Sputterpub's Blog

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)

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.