.

And later still, riding the bus home one night, glancing out the window at a stop, she saw a bulldyke wearing the shirt with a brown leather pilot’s jacket over it, hands in her jeans pockets so the jacket hung open, its bronze zipper teeth like tiny horizontal fringe, cropping to “hate” the Whatever.

Progressions like that made Deirdre distrust her initial responses. She figured she must be counter-intuitive, so often disagreeing with herself. Gradually she learned to reserve judgment. She began to see beauty even in dereliction. Broken glass in a vacant lot, viewed in the sun from her commuter train, sparkled like morning-gilt ocean or mica in a sidewalk. The scab-faced rope-haired crazy drunk, leg-splayed on the floor of the train station against a tiled wall with his penis apparent in the gaping hole in the crotch of his smear-stiff corduroys: that penis the only handsome thing about him, large like a Scandinavian, circumcised and smooth.

If she weren’t reserving judgment she wouldn’t be dressing for the school holiday pageant. She always hated these events. Having to hope for a crowd. Glaring garish lights. The seesaw between embarrassment at the amateurism and the face-thickening demands of emotional manipulation. How heartwarming is that diversity…

But everyone said she should go. Mom and Connie, SuddenJim. Everyone but she and Ian. Deirdre reserving judgment dressed to leave her house.

Her phone rang (Connie). And didn’t (Jim). Connie as usual called for no reason Deirdre could determine. She did some big-sister bossing about what Deirdre should wear to the pageant (“Not the old T-shirt again, Dee,” she declared. “You have to set an example for Ian.” As if clothes could make the boy behave.) And she wanted to rave about some guy she and Duane met in a bar the night before. Connie prided herself on the accuracy of her first reactions to new people. She claimed she could size a person up, character-wise, in five minutes of conversation, and this guy was going to be good for Duane’s career. Deirdre figured that if Connie’s assessments were that accurate she would never be disappointed in people, and since her sister was almost always complaining about how someone let her down, her first impressions probably weren’t often as correct as she thought.

Connie had said Jim Sullivan was a catch when she first met him. She tried to sell Deirdre on him. She described him as eccentric but highly intelligent, weird but fascinating. Actually he was quite smart but had a cognitive disorder; he’d always been distractable unless the subject grabbed him, and he’d coped with his problem by narrowing his field of engagement to what he could manage, and by taking in every kind of stimulant. He drank quarts of black coffee each day. He went through a carton of non-filter cigarettes a week.

If the schools caught a Jim Sullivan now, they’d get him to a shrink and onto some form of speed. They could even test him for his ailment; he has attention deficit disorder, and the doctors would see it if they gave him traceable glucose and watched how little of it was taken up by his brain. Like so many boys with ADD, his condition made him hyperactive the way a toddler who misses his nap is hyperactive; the poor man had a tired brain and needed a little wake-him-up.

But Jim is 54; back when he was in school they just told him to pay attention and punished him when he didn’t. They called him impulsive. They nicknamed him Sudden Sullivan. He learned to hate school, to go into a trade where he could work his body and therapize his mind, to limit his appointments and engagements so he could remember to keep them. At this point medical science figured he was coping well enough that he didn’t need any meds.

Jim latched onto Deirdre when he met her three years earlier. Connie introduced them, and she and Jim concluded that he and Deirdre made a wonderful couple. They were both into enneagrams and the numbers worked. Deirdre didn’t necessarily agree, but she reserved judgment. She couldn’t see a purpose to personality typing systems. She enjoyed some conversations with Jim, especially the ones that took place in bed after languorous kissing and vigorous sex. She didn’t see herself as half of a committed couple, but gradually she realized that Connie, and SuddenJim, and the rest of the world did. She tried to argue about it but no one wanted to listen; she sometimes thought she’d have to stop seeing Jim just to prove to them all that it was casual.