Sputterpub's Blog

They didn’t argue at lunch yesterday. Karen never got around to disagreeing with anything, and Alice restrained herself. In the 15 months since they’d seen one another Karen had acquired diagnoses of hypertension and diabetes, and Alice attempted to be gentle with her. She knew Karen was trying to be good. She was taking her meds and walking every day, her refrigerator now contained some food, and she had given up those Starbucks coffee shakes. Alice was a bit dismayed when Karen ordered eggs benedict instead of something like the portobello sandwich she selected, but she noted the side salad, and she watched her companion leave most of the fried potatoes on her plate.

She was trying not to argue, so Alice stayed away from work topics. She was trying not to harp on diet, so she focused on her own food. She began to wax loquaciously about her sandwich, the roll, bread in general. Alice never cooked much but when she did, she experimented with soups and bread. She understood bread.

“Talk about transubstantiation,” she said around her final bite of sandwich, “and I always think of bread. For that matter, I think about alchemy whenever I knead dough.” She swivelled in her seat a bit as she entered the subject.

“I mean, there I’ll be, with bread and water and a little yeast in the bowl, and as I put my hand in and begin working it all I can think of is that old flour-and-water paste we used to make. Yech. The smell takes me back to like first grade, gluing the paper around the kite frame. I remember reading in a biography of Clara Barton that they cooked the paste – to get the lumps out you know? – but we never did that . . .”

Alice might have noted Karen’s change in complexion but she was wrapped up in her own words. She continued: “It’s like the warmth of my hands is magic. Because the more I work that paste, the sooner it transforms to bread dough. From gunk to the staff of life. Now that’s what I call a miracle.”

Karen retched. She felt the gag and barely got out of her chair before her gorge rose. Luckily the bathroom was near their table. She made it inside before she lost her lunch.

Her regurgitation was clean but her soul was shaken. She sat on the small bench by that toilet for almost 10 minutes, trying to calm, trying to understand or banish the flashing images of helping Darren build that kite.

She was still confused and wobbly when she returned to the table, where Alice had settled the tab and was ready to leave. Karen preceded Alice out of the restaurant. Her shoulders were slumped and her pace was a shuffle. Alice attributed it all to the food.

Alice long ago chose to be self-determined instead of what her parents seemed to see. She decided that she knew at least as much about what was good for her as anyone else, and she was going to choose how she thought and what she did, regardless of the presence or views of the adults around her. This stance encouraged her to be stubborn, and she was interpreted as arrogant, a blowhard, an incipient asshole. But it also made her remember well, because she used her memories to make her choices.

Karen is her polar opposite. Her response to early trauma has been to block it out and her blockage is so complete, requires her to tamp down so much, that a side effect is a severe reduction in all remembering.

Okay, that’s all true but hardly fair. For there’s no comparing the quality of trauma that befell those two. Alice was angry about her parents’ attempts to control her. Karen had been thrust out of the nest at age 12, sent to a boarding school, and rarely visited.

Her exile began right after the accidental death of her brother, and although no one ever said so, Karen thought it was due to that tragedy. She knew what had happened – she’d been there when Darren was struck by the lightning conducted down his kite string – but all she can remember about that time is a series of periods of consciousness that battered and stunned her (death, horror, grief, the funeral, packing, the long drive, seeing school for the first time), and from before the accident she remembers practically nothing.

Karen understands that she could recover her memories in therapy or under hypnosis, but she would rather have her astrology chart read than her psyche, and she distrusts hypnosis as she distrusts all science. She wouldn’t do it even if you called it mesmerism.

She says she’s not interested. She disdains investigation, and she believes she should conduct her business with caution and protocols, while Alice wants to figure out short cuts. Karen doesn’t want to hear about Alice’s time-saving ideas, let alone her reflections on science and philosophy. But Alice can be pushy.

One of their last conversations, for example, was about natural selection. It was two years ago and they were walking at the time, which was bad and good. It was irritating to both because Alice liked to walk faster than Karen and led them with her left shoulder like she was an eager dog with Karen at the end of an invisible leash, while Karen tended to slow her already almost-shuffling gait in response to Alice’s nervous pull. But it was also good that they were walking, because if they hadn’t been outside they would have been in some restaurant, where Alice could grow impassioned and talk louder than she intended, and Karen would either be cackle-giggling her agreement or yelling her objections with curse-laden speech.

Alice had been reading Diamond and Sapolsky, so she was immersed in how evolution works. She was excited at the time and wanted to talk about it not so much for Karen’s benefit as to nail down some ideas for herself.

So she narrated her understanding of how we came to like the taste of fruit.

“Picture it,” she lectured, “long ago and far away . . . before language even . . . our ancestors are out there foraging around for food. Some like the taste of wisteria blossoms or eucalyptus nuts, which are poisonous, and some like the ambient blackberries, which are made of vitamins and minerals and anti-oxidants and undoubtedly more good things than we have yet detected. It’s pretty easy for me to imagine that scene. And to see the wisteria-eaters not thriving, not living to maturity, not reproducing. Over time, most children would be born with taste buds that like fruits, because that’s what their parents had, which is proven by the fact that their parents survived to produce them!”

Karen was quiet for almost a minute. Alice interpreted those silences, like she interpreted Karen’s custom of eating food too slowly, as some sort of passive-aggressive affectation, but Karen would have disagreed with that. In fact, she was growing milder and weary of arguing with Alice. She was trying to think about history and people in a way that could use Alice’s words. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It doesn’t seem that way to me. I just like the taste of fruit.”

(to be concluded tomorrow)