Sputterpub's Blog

Karen had lost a little weight and a little hair in the year and a quarter but otherwise the women appeared unchanged. They’re both about five foot six, but Karen has smaller bones (size 7 shoe compared to Alice’s 11) and carries about 30 more pounds. She always wears pants, always dresses modestly, walks and sits like a highway patrol officer, and spends more than it appears on her hair. It’s naturally quite wavy but almost nobody knows that. She has it colored and cut every three weeks, and pulls it straight with her blow dryer every morning. She looks like a gentle dyke and identifies herself as homosexual, but she’s usually unmated.

She didn’t go to college, and like the few others Alice has met, Karen talks about what she missed like it would have prevented her problems. If only she’d gone to college she would be (choose one): more authoritative, effective, confident. Alice knows that if you get nothing else from a post-high school course in the humanities, it’s the understanding that going-to-college doesn’t fix much.

The way Alice experienced it, life at the university didn’t make the paranoid less edgy, the obsessive less compulsive, the embarrassed less shy. It wasn’t any kind of magic feather – you flew or crashed even while at college – but that’s where Alice stopped looking outside herself for confidence. That’s where she saw that she had been rueful, when she reviewed her junior high behavior from the vantage point of high school and concluded that she’d been too hesitant. And that’s where she found herself replaying high school escapades and regretting, from her college perspective, that she’d held back as much as she had. So she developed her theory of prospective guilt. From then on she made decisions today based on how she imagined she’d feel about herself for it tomorrow.

Alice’s observations and theories are based on her memories. She has the ability to recall accurately, and this may be the biggest difference between her and Karen.

Someone once commented that Alice’s childhood must have been happy enough that she could afford to remember it correctly. Alice thought that was a profound observation, and she felt gratified at the same time that she disagreed. Because while she’d be the first to assert that she knew her parents loved her, she’d also be one of the most eloquent in describing a childhood that was boring, frustrating, and infuriating. Her privacy had been regularly invaded, and the incompatibilities between her and her mother led her mom to summarize and marginalize her. “Alice may be smart but she has no common sense” or “That Alice, with her hippie ideas and her Beatles . . .” when the facts were, Alice was just about the most sensible person you could find, she related to beatniks but never to hippies, and back in the formative 60s she liked the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones.

(continued next Wednesday)

For a girl, Alice was good at science and math. That’s what all her teachers said. But most teachers are morons, and the late 1950s and early 60s were unenlightened years, when pop culture was mired in post-war romance. The fact is, Alice was good at science and math for a boy, too.

She had a quick mind and a linear brain. She was enamored of causality. She loved a good theory. It surprised her family and her teachers when she selected English as her college major, marijuana as her personal medicine, and business as her career.

But none of those choices, except the pot, changed the way her brain worked, and the weed only altered it slightly and short-term. She had a tenacious memory, she loved to learn, and her best teacher was herself.

Herself didn’t teach Alice science and math. Some of that came from her father, some came from a few good men (teachers), and some came from books. Most of her reading was fiction (unless classical mythology can be called something else), but a few items of scientific knowledge captivated her, so she looked at them closely and committed them to memory.

To this day (and Alice is now nearly 60) she can describe DNA, RNA, and something of how proteins are constructed. But the miracle she loves most of all is photosynthesis. She could probably work up the exact formula on a napkin right now, but exactness doesn’t matter except to a plant. Alice knows that sunlight elevates adenosine di-phosphate into adenosine tri-phosphate, and she understands that when ATP steps back down to ADP it provides the energy to turn the carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and oxygen in CO₂ and H₂O into sugar and what we breathe.

Thanks to plants, she says. And although she knows what she’s discussing is chemistry, it seems better than alchemy to her. Who needs to turn lead into gold? How much more wonderful is it to turn exhalations plus water into food and air?

For friends, Alice and Karen make an odd pair. They’re both in the retirement plan recordkeeping business, and they heard of one another for years before actually meeting. By then they had so many historical anecdotes and consulting esoterica to share that they began to take walks, have meals, and even plan trips to continuing education conferences. But they’re different enough that their strong feelings may actually be dislike; each finds the other so irritating that they have let their relationship pulse on and off as if it were sexual.

One of Alice’s colleagues likens the friendship to a toothache; she says that Alice keeps coming back to it like a tongue returns to a bad molar. And when Alice doesn’t, Karen does. So after a hiatus of nearly 15 months, Alice and Karen met for lunch yesterday.

(continued tomorrow)

If Ollie was interested before that lunch, she was smitten after. They parted at 1 p.m. with a pair of reciprocal smiles and flirtatious looks, but neither suggested anything then. Blake was gratified and not completely surprised when Olivia stopped on her way home. After a few comments, he collected his stuff and accompanied her.

She was a little embarrassed on the train with him. She could see their reflections in the curved plexiglass windows as they stood side by side with one hand each on the overhead railing. He looked so obviously…”street” was the only kind word for it. She saw commuters watch them converse; she had to shrug off her self-consciousness. She was glad to detrain and reach the privacy of the evening neighborhoods.

As soon as they got to her place she showed him the bathroom. “You have to get clean,” she said. She gave him a thick towel, pointed out the soap and shampoo. She brought him a robe that would fit him well enough. She took the clothes he was wearing and everything in his pack, and told him she’d wash them as soon as he was done using the water. She heated up soup and bread.

She was in sweats by the time he joined her. The soup was bubbling and the bread was warm. She turned off the stove and oven and was about to open a bottle of white wine when Blake walked to her, pink-tan and slightly damp, and took her firmly in his arms. His long hair was towel-dried and plastered a bit against his right cheek. His face lowered to hers and he gently took her lips into his mouth. He said “Ollie.”

She stiffened and melted at the same time.

Food cooled. Wine went unopened.

It wasn’t like her, to have sex so soon. “Not like Olivia, maybe,” said Blake with a post-coital smile, “but you’re Ollie. And I’m Blake. Hey: don’t get me wrong. I’ve never done anything like this before either.” He turned on the burner to reheat their soup. He pulled the robe around himself and tightened the terrycloth sash. They settled into their meal like a couple, but the evening seemed surreal to both of them.

In the middle of that night she went to the bathroom. The rats or mice or squirrels, whatever they were, were scrabbling in the attic again. They were so loud that she turned on the light. And screamed. Olivia wasn’t a girly-girl. She was not squeamish. But anyone would freak at the sight of that rat face, poking through a just-chewed hole in her bathroom ceiling.

Blake came running. Neither of them know exactly how he managed to garrote the beast, but he took care of it and disposed of the body.

They returned to her bed and reached for one another. The first time had been explosive for him and flattering/overwhelming for her. This time it was more mutual and less definitive. Followed by cuddles till they began to stick together: then Ollie edged away from him and into dream.

They didn’t speak about it, but Blake didn’t leave. Like a Jamaican man he moved in on the woman and the woman’s place, and without discussing anything they knew the arrangement was at her sufferance. It wasn’t until Ollie woke up six weeks later, with Blake’s morning-firm penis in her hand, that she recognized a relationship. Realized it would no longer be simple to discard him, if she wanted to discard him. Wondered if she really wanted him.

It never would have happened if she hadn’t kicked over his change cup. It probably wouldn’t have progressed without a chest-high flight of pigeons. It very well may not last. Ollie squeezed his organ gently and slipped out of bed. She watched small butterflies mate tumbling in the air outside her apartment window, while she poured orange juice into a jelly glass and wondered how she felt.

Olivia found herself thinking about Blake on and off all day. She felt too shy to see him that evening. She walked the long way around to her train station and then fantasized about him that night. Not so much sexually, although she had seen a bulge in his pants and, normally, Olivia didn’t notice that. She wondered most of that evening what Blake would be like cleaned up. She’d always been intrigued with the whole makeover concept, but she never thought about applying it to a guy. It was the woman in those old movies, who removed her glasses and shook out her hair and was transformed from spinster to sexpot. It was females in the magazines who sat for the before-and-after shots. But Olivia imagined scrubbing Blake clean, donning him in fresh flannel and denim, combing his streaky hair.

She woke the next morning trying “Ollie” on for name. She liked it. She’d been a little put off when he first said it, but it was growing on her. She’d never had a nickname before. She attempted “Livy” for a brief time in high school, but it didn’t take. Her friends kept calling her by her full name – “Oh-Livia” when they paged or lulled her, just like her mom – and she kept feeling frowsty for it. “Ollie” seemed capricious to her. Whimsical. Comfortable/goofy. She rolled the syllables around her mouth while she brushed her teeth. She said it out loud while she watched two squirrels chasing around the trunk of the oak tree outside. She shouted it, and the closest squirrel sat up and bulged his berry eyes at her, spine like a question mark, tail like a bottlebrush.

Blake was looking for her when she hit the sidewalk that morning. “Hello Ollie” he said with a smile. And “hi Blake” she returned. “Take me home tonight?” He asked it without assumption or insult. She was startled but she stopped. “What?”

He hesitated. He looked in her face, considered something, mumbled, blushed, and smiled. Before she thought her words through she told him she’d be back at lunch.

“I can bring food,” she said. “What do you eat?”

“Anything.”

“Not vegetarian…?”

“You know the saying: beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Okay then, Blake. I’ll see you around noon.”

She continued up the crowded sidewalk to her office building. She was surrounded by pedestrians wearing electronics, but she was as unaware of her environment as any of them. She moved inattentively amid a sea of headphoned folk, into intersections crowded with cars driven by people on radios or cellphones, but Olivia saw only the inside of her forehead, where visions of cuddles and conversations danced in place of the morning sun.

For lunch she bought portobello mushroom sandwiches, with mozzarella and pesto on focaccia. She didn’t intend to seem fancy, but it was the only tasty item at the Italian coffee bar outside her office. She added bottled water and a big cookie. She walked with the food and her nervous excitement to Blake’s corner.

He put away his cup and they sat on the wall overlooking the hackysackers. An adolescent Dalmatian interfered with the game and had to be leashed to a small tree. Ollie learned that Blake was in fact a bike messenger. He’d been clipped by a bus two months earlier, and he broke his knee. Bike messenger jobs didn’t come with benefits. Blake had no health insurance. His meager savings had gone to the doctors, he’d lost his rented room, and he couldn’t work until he healed. He was an aspiring metal sculptor without a studio, three years younger than her thirty-one.

It was the unusual story: adopt a derelict, clean him up, and wake one morning with his dick in her hand. If she were a prostitute they’d describe her heart as gold. But one thing leads to another, connecting people like trains of thought across the space of gray social matter, and so a length of life is strung.

She saw him on the corner for weeks before she gave him anything. At first she assumed he was one of the bike messengers; he looked young enough and he seemed to talk to them lounging around between jobs playing chess or hackeysack and sneaking hits of cheap pot. But slowly she came to realize he was different. As Olivia walked each morning to her office from the train, each evening to the train from her office, it seeped into her awareness that this one stood a little apart, and listed to the left. He leaned against the concrete wall more than the others, or he sat on the ground. She noticed that the cup he held was not full of coffee or cola; on the ground before him she saw that it was empty except for some coins.

Usually she didn’t give any money on the street. There were too many hands and cups to choose from, and Olivia was pretty sure what she gave would not go for food. Usually she just walked past the sidewalk folks, bike messengers and panhandlers alike, observing body modifications and wardrobe choices but keeping her hands in the pockets of her jacket, where the only thing her fingers touched was her transit pass.

But one day, three and a half weeks after he first became a streak-haired presence in her subconscious, Olivia exited the station with a five in her pocket. She felt almost ill with sudden hunger as her train pulled into the city, and she moved her smallest currency from the wallet in her backpack to the linty right pocket of her corduroy coat. She bought a blueberry streusel muffin as soon as she surfaced to the pillared daylight of the financial district, and she came away from that transaction with a small bag of sweet fatty bread and $2.25. She was so involved in pulling a little globe of streusel topping off her muffin that she didn’t see the paper cup on the sidewalk. She kicked it over, and she spilled his few coins.

He wasn’t crazy; he didn’t yell at her. He simply leaned forward and began to gather the scant change, so she bent and helped him. Pushed one of her dollars into his cup and met his eyes. Noted they looked dark amber, like the steaks in his long straight hair. He smiled and thanked her. She continued to the office, impeded on the sidewalk behind a pair on cellphones. They appeared to walking together but not relating to one another, not attending to their surroundings, rapt in their telephone conversations and slowing her down. She considered how much more real the guy with the cup was than the pedestrians ahead of her. She looked back at him and saw with surprise that he was still paying attention, watching her progress up the street.

From then on she noticed him. Everyday their eyes met and sometimes she dropped change in his cup. Eventually their mouths moved in silent “hellos.” Soon after that they vocalized. Still they might never have conversed if it weren’t for the pigeons.

Dumb birds. They make no sound and rarely fly. They are not lovely. They bob their heads like chickens when they walk, their armlessness apparent. Baby pigeons are not much smaller than their parents: just browner, stupider, more often dead.

It happened one Tuesday morning that she was flocked by pigeons when she passed his corner. A bad bum flushed them over the hackysackers immediately before Olivia stepped off the escalator onto the sidewalk, and a bunch of the birds flew chest-high past her in a poultry-panic, startling her so that she misstepped off the curb and stumbled into her acquaintance-derelict. She noticed his bad smell before his good looks. She felt his strength as his hand gripped her arm above her elbow, holding her up against her fall’s momentum. “Whoa,” he gasped out with a smile, as he leaned into what she was to learn was his injured leg. “You okay?”

The pigeons had cleared out, although Olivia noticed a man a building away who picked at his jacket shoulder as if he was besplattered. “Yeah,” she answered. “Thanks.”

“No problem. I was here anyway.” He smiled and Olivia noted again his amber eyes.

“My name’s Olivia,” she blurted.

“Ollie.”

“No one’s ever called me that…”

“It suits you. I’m Blake.”

They exchanged a few sentences and then she walked on.