Sputterpub's Blog

Amy, Nancy, and Jill liked the liquor store the best. It was at the end of the string of shops, the farthest from the grocery store, and it was unexceptional except for two things: candy and the contest.

The grocery store had candy too, but not as big a penny selection. Only the liquor store had the Miss Reingold contest.

The election material was the ballot container was a cigar box. It stood on the counter next to the cash register. Its lid was permanently flipped open, displaying photos of the contestants. The six women pictured were luscious and near-nude; Amy and her friends were as fascinated by their suggestive beauty as they were by the illustrations in Amy’s father’s volume of Candide or by the pictures in Jill’s older brother’s hidden Playboy. They picked their favorites and several times tried to add their votes to the folded papers collecting in the box, but the store owner always fished theirs back out and told them they had to be grown up to buy the Reingold beer and they had to be able to buy the beer to vote.

In time Amy forgot about Nancy and Jill. They were never any closer than convenience, and Amy ended up moving away from Glen Cove shortly before her ninth birthday. But she never forgot the bright lips, shiny hairdos and ballooning boobs of the Miss Reingold contestants. She never forgot the song.

When she was grown Amy came to understand copyrights and advertising procedures, but at first she thought the tune was original for the beer. She had no idea then that the brewing company paid to use the music from “The Bridge On the River Kwai;” she just sang the words Reingold, the beer that’s extra dry so much her parents worried a little. She knew it so well that when a cereal company also paid for the song rights and slapped on the words Winners…warm up with Malt-O-Meal, she grew indignant and complained to her parents about infringement. That’s when they told her the music had originally been created to go with a movie about war; they even found the soundtrack and bought it and played it for Amy on the big phonograph in the livingroom.

When Amy was grown and reminisced about those times, she began to comprehend the shapes of the metaphors. She saw a suburban little girl, subliminally serenaded by a battle song which had been co-opted by a beer and a boxed cereal, respectively.

For Amy is grown now. She and her coworkers are mostly baby boomers so their trivia games concern the late 50s and early 60s. There’s always a lot of light and time, even after their 10 p.m. suppers; they often play. In recent weeks the recurring subjects have been sad, frightening, or really bad films.

Amy’s first scary movie was “The Blob.” Most of her friends got to see one of the Dracula movies at the Cove Theatre; her mother wouldn’t let her go. But what did Amy’s mother know about sci fi? So Amy saw “The Blob.”

It was a memorable experience. She sat between Jill and Nancy, their fingers stained and sticky with berry juice from the walk, their molars jammed with Sugar Babies. As the plot intensified she pressed her back against the plush theater seat, her eyes wide open and stuck on the screen. She wouldn’t have closed them for the world; she had to keep watching the oozing red goo, even while she wondered at her Dracula-experienced friends covering theirs and shrieking.

She took in the ending with deep satisfaction. Ever after she had a crush on Steve McQueen. The resolution reenforced her love of ice and snow and winter. Cold and clean.

When Amy was 13, four years after her family left Glen Cove for the west coast, she first read Rachel Carson. By the time she was 15 she was into conservation and aimed at a career in marine biology. She would have called herself an environmentalist if the term had existed.

But it wasn’t until she was grown, talking trivia with her coworkers after a long day of measuring sea ice, that she watched the movie with a seasoned brain. They always laughed when they played trivia, but recalling “The Blob” entertained them so much they ordered it and viewed it. So they were all up later than usual last night, and they were all sadder than usual, after.

Amy was three. She watched her parents pack up and then they followed the moving van to their new home. They drove there in the big silver Chrysler, and Amy clamored to stand in her usual place, between her parents on the big front seat, fixated by the vertically-grooved all-chrome dashboard with the artfully-concealed glove compartment that never held gloves. She nagged to stand there but she was put in the back seat with her new baby brother, stuck like a piece of stale candy in the corner farthest from the basket that held squirmy little Mark. Amy’s mother said Mark wasn’t the good sleeper Amy had been. But he had lots of black hair.

They moved to Glen Cove to their first real home. This time her parents purchased. It was a new house, three bedrooms and two baths, an all-electric kitchen and an attached garage, on a curving dead-end street of similar new houses. A year after they moved in, the pasture land behind their back yard was subdivided and developed into split-level homes, and Amy resented that. She envied the new residents for their stairs but scorned them for being latecomers, and not for years did she understand that her family and neighbors had encroached on the original farm worse but earlier than the split-level dwellers (and the farm owners had encroached on others who had trespassed on the commons of possibly indigenous people, and so on, as repetitive as a house of mirrors or the label with the picture of the pixie gazing at the bottle with the label with the picture of the pixie gazing at the bottle…)

Their house was near the bulb of the dead end. Going out, the street curved to the right and rose to an intersection. Then the road arrowed down to a thoroughfare, and if you turned left at the thoroughfare (or just before it and through a field of wild berries), there was a Bohacks grocery store and a row of shops. When Amy was older she would walk to that little shopping center, cutting with her friends past the old farmhouse that served as the family doctor’s office, plowing diagonally through the berry field among the scratchy gold twigs and the purplish fruit. But for the first few years Amy only approached those stores from the car, and their shapes reminded her of Mark’s favorite toy: a string of painted wooden wheeled duck-and-ducklings that he was supposed to pull behind him when he toddled, but that he liked to suck on while he sat, instead.

If the little mall had a name it didn’t lodge in Amy’s memory. Her family titled the hill instead; they called the steep street Bohacks Hill and every winter when the first snowfall stuck and that street was closed till plowing, Amy’s father would pull out their sled and they’d all walk to the intersection at the top of Bohacks Hill, where her mom would watch while the rest of the family triple-deckered down that bright white slope. The clean swish of the runners was a sound Amy would love for the rest of her life.

She was almost eight before she was allowed to walk to the shopping center without an adult. Even then she wasn’t permitted to make the trek alone, and her younger brother didn’t work as escort in part because her parents said he was too young, but mostly because Amy wouldn’t have him. Mark had commenced sibling hostilities three years earlier, and since then Amy only played with him when she had no one else, like when they were left with a sitter or on vacation.

She’d carry the memory of his first attack forever. She was five and he was two. She’d been sitting on the red velvet hassock in front of the TV set (the required six feet away from its radiance), watching “The Howdy Doody Show,” when from out of nowhere (motivation-wise), Mark bit her right in the middle of her back. She’s not even sure how his teeth got a grip on that place between her shoulder wings, but they did: he bit bright and fast and hard, like a bird. It hurt. It shocked.

Amy made friends with some girls on the other side of her back fence, and it was with them that she ambled to the store. She first met Nancy and Jill at school, then she noticed them on the walk home, and finally they spoke and entered each other’s houses, where Amy got to see close-up those half-flights of stairs to their livingrooms and kitchens. She thought they were fun. But she remembered her mother’s frequent complaint, when she or Mark were sick and their mom had to race around caring for them, that she needed roller skates to keep up with their demands, and Amy knew her mother could never handle it if their house had steps.

I walked down the hill to my place, where I intended to enjoy a half hour in my overstuffed armchair, with a heated herb-filled neck pillow around my nape, before the invasion of the wives.

That’s how I thought of my regular get-together with my sisters-in-law. They showed up at my place once a month for munch and gossip; sometimes we walked or saw a movie, but always we ate and we talked.

That’s not to say I don’t like and love my brothers’ wives. Clare and Lucy have been in my life since high school and my early twenties, respectively, and while I’m unlike them I don’t dislike them. They both have qualities of my mother. Only with blonde hair. And bigger breasts. But wifely like my mom. They all have attitudes that elude me and goals, perhaps, that I don’t share. But they seem to be mostly content in their marriages, and that’s something I never achieved.

Maybe there isn’t a rule book that everyone has a copy of but me. There seems, however, to be a quiz, and I keep answering incorrectly. “What would you say,” I asked Clare and Lucy over our pizza Provençal, “if your husband came to you with: ‘Honey, I know you love living here, but I’ve just had an exciting offer that could really move my stalled career. The problem is, we have to move for at least three years to Cleveland (or Flint or Duluth, or anywhere that sounds really unpalatable to you).’ What would you do?”

Clare looked at me with a grin around her mouthful of pizza while Lucy said, “I’d be packing my bags…” and as I asked “Really?” Clare began a vigorous nodding of her head.

I was surprised. I knew we were different, but my immediate response to my own question was the thought that long-distance relationships aren’t impossible, and that we’d have some great weekends when we saw each other. I’d definitely want my mate to follow his star. But no way was I leaving my house and job.

Their willingness to move seemed immediate and absolute. Even though relocation would end Clare’s local career and take Lucy away from her much beloved and ever-renovating house. And it wasn’t that they always chose for the good of my brothers; I’d seen too many examples of Clare and Lucy deciding what was best for the men, limiting what my brothers knew of their real opinions, manipulating Sam and Jake into fatherhood and executive careers like they guided them into certain slacks.

I didn’t get it, but even so and unknown to me then, Josie was doing exactly the same thing with her husband. She was maneuvering Freddie into a house while appearing submissive to his wishes. He said they couldn’t afford one yet, and she agreed, but she kept pointing out to him all the ways they could save money by owning instead of renting, and she always acted as if he had taught her the ways. Josie’s mother, like all our mothers, counseled her daughter to be loved a little more than she loved, lest she lose all control.

And yet, these men grew out of the boys we knew when we were kids. I couldn’t believe they were the enemy. I didn’t want that deal.

(I wonder how happy those marriages are? The women seem too conscious. The men have told me – my brothers anyway – that they have no regrets but if they had it to do over again they’d make other choices. They roll their eyes toward their marriages when they say that. Funny: I’d say I do have regrets, plenty of them, but I’m pretty sure I’d make the same choices all over again…)

Four years and seven months from now I’ll receive my first diagnosis of cancer. Finally we’ll learn the oblique source of my headaches and neck pain. Half a year later, I’ll have reached the Siberia of Stage IV.

Coincidentally, Josie will then have finished her training and distinguished herself as an oncology nurse. She’ll still be clueless about topography, duplicitous with Freddie, territorial about her house, and as passive/aggressive as the next woman.

But she’s going to be my sweet succor. Josie’s genius for nurture will improve my life and together, patient and nurse, we’ll lengthen it. I’ll have additional seasons lent to me, when I can walk in my favorite places. I’ll be amazed at the beauty of this planet, and I’ll marvel at Josie’s unawareness of it. Grateful, vain me: I probably won’t even recognize her.

I take the train in the morning and the bus at night. I’d take the bus both ways, but I leave too late for the last AM express, and the local is a long run. I prefer the bus. It’s cozier. I get to relate to the driver. I can check out the view. Just yesterday, I glanced up from my book and was astounded at the western sky.

I was sitting as usual on the starboard side of the bus, sideways over the rear wheels, so I faced west whenever we ran north. For the SF to Berkeley express, north is most of the route. As we were cruising along the highest part of the freeway interchange in the East Bay, I looked up and noticed that San Francisco was under a veritable wave of fog. Apparently behind and above the city, like a cresting shadow or a billowing shroud, a gray bank of fog reared beneath a blazing blue and gold sunset sky. The hills of the city hunkered in the grayness, with the BofA obelisk and the Transamerica pyramid poking up puny. But the top of the fog bank was edged in lit yellow, a thin blaze of incandescence like a rip against the high azure.

It was a rare sight, changing while I drank it in. I wanted to point at it like a child and stutter “Look look!” for the other passengers, but I didn’t follow that impulse. As swiftly as it rose came the understanding that “Look look!” would bring them little satisfaction and me none. They were two dozen and oblivious. Some reading, many napping, a few nodding to whatever came into the devices in their ears. A number on cell phones. I’d noticed three rings. I counted seven talkers. It annoyed me a little, because the conversations were distracting and yet insignificant. But I was also impatient; my neck hurt.

I didn’t see Josie. I wouldn’t have recognized her or approved of her if I had. She sat on my side of the bus, facing forward near the front. She talked quietly on her cell phone. I couldn’t hear her. Cindy held up the other end of their conversation, encouraging Josie to continue her classes. I didn’t know it then, but Josie was stretched rather thinly between the demands of husband and young children, her part-time job in Oakland, and her attempts to go to school at night. That’s why she was on the commuter bus, only unlike the rest of us, she was not going home.

I was. I got off the bus at my usual stop but instead of proceeding directly down the four blocks to my own I veered a bit north and approached my house from the other direction. That route took me past one of my favorite spots, a corner just a block above my place, but the intersection of some kind of magic. It always felt good right there, with the air circulating quietly, effervescing almost. Maybe it was spirits of some kind – perhaps the unassuming single family homes on that corner are built above some important graves – or maybe it was just fortunate topography. There was a little hill, with a view due west of the bay and the gateway to the ocean. And there was the fog wave, still poised above San Francisco like it was about to curl the sunset into a roiling tube of light and shadow, break upon the stepped buildings in a dark cascade, and then ebb the daylight away like undertow, pulled down and drawn west into the night.

I stood there on a quiet hill street in a residential neighborhood in a town of a hundred thousand looking on a city of a million, massaging the side of my neck with my fingers, feeling the air gentle, cool and slick against my cheeks, and I felt as if I were the only person then alive.

It lasted four minutes. In that time the setting sun changed the color of the high sky from turquoise streaked with yellow to pale striped with salmon to shading indigo, and the gray cloud transformed from a cresting frozen wave to a smoky down blanket. It seemed to tuck the city in for the night. I watched it entranced until an SUV driver pulled into a curb spot half a block down the hill and paused for some reason with headlights on. Amazing headlights: bright as day and piercing the dusk for three hundred feet. I’m sure it cost the driver little fuel, what with the engine on and all. I’m sure it blasted my reverie.

I’m indigenous to this continent, but I am not Native American. Unlike the wives, I pump the blood of neither Creek nor Sioux. I am a product of the distilled gene pool. I am a Jew.

But I was born in America, nourished on its produce, and I am more of here than anywhere. My favorite foods are new world natives: potato, tomato, avocado, blueberries, corn. All beans except fava. Chocolate.

I am at home here. I feel connected to the land.

The tropics are lovely, and vegetation is sweet, but that fertility mutes the conversation I want to hear. Only when I stand like a gnat on the floor of Death Valley, or sit by the redundant ocean, or crunch into a monotonous Alaskan path, do I begin to detect the dialogue between the planet and the universe.

We are lush in Northern California, but we quake. We reside at the sliding clash of two continental plates and the planet often shakes off our elaborations. We are rockbound and fissured. We edge the ocean but we are spared the music vacuum of the beach.

Or so it should be. But we clutter ourselves. We add bells and whistles and mirrors, features and feathers and automobiles, till we’ve gimmicked the visual and gummed the aural and we perform these crazy dances of disconnection, from each other and from place. Just last month:

I had almost completed my twenty-minute walk to the train station one morning, a little bothered by headache but otherwise feeling fit, when a driver pulled her car to the curb near me, to ask for directions. It was a big old car – a Chevy I think – with a weather-worn dullness to its mismatched paint and cellulite in its chrome bumpers. It had mushy shocks and it rocked toward me as it stopped.

“Excuse me: can you tell me how to get to College?”She looked Latina or Filipina. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, small-nosed, chubby-cheeked. She could be any age from thirty to forty-three.

“The street?” I asked, to distinguish it from the university. She nodded. “Oh (lord). Well, you have to get all the way to the other side of town… Let’s see: you need to turn around and go a couple of miles in the opposite direction, then head left up the hill for about half a mile…”

“So I turn up here and…?” She looked up at me with a beseeching smile and a creasing brow. I realized in that moment that she had absolutely no concept of topography. Wanted me to give her the number of streets and turns from Sacramento & Cedar to College Ave. I looked in her face and started again:

“No, no. It doesn’t matter what street. You have to turn around and go back the way you came for a ways, and then up toward those hills. See?” and I swung my right arm around and aimed behind me to where the coastal range climbs to the next county.

She wasn’t getting it. She leaned toward me and tried to look where I was pointing, but I’m sure the frame of the car window got in her way. Her world was asphalt and her controls were foot pedals. She didn’t perceive the hill-to-bay slope of the land. Meanwhile my light was green. My train doesn’t wait. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I have to go.”

(Of course it was more complicated than that. I felt bold, setting limits, but I also felt bad. She felt chagrined and then cheerfully defiant. “Fuck you very much,” she mumbled, polite in tone but under her breath, as she maneuvered her boat of a car around the corner and started, roughly, to follow my directions.

(Her name was Josie, and she was harried because she was stealing moments away from a work errand, desperately seeking a small store on College which sold her best friend’s favorite candy. Cindy was nauseated from chemotherapy, and only craved the caramels from there, and Josie was determined to purchase a quantity of the stuff for her. She didn’t have much time, though. She had to get back to her job in Oakland. She was agitated.

(It’s true she was clueless about topography, but she had other talents. She was a good friend to Cindy, a wonderful mother to her two small children, a successful wife. I didn’t accomplish anything by desisting in giving her help. Except I made my train.)