Sputterpub's Blog

He speaks to me. Normally I’d have a book open as protection against unwanted transit chats, but I’d forgotten this time. I’d been too interested in how the fat guy up front fits into the single seat, in the (academic) question about the sexual orientation of the black-haired creature diagonally across from me, in trying to plumb the nature of the relationship behind me (did she rock the cradle or rob it?) from conversation alone.

My seatmate speaks and I don’t understand him, but I have to glance at him. Thin face, clean greying frizzled hair radiating from his head and chin. He speaks again, and I can tell it’s about the silver-toned ring he’s showing me, but I still don’t understand him. It isn’t the lingo; it’s his lack of teeth.

I manage to indicate with a nod and a hand gesture that it’s a nice ring but I already have one and don’t want another. I turn away and hope the ensuing quiet will last. Unh uh.

He speaks again. I never saw the movement but now the ring has disappeared and he has a bent postcard in his hand. He’s showing it to me but growing excited and not holding it still; I have to pay some attention to see it.

“It’s a openin’ today,” I make out of his syllables. I look closer. The postcard is about some new affordable housing community … a few blocks south of where we’re passing, in the direction my seatmate is indicating with the card just as we pass, and sure enough, it says it’s opening today.

I look into his face and we smile. I see that he’s either not very bright or maybe damaged, but he isn’t dangerous. He’s going to be a member of the community on the card.

“I’m the first tenant,” he says clearly. His clean toothless gums are pink. Then he puts down the card and gropes at his waistband.

His T-shirt is dark green. He pulls up the hem an inch or so and cups the device that hangs from his belt loop. It’s the size of a Pez dispenser. “My key,” he says.

I heard a snippet of interview with my Representative on the radio recently. Asked what her prized possession was, she answered “my family.” I remember thinking that wasn’t a fair response; family isn’t a possession. I considered what my prized possession might be, and I admitted that I’m so fortunate I have a lot more than one. So does everyone I love. But this man, sitting beside me on the trolley, I think this guy has a prized possession.

He stands to exit the bus at Sanchez. The driver says to him, “Next time use the front door, okay bro?” He nods at the driver’s face in the mirror, he nods back at me. “Been sleepin’ out a long time,” he says to me.

“How long?”

“Fifteen years. 1990.” He steps down through the door to the street.

I ride two more stops. I thank the driver and walk the four blocks to Madie’s place. I’ve been looking forward to this dinner. It’s been almost three months since she and Phyllis and I have been able to mesh our schedules.

Phyllis opens the door. “My Lord, woman: you’re skinny! You look great! How much have you taken off? It’s like you’re ten years younger.” I grimace within but walk into her hug. Plusher than I remember. Madie too is looking plump.

I catch their shared look at me. Eyes slant down and lips sneer up. A part of my heart closes.

The street scene becomes distractingly lively at Fifth. Tourists waiting for the cable car, street vendors behind tables and street entertainers on tiny stages, gaggles of adolescent girls in low-cut jeans and too-small shirts, fine-pored puppy bellies belting their prance: nearly a 3-ring circus. From the high windows of the trolley I can almost ignore the cars.

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t start to menstruate until I was four months past my 14th birthday. I was old enough to keep a diary and I did. Keep it and keep it: white imitation leather on a middle shelf in my study. It records my very first diet. Exactly two weeks, fourteen days, a fortnight, half a lunar cycle, spans the time from my first diet to my first (at last!) period. Coincidence? Or a sudden flooding onslaught of diet-inducing hormone?

The doors of the club then opened. I began to fit into shared secrets about sweet foods and calorie counting, girdles that would evolve into lycra outfits, sympathetic dressing-room lies. I had never been comfortable with groups of girls, I had always been repelled by squealing jumping hugging creatures, but it seemed right and natural to back into the warm cuddling embrace of a dozen plump peers. Trying to diet was nearly as cool as trying to smoke.

Eventually I blundered into a bout of success. The one class I feared was P.E., and I tried out for the marching corps because my friends were, and the marching corps members had P.E. together, and P.E. alone would be intolerable. I joined the corps and started marching instead of munching after school, which unaccustomed activity and abstinence produced fast impressive results; I slimmed down at 15.

And was gently but thoroughly removed from the club.

It would have been remarkable how completely it happened, except I was too stunned to remark. Suddenly my best friend Norah didn’t want to tell me what she had for dinner. I overheard Cindy and Gail snickering about me after I told them how hard I was working to lose the last three pounds. Plump girls who formerly tried on underwear with me, now looked at me the way I used to glance at our bikini-clad summer neighbor at the lake: as if I had no idea what it was like to turn down a hot fudge sundae in favor of a dream about a dress.

We’re invaded at the Civic Center stop. Two shabbily-dressed black guys board by the rear door.

“Uh, hello fellas,” the driver says back to them, smiling the words into the mirror above his head. “Back door workin’ okay?” and one guy, the beefier one, ambles up toward the front of the bus. But the other one sits down next to me.

I’m not pleased but I’m not worried. Full bus, daylight, and I’m not frail. I’m dying to look at him but I don’t want to encourage anything. I can see blue jeans, loose but not too, clean and not old, medium-brown arms, hands older than young but not yet too veined. I test the air, gently, tentatively, and he doesn’t smell bad.

“Oh my God you look great … I can’t believe it’s you. Turn around: shit, girl: you’re a mere shadow of your former self.”

Yeah right. What am I supposed to say? Thanks? It’s so embarrassing. I smile and kind of giggle, and I stop Natalie’s viewing by reaching in to hug her. We say it’s been ages and I tell her I have to catch the bus.

I adore the admiring looks of strangers. So impulsive and honest. Their eyes say I’m looking good. But I hate the compliments of friends.

See, I’m likely to backslide. Of course I am. My name is Jill and I have an eating disorder. Currently it’s in remission. I’ve been dealing with it (I almost said “in control” – as if) for a year and a half and I’ve lost 40 pounds. But I can gain it back. I have before. And if I do, today’s sweet phrases will twist like daggers in my swelling belly. They’ll become sentences of reproach and self-contempt.

I cross the street next to a suited man on a cell phone, and I acknowledge his courtesy with a nod as he waits for me to step up to the bus stop ahead of him.

My name is Jill and I have a bad body image. My problem is so common it has no glamour. Go ahead: try to make me exotic. I’m not from the South, my parents are still together, nobody in my family even drinks too much. I’m just fat within. I hate puking too much to purge. Not that anorexia or bulimia would do it … any disorder that no one of color gets is not ill enough for words.

On the other side of the street an electric bus loses its connections. It’s just made the turn onto Market and both poles leave their wires. The driver has to get off and manipulate the pulleys into place by pulling on dusky black cords. The man at my side has finished his call and tries to start a conversation, but I’m saved by the approach of the trolley. The driver hands me a transfer with a smile. There aren’t any vacant single seats, so I take the best double: the one right behind the rear door. I settle in with my pack on my lap.

My name is Jill and I am a straight female, so I have an eating disorder. My problem is so common that when I succeed at overcoming it (no matter how temporarily), I get booted out of the club. You know the one I mean: it has no name; there’s a branch everywhere women gather; women gather everywhere.

It’s omnipresent and insidious. Researchers are just starting to notice how pre-adolescent girls police each other: none of that boyish violence – instead, the girls reform by sneer and rebuke by snub and, whether it’s innate compliance in the sex or the effectiveness of the facial gestures, girls succeed more than boys do at civilizing their group.

I joined in 1964 but I was prepped for years. I was apprenticed by my mother before I saw the sorting. Wise mistress, she showed me how to fix my physical flaws long before I understood I had any.

I knew not to wear horizontal stripes. To select a skirt length that would hide fat knees, a shoe that would make the foot look smaller. It’s not like I then had big legs or feet, but my mother was an instinctive geneticist and prognosticated body shape almost as well as eyesight (myopic) and hair (dark curly).

Lilah’s dad was in general wonderful. He wasn’t sexist like her mom; he encouraged her at various times to aspire to philosopher or doctor or scientist instead of secretary or nurse or elementary school teacher. But he like Jamie was a younger brother: an expert at baiting the ambient emotional females. He should have been sensitive to the fact that Lilah wouldn’t go bowling once she discovered the sizes were blazoned on the backs of the rented shoes. But no: he began to make comments about how she could go snowshoeing without the snowshoes.

His taunts made no sense to her. She had inherited her big feet from him! The whole family had sturdy pedal extremities; even her mother, the smallest mature foot among them, wore size 8½. It was the illogic of his statements that made Lilah react so strongly. But reaction of course was what the taunter sought; her father and Jamie and finally Sam kept making crazy infuriating statements about her big feet.

Fortunately, in Lilah’s opinion, Jamie had sons. He moved away from the rest of the family and only had his wife Laura to tease. Jamie and Laura raised their kids out of the country because Laura had a career State Department job.

On one of their early home visits, though, Laura shared some intimate details of their marriage. Laura tends to drink a lot, and she’s a small person (shoe size 6) so the Jack Daniels hits her hard enough to make her often tell more than Lilah wants to hear. She let it slip that one of her favorite foreplays was to have her toes sucked, forcing Lilah to envision Jamie performing that service (“TMI,” as Lilah’s daughter later taught her, when Cass was a teenager and her world was so full of three-letter acronyms that she even created the war cry “Down with TLAs!”). Too much information.

Lilah has looked back at her early childhood a lot over the years. She pretty much concluded that the early battle over foot odor must have been some anti-incest protection. After all, even with the sibling tussles she always found her brother Jamie to be an attractive, nice guy – certainly deserving of a better life partner than Laura made – and Jamie liked Lilah, too. She conjectured that the foot odor thing acted as some sort of barrier against them even fantasizing.

But recently Jamie and family came home on leave. They stayed at Sam’s and Beth’s house for the week; there’s more room there and the brothers were always close. After they left, Sam spoke about their visit. It went pretty well, he said, except that Laura ran through an amazing amount of sour mash whisky and presented a few snit-like problems after drinking. But Sam and everyone else in the family are used to that. Sam’s surprising complaint was about the evening time they all spent around his new projection TV set in the livingroom. “I couldn’t believe it, Li,” he said as they ate lunch in their favorite bistro. “Jamie and both of the boys kept taking their shoes off, and suddenly the room reeked! I couldn’t figure it out. It’s not like they don’t shower or wash their socks. But the odor was so bad my eyes watered! Beth’s too. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

Jamie started their sibling battle. For no reason that Lilah could ever determine, he snuck up behind her when he was two and she was five, and he bit her in the middle of her back. She was sitting on the red plush hassock at the time, engrossed in “The Howdie Doody Show” on the family’s big black-and-white console TV. She couldn’t even figure out how he sank his teeth into the concave part of her between her shoulder blades, but he bit hard and held on like a terrier; it really hurt.

Their squabbling started around then, and except for the times they became allies against elderly babysitters, they kept at it for the next decade. It was about a year later that Lilah got her first whiff of Jamie’s bare feet. He’d been running around outside in his shoes, and then he plopped down near her, newly barefoot, on the floor in front of the TV. “Oooh,” she squealed. “Stinky feet! Get away from me!” She wasn’t fooling. His small feet smelled like Kraft Parmesan cheese to her, and she was repulsed.

Jamie had excellent little brother skills. He learned early how to bait Lilah, and he carried his talents into his future, passively-aggressively taunting his sister, his mother, and finally his testy wife. He responded to Lilah’s complaint by alternately thrusting or sneaking his bare feet into her nasal environment and by accusing her of the same extreme malodor.

“Stinky feet! Stinky feet! Get your feet away from me!” It didn’t matter which of them said it or how far the accused feet were from the speaker’s nose. The livingroom was never big enough to separate them sufficiently, and the parental tolerance wasn’t big enough to ignore the battle. Jamie and Lilah were sent to their respective bedrooms more for the foot odor battle than any other argument, and only the passage of time, a lot of time, reduced the problem.

It went on for years. When Lilah was eight and Jamie was five and their baby brother Sam was just a few months old, the family moved from Long Island to southern California, and so did the foot odor argument. Suddenly they were surrounded by the bare feet of children. Everyone in the neighborhood ran around without shoes during the persistent warm weather, and most of the girls wore sandals to school. All of the fresh air must have dissipated the odor; the argument began to fade along with memories of snow holidays.

At first Lilah was shy about showing her feet. They looked pale to her even after weeks of exposure to sunlight, and her toes seemed longer than those of her new friends. She felt deformed, the way the fourth toe on her left foot turned under the third. But none of her friends commented; in time she began to relax about the subject. For a time.

But Lilah’s feet grew ahead of the rest of her. She’d be a taller-than-average adult, and her size 11 feet would eventually fit the rest of her frame, but her feet and nose grew before her legs and face in general; instead of becoming a coltish young teen, she thought of herself as a clown. Her father didn’t help.

Lilah liked being an only child, until she was three. She would have continued liking it, but her brother Jamie’s birth changed everything.

“A woman gets two great loves in her life,” her mother told her a decade later. “Her husband and her first-born son.” Lilah’s mother learned that from her own mom, but she only passed the wisdom on to Lilah because she found it to be true.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved Lilah. But she’d been the youngest of her family and she never babysat. Her own mother died during the pregnancy. The simple fact was that Lilah’s mother didn’t know what to do with her baby daughter.

At first they had a nurse around. For three weeks there was a rigid old woman in the apartment, insisting that Lilah be fed on a schedule, issuing instructions about formula preparation and bottle sterilization, plopping the baby into maternal arms by the clock and then snatching her back for burping or changing or bathing or sleeping, as the program dictated.

After the nurse left, Lilah’s mother tried to maintain the schedule. But she didn’t feel confident. About the only times she really enjoyed her baby were when she dressed her in one of the elaborate feminine outfits the rest of the family had presented to mark the birth. The baby wore at least three ensembles each day.

Lilah’s father was amazed and besotted by her, but he worked five or six days a week. He cuddled his infant daughter whenever he had a chance, he took the nighttime feedings upon himself, and he would even have changed her diaper, but daddies didn’t do that then.

It was so different when Jamie came along. By then the young family was out of the apartment and into their first house. Lilah’s mother was confident. She didn’t dump the baby into her husband’s arms as soon as he came home.

But it was more than that. Lilah’s mother’s heart melted when the doctor put Jamie in her arms. Love bloomed in her chest, flooded her torso like it never did with Lilah. Jamie was smaller, weaker, needier. And then there were his feet.

The doctors said Jamie needed orthopedic correction. His soft feet twisted slightly inward, and the experts said the pronation would not mend itself. They plastered him from his toes almost to his knees, weighted him like for a gangland drowning, and sent mother and boy home with extra care instructions.

Lilah’s mom would have hovered anyway, what with Jamie’s relatively low birth weight and tendency to bluish lips, but those white casts pulled her like anchors on a chain. Lilah loved her little brother but she wearied of being shooed away from the bassinet. She longed to be lifted again, but her mother seemed to have arms only for Jamie. It got to where she hated to be told she was a big girl. That may be why she started shitting in her closet. Her parents responded, on medical advice, by giving her an enema and then placing her on the potty to show her where it was done. It was a traumatic event for all three of them, so her parents never repeated the lesson but Lilah remembered the experience as multiple and bad.

In time their situation improved. Jamie’s casts came off and Lilah resumed the desired toileting. Jamie’s feet didn’t give him much trouble when he began walking, except he never had a sufficient arch and he always pronated a bit, and they didn’t bother Lilah again until he was three.