Sputterpub's Blog

“It’s worked for me.” She startled at my voice. “Working I mean. The first half year I was married to Matt I didn’t have a job. Took to staying home and indulging in unhealthy habits. It got to where I wouldn’t even venture to the little corner store for cigarettes, because that meant talking to the clerk. I got totally nauseated one afternoon, trying to smoke Borkum Riff pipe tobacco in a hand-rolled cigarette. I hate vomiting. That experience made me answer the clerk/typist ad that led to the job that led to the career that – let’s face it – has sustained me almost every way since. So no: I’d say working is good for me.”

Joy hummed a response that could have been realization, resistance, or both: “hummh!” with her lips closed, exhaling like a snort through her nose. “I don’t know,” she articulated. “I wish we could go back to how it was in the beginning. Full of future. Nowadays I don’t even want to have sex with him.” That’s how I figured out she was speaking about her marriage to Matt in particular and not about life in general. Her comment struck me, of course. One thing I thought Matt had always been good at, even when he got dull about each day, was sex. And I remembered him baiting me when he first got together with Joy, making comments about how great it was to be with someone who enjoyed it and knew how to use her teeth.

We were interrupted by the sound of Matt’s Birkenstocks on the stairs. Our son and daughter clumped after him, apparently not eager for this dinner out.

(They find Joy a drag. They’re willing to sit through grace and they try not to interrupt her boring stories, but they don’t want to call her “ma’am.”)

Matt stood at Joy’s shoulder, a shorter fatter bitter version of his younger self. His height was reduced by the back surgery but the Buddha belly has been his own accomplishment. (Our kids take after him and remind me of the man I used to love, but he doesn’t.)

He looked old and tired and tense. Joy looked resigned and unhappy. At least the kids appeared young and fresh. They left and I flipped on the porch light in their wake.

I smiled with a little satisfaction as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and study. I had a couple of hours to myself and I intended to indulge my passion for home, comfort, and coziness. (Left alone, home is where I’d always be. Cozy’s how I’d always feel. Left to my own inclinations, I would sink back into the eiderdown comfort and suffocate in feathers and my own CO2. But for two hours it’s safe. Home as respite must be okay.)

I smiled too as I recalled an encounter that morning. I was four blocks away from home, almost to the train station, when I passed a neighbor whom I don’t know. He’s a rather homely man, crane-thin, long-nosed and forward-leaning, who lives three houses from my far corner, on this side, and I pass him sometimes on the sidewalk of our block. We’re both reserved. We sometimes smile. We never speak. But this morning, finding each other a full four blocks away from our normal turf, we each exhibited a little delight, a little glee of recognition, and we naturally spoke.

“Hi.

“Good morning.”

It never would have happened that way, if I hadn’t left my house.

She said, “People ought to be careful what they call their kids. I’m just now starting to learn how damaged I was by my nickname.”

(Joy. She’s called Joy.)

“I kept trying to live up to it. Always had to be the happy one. It was the role assigned by my family.”

“How’d you get the nickname?” I asked as much to divert the flow of her ranting conversation as to get the answer. But it did seem strange that someone with the full name Jody would have a nickname. Almost as senseless as Jack for John.

“My baby brother had trouble with Jody. Made one syllable out of it. They tell me it sounded like ‘Joy.’ My folks went along with it.”

(I would rather have been alone right then, in my cozy study at work on some problem from the office or puzzle on the Internet. But what could I do? The woman sat at my dining room table, talking depressed. Her husband, my ex, was upstairs dealing with our shared son, and I couldn’t see a way to escape her company.

(In the one picture I’ve seen of Joy young, she looked typically pretty to me, but the small features and large breasts haven’t aged well. Of course she could recapture some of that streaky blonde cuteness with cosmetics, hair color, and a good bra, but Joy doesn’t seem to be into style. Most folks assume she’s gay. She always wears loose trousers and shapeless tee shirts. Her hair is dull uncombed. Her breasts swing like water balloons. She moves from the shoulders when she walks, and her Georgia drawl sounds redneck.

(A week ago my son told me he hates Joy’s body. I thought that was a provocative statement from a 16 year old, so I stopped what I was doing and asked him what he meant.

(“She’s never like this: open and happy” he demonstrated, pulling his chest upward and swinging his arms wide apart so he filled a corner of the kitchen. “She always slumps,” and he collapsed his arms inward, inverted his chest, and closed himself around his torso.)

That recollection made me pay attention to Joy’s present posture: arms crossed above her breasts, right leg twisted around the left, face drooping, eye almost twitching. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like shaking her out of it, except I didn’t want to touch her.

She spoke again. “You seem to be all right: living single,” and she looked at me, clearly waiting for a response.

“I’m pretty happy,” I acknowledged. “But then I don’t get much chance to be lonely, with the kids and all.” That was my attempt at self-deprecation; I really didn’t want to take off on how glad I was when the kids were with them, how relieved after nearly two decades to have a bed and bedroom of my own.

(Maybe if I stopped working so hard and smoking so much pot I would feel lonely, like I do in a hotel room when I force myself to vacation, alone in bed without my homey comforts. But here, now, with my stuff, home alone is like heaven.)

“Yeah, I was okay too, as long as the kids were around. But after my daughter left I started to sink. It might not’ve happened if I’d been working at the time – you know how a job can keep you together – but Bill was still paying alimony then, and I was staying in my house way too much. Smoking pot and tobacco and watching daytime TV.” She paused and twitched around so I knew she wanted a cigarette then, but no way was I going to allow that inside, and she didn’t want to go out (Joy avoids light like a vampire when she is depressed).

“Then I took to going to bars to try to meet guys,” she resumed. “That’s where I saw Matt. Under the circumstances, he was an amazing find.”

(Matt’s okay. Bright, not deformed, able to earn a living. But my ex-husband is fundamentally pessimistic, insecure, and boring. That’s why I didn’t keep him.)

“So we got married,” and she looked directly at me again. I remember Matt was so desperate that he would have proposed to any of many. Joy accepted. “And for awhile, life was great. Moving ‘cross country, being newlyweds, accumulating stuff together. I got a good job at the hospital. Maybe I should’ve kept that.”

“I’m sick,” Hannah says by way of explaining her presence and her appearance, “and I’m supposed to be reading board resolutions.”

Buck doesn’t hear her correctly. That’s because one of the local walkers is passing by, and that has started the neighbor’s dog barking. Buck hears “board” and “resolutions,” and responds with: “Yeah, it can get pretty boring. This time of year puts pressure on everyone. I for one have given up on the New Year’s resolutions.”

Hannah immediately comprehends their misunderstanding. “No, silly,” she says, smiling so widely her sinus hurts. “I said ‘board resolutions.’ You know: legal shit. ‘WHEREAS blah blah blah, NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED…’  a bunch of prepositions, signifying nothing.”

Buck doesn’t miss a beat. “And I mean it about giving up on New Year’s resolutions. I mean: what’s that about? What will possess someone to make a behavioral change right in the heart of winter? And have it take effect right in the middle of a night?

“Say I decide to drink less, or stop smoking…” he continues, while he rakes the wet bay leaves from the side of the driveway. “Do I suddenly stop drinking or smoking right at the stroke of midnight? That’s when the party starts! So why make a resolution to immediately break it?” He uses the bent fingers of the rake to scoop the leaves around the bases of the driveway plants. “Even so,” he concludes, “I’m going to get out and about more next year. Maybe meet somebody.”

“Sounds like a resolution to me,” Hannah comments. “It is arbitrary. My fact-a-day calendar says Julius Caesar switched the beginning of the year to January 1^st in 45 B.C.E. But it doesn’t say why. And it tells us the British (and colonies) didn’t switch to January 1^st until 1752 (which must have been a discombobulating experience). But I know someone for whom New Year’s resolutions work. I live with him. It’s rather obnoxious, but James seems able to resolve something this time of year, and then stick with it. He quit smoking one New Year’s eve. At midnight. He made the decision to leave teaching and study law on a December 31. I’m a little concerned right now, because he’s been acting strange lately. He may be getting set to make another of his resolutions.”

“Maybe January 1^st works for James, and another day for me. Like maybe my resolution day is February 20^th or something. Maybe I just have to discover it.” Buck is moving with his cuttings net to the back yard.

Hannah goes with that idea. Grinning, she says “I tend to make my life-changing decisions in the fall. I always thought it was rather Judaic of me, near the high holy days and all, but maybe I just have a late September resolution day and never noticed it till now. In fact,” she warms to the idea, “maybe I can have more than one resolution day per year, if I live at different elevations…say, September 21^st at sea level and May 12^th at 7,000 feet or above.” She follows Buck to the back yard, considering coffee.

“What do you mean: James is acting strange…How so?”

Hannah tries to lift her fever-limp hair away from her nape, but it settles back into the collar of her sweatshirt. “Oh, he’s different. More indignant about work but less so about home. He’s been tender and affectionate lately. He took care of me when I was sick. There have even been some erotic moments, and after the recent kidney stone and a few other events, it had been awhile.” Hannah calls the image of James’s face to mind. There is the graying but yet enough hair, the brown eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the biggish nose, the average mouth, the well-trimmed beard. There are the arms of those spectacles too tight against his face, carving grooves above his cheeks and ears, inviting one to notice the distortion through his lenses, irritating Hannah. But there too is a rare determination in those eyes, deepening and warming them to chocolate. There is a decision about that mouth that invites Hannah to kiss it.

Buck has paused in his bamboo trimming. He is looking at Hannah and now says, “You go, girlfriend. I think you have something here. It makes me even more ready to get myself out into the world.”

“I think I want some coffee.  You?”

Buck accepts with a nod. Hannah walks from the back deck through the sliding door into the kitchen. She grinds Royal Celebes Kalossi beans and puts them into the brewer. While the heated water drips through the coffee, she goes to the bedroom for her socks. She pushes aside the corporate resolutions to sit on the edge of the bed.

Hannah is an anti-traditionalist. This goes hand in hand with her position on history, as observance of tradition is just blind history worship. She marvels at how quickly tradition can be established; Kwanzaa was invented just decades ago, and now it is widely celebrated where she lives. “Family traditions” can be laid down in a matter of three years.

Hannah would normally be derisive about New Year’s resolutions. She’d say something droll, likening the emptiness of personal resolutions to those of corporations.

But Hannah isn’t normal right now. She’s coming off a benign illness and living with a man acting strangely. In Hannah’s interesting state, the arbitrariness of the New Year observance seems enchanting. Why not a day in the middle of the winter? Why not an hour in the middle of the night? How delightful to make tradition out of a ceremony that contains absolutely no symbolism.

Hannah heads back to the kitchen for her coffee. As she pours out mugs for herself and Buck, it occurs to her that a New Year’s resolution can be a promise. She gets interested in her life.

Hannah is an anti-historian. That started when she couldn’t master history in school; she who aced elementary and junior high classes without doing any homework couldn’t pull a B on a history quiz. She read and reread fiction at the rate of four to six books a week, but she couldn’t get through a page of history text. She had an astounding memory for details, with a special knack for numbers like phone, license plate and Social Security, but she couldn’t remember when Watterloo happened, or the date the Constitution was signed.  She just didn’t “get” history.

So she went around it. She did the minimum necessary to complete required courses, and avoided the field whenever she had a choice. She found that avoidance didn’t limit her. She had a fine life without a history aptitude. Over time, Hannah embraced the conclusion that history wasn’t important. If it were, she reasoned, then she would feel the lack of it in her own life; since she felt no lack, there must be no lack.

She found an analogy to support that conclusion. Her own history had been so happy that she remembered its unhappiness. She had been such a sun-and-moon to her first-generation New York Jewish parents that she remembers feeling irritated about their restrictions on her privacy and power. Hannah maintains that childhood is a hideous and barbaric experience and isn’t surprised that no one outgrows it. By contrast, her friends came from such dysfunctional backgrounds that they all romanticized or anesthetized their childhoods. James, for example, with his phenomenal memory for minutia, can’t recall details about his youth. Or Nora, her oldest friend, now tells stories about her early Christmases that Hannah, who was there, knows to be embellished to the point of fabrication.

Hannah figures that personal histories are just microcosmic cultural histories. And she knows that her fellows aren’t remembering their personal histories with accuracy. She analogizes that cultural history isn’t accurate either. She doesn’t disagree that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Instead, she thinks we’re all doomed to repeat it because we can’t learn it, at least not the way it’s taught.

“The optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds,” Hannah recollects as she slides out of her warm bed, “and the pessimist fears he’s correct,” as she shuffles toward the bathroom. “But they both miss the point.” She continues her musing as she uses the toilet and brushes her teeth. “It’s like they assume every turn our culture has made has been the right one. The turn just has to work well enough – it isn’t necessarily the best turn…” She puts her head forward to wash her face, but the sudden pressure in her left sinus cavity causes her to stand straight again. “O-o-o-o-h,” she moans involuntarily. She cups her left cheek in her hand and watches her movement in the mirror. The fever and chills of the last three days have subsided, but the cough persists, the congestion comes and goes, and now she has this sinus pain. She looks at her own pale face in the mirror. Her 49-year old skin is more papery than normal and her shoulder-length auburn waves, usually the pride of her modest looks, hang in limp sweaty snarls against her skull. She takes 400 mg of ibuprofen. Then she takes herself and her misanthropy back to bed.

She props her pillows against the headboard and tries to read. But it’s nearly 9 a.m. and except for the soon-to-subside sinus pain, she feels fairly well. She thinks she’ll get up. She spent most of the last three days in bed. She was feverish enough then to want to drowse there, between down pillows and down comforter, gowned, robed, and socked, with the bedroom TV tuned to the History Channel or the Discovery station. She was ill enough to appreciate James’s experiments in tenderness. She was able to accept her illness with some grace, because late December is the least busy time in the calendar of a civil litigator. She has a trial starting the second week of January, and she wants to work on preparations for it, but there isn’t a better time to stay home. She looks again at the papers she has to review: five years’ worth of corporate minutes and board resolutions that apparently no one ever read before, or the disputants wouldn’t be litigating about issues on which the record says they had always enjoyed unanimity. She looks again at that universal font, toner-printed and photocopied on twenty pound rag bond, embellished with all-cap paragraph openers and embroidered with compound prepositions, and she sets the papers aside. They’re history. They’re inaccurate. They bore her. No sooner does she decide to take a shower, before she has even removed the comforter from her lap, than the cats dart from the bed toward the front door, signaling Buck’s arrival. Hannah would rather talk to Buck than stand in the shower, so she pulls on her sweats and moccasins, and heads for the yard.

“Well hello,” Buck greets her with some surprise. “And who ran you over?” Buck usually makes his weekly gardening stop at around 7 a.m., but the Christmas/New Year holidays have thrown his schedule off. He’s crowding several clients together so he can take some long weekends, and he’s arriving at Hannah’s and James’s place two hours later than usual. He didn’t think she would be there.

“Hi, Starbuck,” Hannah says with a sleepy grin. Buck’s real name is Jay, but he picked up the nickname Starbuck in college, and it was shortened to Buck years ago. He doesn’t much like Starbuck now, because hearing it folks assume he’s named for the Seattle coffee magnates. It’s true Buck loves coffee, but he prefers Peets over Starbucks, and Royal over Peets. His nickname comes from his favorite character in his favorite book. Buck doesn’t look or act like an intellectual, but he reads Moby Dick at least once a year. He also rereads the works of Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner. He says he likes a book he has to pay attention to; it makes him block out the bleak realities of his life.

Buck also doesn’t look or act gay, but he is. He’s an unkempt, unfastidious, husbandly gay man, who continually surprises Hannah with his attraction to rednecks, his fantasies about big white convicts, his bottoming desires. He’s a remarkable contrast to James, who won’t dirty his fingernails in their garden, can’t repair a home appliance to save his life, balks at tending the fireplace or barbecue, wears close-fitting particular clothes, enunciates with finicky precision, and (at least lately) is quite vigorously heterosexual.