Sputterpub's Blog

Now Ray’s in school again. It seems to Sharon that he may be slipping back into something like his Tet Offensive or R.O.T.C. weirdness with talk like today’s. It’s happening more and more. She wonders if she should call her uncle. Ray and his father could be closer, but Uncle Ron was there 25 years ago, when it started before…

Sharon pulls her sweatpants off then to throw them into the washer and rediscovers Nancy’s barrette. She looks at its small picture again and starts for the wastebasket, but she deposits it instead in her jewelry box, even though it carries the fine grime of ten years under the doorframe. She has a sudden desire to see Nancy.

“You always were a witch,” Sharon addresses the idea of her stepdaughter. “Now I discover this artifact you planted here, and I’m forced to remember you, now, when I have so many other things to do. Witch.” She’s exaggerating, but the barrette is having a strong effect upon her, and she’s doing whatever she can to reduce that effect. She feels uncomfortable.

Sharon didn’t love Nancy. She met the baby girl expecting to love her, intending to, but it just didn’t happen. At the time she wondered if it could be jealousy; Pete’s only daughter would always have his love, something that Sharon as his second wife wanted assured to herself. Or maybe her coolness was some sort of maternal competition. Since Sharon loved her own child to distraction, how could she do other than (in her heart) disparage other babies as less perfect than Timmy? She has looked inside herself to the best of her ability, and she doesn’t think her problem with Nancy came from jealousy or competitiveness. The little girl just wasn’t very likeable.

Nancy was a colicky baby, a fussy toddler, and a tantrum-throwing tot. She was terrified of anything new, which made her less than fun to take places, and she was amazingly stubborn. They left her once sitting in the middle of a sidewalk, because she refused to walk any farther and demanded to be carried. They acted like they were deserting her and then hid behind the corner of a building to watch what she would do.  After 25 minutes, they gave up. Three-year-old Nancy never budged in that time.

She didn’t even cuddle correctly. She had a rounded high forehead and she liked to burrow with it into Sharon’s side. That would have been awkward but bearable if Sharon weren’t so ticklish, but as she was, the cuddle didn’t work. Every time Sharon tried to adjust her position Nancy objected, flailing with her plump hands and sometimes scratching Sharon until Sharon, ashamed to admit it, came to hate the sight of Nancy’s fat baby fingers.

And twice, Nancy shat in the bathtub. What was that about? She wasn’t sick either time, and even Dr. Spock says babies never move their bowels in the bath. It wasn’t the most unpleasant stuff Sharon ever had to clean up, but it remains in Sharon’s mind somehow emblematic of the Nancy times.

She hasn’t seen Nancy in ten years. Pete insisted on a clean break with the divorce, so Tim and Nancy were wrenched apart after being raised like part-time twins for the first seven years of their lives. For Tim that led to a lot of therapy; Sharon’s grateful that he’s better now. She has heard a little about Nancy, and it hasn’t been good. But today she found a hot pink artifact from child Nancy, and she has a powerful urge to see her or at least hear about her. She knows where Pete is. She could find Nancy. She doubts it would do any good.

Sharon pours in the laundry detergent, shuts the lid, and starts the washer. She glances across her patio as she crosses her kitchen and sees that Ray is still at his table, still in his book, still with his ideas. She may call Pete later. For now Sharon decides to call Uncle Ron.

“The revolution never stopped,” Ray speaks across her thoughts. “The media is us, the politicians are us; there isn’t a them out there to villainize any more.” Ray rises from the table, steps across the minute kitchen to his two-burner stove, and lifts the still-warm kettle to refill his cup. He offers hot water with his raised eyebrows, but Sharon shakes her head. She sits on the vinyl-bottomed chair across from his and rests her forearms on the cool surface of the small metal-edged table.

“Look,” he says as he sits again. “Jung said myth is to the collective unconsciousness what dream is to the individual unconsciousness. Once you posit a collective unconsciousness, you can go places with it! So if a child, say, can be so traumatized by some event that he carries a neurosis or compulsion throughout his life in response to it, well then why can’t a generation, especially one as self-conscious as the post-war baby boom, why can’t a generation be collectively traumatized into response?” Ray leans forward with intensity.

“The Vietnam conflict, among other things, was traumatic. But that betrayal of us, that killing us to protect so-called leaders in their incorrectness, that was the big trauma. What if our generation’s response was to tear down the customs that led to that protection?”

“I think I understand what you’re saying,” Sharon comments, “but what about all the complaints I’m hearing? how the media will print anything that will sell; or that Washington just ought to shut up about the President’s sex life and let him get on with the good job he’s doing – it sounds to me like our generation doesn’t like the stripping away of leader dignity any more than the last did.”

“The key word, my dear… the key word is unconsciousness.” Ray emphasizes his point with the index finger of the hand that is not holding his cup of hot water. His didactic tone annoys Sharon. She doubts that he uses it with his third-graders. She thinks he intends to use it on the college students of his future, if he ever manages to complete the doctorate necessary to have college students in his future.

“You definitely may have something, Ray. But right now I have to finish cleaning. Maybe you’ll join us for dinner?” Ray sits down with Tim and Sharon most evenings, but something about Sunday requires a specific invitation to him; he won’t drop by on his sabbath without one.

He accepts of course, and Sharon returns to her house. He’s still talking aloud as she crosses the small patio, but she knows from experience that she doesn’t have to pay attention. At the moment Ray is talking more to her than to himself, but he doesn’t require a response, and he’ll shift completely to himself within another minute.

Sharon puts the barrette in the pocket of her sweatpants as she resumes vacuuming, and she doesn’t think about Nancy again until she changes to jeans so she can add her sweats to the pre-dinner laundry.

While she vacuums and dusts, while she scours and sponges, she considers her cousin Ray. This is the second summer of his doctoral work, and he seems weirder than last year. She didn’t really know him back in the late 60s and early 70s when he was an undergrad, but she’s heard the family stories. Ray went crazy then. There was something about studying and maybe the times, but he became convinced that the Tet Offensive was the most significant event in modern history, he became obsessed with a fantasy of wrecking the R.O.T.C. building with a bazooka, and he just basically got things out of perspective. Since he didn’t have access to a bazooka no one worried about him; from what Sharon hears, folks found him amusing or tiresome then. But he flipped out right after he graduated, when his mother killed herself.

Ray’s mother, Aunt Emily, was an alcoholic suicide. So were her sister Esther eight years before her, and their father Willem 20 years earlier still. It was like Ray picked up the family curse as soon as his mother dropped it; within months of her death he was diagnosed as manic depressive with suicidal tendencies, and put on psychotropic drugs. He hated them. Eventually he got himself under control without the drugs but with Catholicism and rigid diet-and-exercise routines.

Sharon isn’t related to Ray on his mother’s side. Her mother and Ray’s father are siblings. There’s plenty of dysfunction in that family, as Sharon knows full well, but she’s grateful not to be related to Aunt Emily.

The catalyst for Ray’s epiphany is on page 70. “As a case in point,” wrote Peter Coyote in his autobiography, “consider Robert McNamara, sacrificing a generation of youth in Vietnam after concluding that the war was pointless, because he did not want to tarnish the dignity of the nation’s leaders by criticizing them.”

“Damn. I knew that and forgot it,” Ray says to the page. He sips his hot water and finds it lacking, but he recently gave up caffeinated beverages, and he has run out of herbal tea and lemons. It’s Sunday and he doesn’t want to use money, so Ray will make do. He’s accustomed to that.

“… I knew it when it happened and I was alive when he admitted it…” Ray continues to address the book. “But I never saw till now that we’ve been tarnishing their dignities ever since.” He stands up, pushing the metal-framed chair with the back of his legs. “Hey, Sharon,” he calls as he moves to the doorway of his cottage. “Hey, come here a minute.”

Sharon can’t hear him. She’s only about 15 feet away, across the paved patio and inside the back room of her house, windows open. But she’s running the vacuum. Her cousin Ray can hear the machine if he listens, but he’s not paying attention to anything except his thoughts right now. He’s not even aware yet that she hasn’t answered.

Sharon is pushing the do-everything attachment on the old canister machine she took from her grandparents’ home when it was sold. It was probably a good vacuum cleaner when it was new, but it is now pathetic. She has to run its bent bristles repeatedly over her rugs and floors, and even then a loose thread or feather can defeat the machine, successfully clutching the worn fibers of her cheap carpets against the weak pull. Sharon’s vacuum really doesn’t suck.

She has just finished raking the rug with the attachment and turns her attention to the painted flooring by the door to the patio when she spots something pink beneath the frame of the doorway. Hot, unnatural pink. She bends down and pulls at it with her right index fingernail. What emerges is a child’s barrette, one-piece plastic, pink with yellow, designed to hold hardly any hair. It is adorned with a picture of a fuzzy yellow chick pushing a barrow of what look to Sharon like Easter eggs, but she’s not sure, because the picture is only about two centimeters across, and the eggs or whatever are too small for Sharon’s 45 year-old eyes to examine.

That barrette may have been under the doorframe for decades, she tells herself, except the design isn’t that old. With compelling certainty she knows it came from the brown hair of her ex-stepdaughter, and she knows when. She turns off the vacuum with her foot. Her expression becomes pensive. Ray’s voice comes to her.

“Hey, Sharon…c’mere, will you?” She does.

Ray is two years older than Sharon, but lives and acts much younger. He’s 47 and still a starving student (of philosophy and religion). He spends the academic year in Boston, living a spare life off student loans, and he has taken to spending summers with Sharon, since she has taken to offering the cottage rent-free.

They didn’t grow up close; in fact, Sharon can only remember seeing Ray and his three sisters on two occasions when they were young: the death of each shared grandparent. Sharon’s inheritance from them was an old vacuum and a relationship with her cousin Ray.

As it happened, Sharon’s second divorce coincided with Ray’s arrival in Southern California ten years ago. He needed a place to live while working as a substitute third grade teacher, and she needed the bit of extra income his tenancy provided. She didn’t mind the idea of a daddy-aged male around for her son Tim either, but that was before she learned how un-daddy-like her cousin is.

“Hey, Shar…” Sharon interrupts Ray’s next summons by walking through his door. She holds the small barrette in her left hand.

“You know, Ray,” she starts, “if you really want to talk to me, you could get up and…” but he doesn’t let her finish; he rolls over the end of her sentence with “I can’t believe I’ve been so dense! Think about this: 25 years ago? when the assholes kept sending our guys to ‘Nam even though it was already a lost cause? you know? McNamara said they did that to protect the dignity of our so-called leaders. Well, look at what we’re doing now. Tearing into Clinton’s sex life. Pulling the covers off the congressmen, the judges, the mayors. In fact, we’ve been doing that ever since Watergate.” Ray’s red hair has faded to pink over the years, but his face still flushes with excitement.

“Hunh?” Sharon is distracted; she is still thinking about Nancy ten years ago. Her stepdaughter was seven then, two weeks away from ceasing to be her relative by operation of law. Pete brought Nancy by to see Sharon’s new house, and Nancy didn’t quite make it to the back patio before throwing up her breakfast. Pete and Sharon attributed Nancy’s illness to something she ate; only now does Sharon realize that the child’s body was wiser and more honest than the parents. For all the stress in Pete’s and Sharon’s marriage, it was a safer place than the home made by Nancy’s neurotic mother, it was the place where Nancy’s good friend and stepbrother Timmy lived, and it was splintering. Why not vomit? Sharon thinks Nancy lost the pink barrette on her hurried way to be sick.

Both John and Jen annoyed me. I felt impatient with each. But then I’m an impatient person. I think there may be a gene for patience/impatience. But since the trait doesn’t lead to social dysfunction, there’s no scientific grant money to find it, the way there are funds to find the “impulse gene.” I think it’s possible that the (im)patience gene influences our compatibility with others. I think we live at different rates, and we find our friends among our own velocity. Philosophers have spent too much thought on space and not enough on issues of time, duration, velocity. But that’s another monograph.

John and Jen annoyed me and intrigued me. Why did each persist with an insignificant issue, in the face of interlocutor disinterest?

First I tried to answer my own question. I thought John might be doing the Alzheimer’s-dance – he’s 66 and probably that much more concerned about any inability to remember little things. I’ve noticed that concern can produce quite a bit of tenacity about conversational recollection. But Jen couldn’t remember something she never knew – where Paul’s opera seats are – so I couldn’t make dementia issues explain both their behaviors. Could it be simple passive-aggressive stubbornness in response to my attempt to shut them up? Were they additional examples of what I often notice: people who appear to be conversing but who, for reasons of ADD or OCD or some spectral condition, are really just thinking out loud in my presence?

Then I tried to get an answer from another. I described the conversations to my business colleague. “So what do you think?” I asked Robin. “Why did they persist?”

She looked at me across her cluttered desk and announced, “They need to be right.”

***

Maybe. Probably all of the above. John and Jen each like to be authoritative. They’re fixers. They’re rationalists. They try to remember what eludes them. They probably resent my forcefulness.

But Robin’s words produced a resonance in me that I cannot ignore. I hear myself having an opinion on all subjects, and offering it without reservation or consideration. I see myself as a purveyor of unsolicited advice. I recognize myself as a dispenser of unwanted wisdom.

I now want to learn to stop asserting my knowledge or proclaiming my opinion. If I already know it I don’t need to say it.

I want to be quiet. Let some questions lie. Let some others answer. Unless asked. Until certain.

I will not attempt to stop opining within. I’d fail if I tried. I’ll be the Walter Mitty of righteous indignation. Around my soul as I live my days will float a fantastic field of strong, funny, indulgent, silent judgment.

I will learn to be less right.

That’s an affectation, and I hate affectation, but I think affectation has an effect (at which moment it becomes effectation). At least I admit it when I affect. One must be allowed to effectively affect, provided one owns it.

I state, “I want to learn to be wrong.” Here is what I mean:

Two days ago, I lunched with an old acquaintance in a good restaurant. It was John’s turn to buy, so he picked the place and made the reservation. After we were seated and had made our individual decisions about whether to hang our jackets on the old-fashioned wall-hooks or on the backs of our wooden chairs, he started one of those chef conversations.

“There’s a new chef here,” he said. “What’s his name?”John aimed his eyes upward without lifting his chin. “He used to work at that place in Sonoma; oh… what is it called?”

“It doesn’t matter, John.” I tried to knot that conversational thread. “This is San Francisco, there are a thousand great chefs, I don’t know their names so I can’t help you, and the name won’t mean anything to me. I expect we’ll eat good food.”

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Oh, you know who I mean…” he prompted as he looked at me shaking my head in disagreement. “He started that place…”

***

Later the same afternoon, I returned a telephone call from a business friend. Jen regularly attends opera, symphony and ballet performances. I don’t; at age 47, my friend Paul had just taken me to my first opera the weekend before. She asked me how I liked it.

I said, “The opera. Oh boy. I read the review beforehand and went into it understanding that the performance was not considered admirable. I agreed with that opinion. But what did I know? I didn’t realize that the director reworked all the chorus parts and transformed the production. I was amazed that Paul found it wonderful. He applauded with his arms out, hands clapping up and down. It reminded me of a trained seal. I was also reminded of the description of a Navajo sweat lodge ceremony: after I adjusted to the confinement of the narrow seat, the restriction of my legs and feet in small uncrossable space, the beading of sweat on my face (around my hairline, in the creases beneath my eyes and beside my nose), the moistness of my hands as I tried (so discreetly) to wipe that face, after I accepted all that and slowed down to where I could appreciate the six molecules of cool air convecting about me, I believe I achieved a minor trance state which enabled me to tolerate and partially enjoy the experience.”

“You were too warm?” Jen asked, unnecessarily I thought.

“Oh, yeah. Me and everyone else. Apparently the renovated opera house is already famous for abysmal ventilation (actually, an abyss is probably better ventilated).”

“Where were you sitting?”

“I don’t know what it’s called. Third row something, not down on the bottom.”

“Grand tier?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Balcony?”

“Jen. I don’t know. Paul has had season tickets for 20 years now. I think we can count on him to have done as well for himself as he could. They’re respectable seats.”

“Must be balcony.” There was no deflecting her.