Sputterpub's Blog

“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.

At first she was irritated. Then irked. She tried to modulate her negativity, but Monica grew waspish. Simon responded with anxiety and tripled his efforts to please her. He began guessing at what she desired and conforming his own choices to what he imagined were hers.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” she’d ask him after they both returned home from their jobs. They were free adults; they could dine out, cook at home, shop and picnic, whatever.

“I don’t know,” Simon would voice while looking into her face. “Ummm,” as his brows drew together. “Italian?” He inflected the end of his answer into a question. His demeanor declared that he was ready to change his response to whatever matched hers.

Monica knew it would be as crazy to complain about her handsome husband’s devotion as about her other privileges. Which made her even more irritable. Then her irritability triggered more guessing from Simon. “For you to be happy” was his invariable answer to her any question about what he wanted from life. And as Simon kept insisting, what they had seemed to be as good or better than other couples. “Look around,” he said to her. “What more do you want?”

After it was over, she concluded it shouldn’t have gone on as long as it had. Then she could see how they diverted their energies into real estate purchases, and building, instead of working on (or dismantling) their union. With hindsight it was clear to Monica that her on-and-off affair with their realtor Max was never going to go anywhere (he was great fun but they shared no values) and distracted her from evaluating what was happening at home. And Monica realized when she had to arrange her abortion, that she clearly didn’t want to have a baby with Simon, but it wasn’t till after they split up that she understood her aversion to having a baby with anyone. Monica loved her parents but had no desire to be one herself.

At her last lunch with Simon, after the divorce but soon enough that it was in the nature of a debriefing, he voiced his only complaint about her. His girlfriend Debra had him attending a Unitarian church. Debra was Jewish and characterized herself as “open;” she was comfortable in that environment. Monica had been raised in a mixed-culture home; her parents observed Chanukah for her dad and Christmas in keeping with her mother’s traditions. Monica always preferred Christmas even though she sided with her father about most things. She liked the drama, the abundance and the tree, but mostly she liked Christmas because it wasn’t the only rhyme for her name.

“I can’t believe you never told me,” Simon said to her over that restaurant table.

“Told you what?”

“It blows me away. We were together all that time, and you never told me the true story of Chanukah.”

Monica is older now. She has acquired perspective with experience. She has a fair understanding of the Simon years. But she still sputters when she recalls that complaint.

She didn’t complain about her loneliness, then or later. Monica knew it would be like bitching about the obligations of wealth; she wasn’t going to get sympathy and she wouldn’t feel admirable. But she noticed. For a few years she even longed to have a weight problem, so she could gain admittance to the unacknowledged sorority of dieters. She kept reading and writing and thinking, and in college she met Charlie.

He was tall enough, good looking enough, smart enough, and very complicated. Monica admired his way with words, written and spoken, so much that she concluded she was in love with him. She also concluded that they would be life partners, even if it meant starving together in a garret somewhere, except Charlie flipped out at 21 and flipped into mental illness, and Monica wasn’t romantic enough to get past that. In fact, she turned away from Charlie so completely that she allowed herself to be recruited into a sales job she would have laughed at just months before, where she succeeded so well she didn’t leave.

It was just a season after that personal veer that she met Simon, whose clattering white horse (okay, it was a black Camry) and dazzling white teeth (the truth) must have deafened her sound sense and blinded her right vision. At least, that’s how she liked to sum up their story afterward.

They met, they dated, and they soon married. Monica’s parents expressed skepticism when she raved about how perfect Simon was for her. Even though their own engagement was only three weeks long they urged their daughter to give it some time. But Monica was set to marry. For the first time in her life she felt normal, and she couldn’t get enough of it, right then.

Monica has wondered since about the affect marriage has on a couple. She’s known of several relationships that were working just fine for as long as ten years, only to fall apart within months of tying the knot. She always thought there had to be more to those stories, until it happened to her.

Simon changed. He’d been fun, impulsive, sexy, even heroic at times, at first. And at first is when Monica said yes. Back then, when Simon said he loved her it seemed to mean something. No sooner were they married than his declarations became more like daily affirmations; every time Monica turned around her husband was enunciating those three little words or miming a kiss.

She felt stifled. It wasn’t that Simon rained on any parade or sought to change her. But his love and devotion became so prominent and public that she felt she had to regard it, too often. She started to notice that when they were in company Simon invariably looked at her when he talked, even though he was saying things that had already been spoken between them. She had to pay him attention when courtesy and interest invited her to attend to others, and she incurred a mixture of resentment and boredom about him that was hard for her to ignore. And got harder.