Sputterpub's Blog

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.

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.