Sputterpub's Blog

Alec and Cheryl wanted to stay together, for Liam and also for their second child just starting to gestate then. So they created a little space by sleeping apart. She and her growing belly remained in the big bed but he took to floor-sleeping on the carpet in Liam’s small room.

That helped. So did the easy birth and infancy of their daughter Angela, and Alec’s inheritance. They bought their first house and began to spend money.

But they also grew apart. Alec developed chronic heartburn and trouble with hemorrhoids, and his domestic goals began to resemble those of his dead wealthy parents. Cheryl found less to laugh about, wrestled with daily sadness, put on weight, became nostalgic for the working-class homelife she’d despised when she was growing up. They set up separate studies at home. After the kids were asleep Alec liked to drink vodka and watch cable TV in his room. Cheryl tried handcrafts in hers but, what with the kids and her depression, she tended to nap most evenings.

Even so, time passed. Life went by faster each year. By the time Liam and Angela were in expensive private middle schools, mid-life was upon their parents. Alec had never been highly sexed, so he was safe from silly affairs. He bought a Ferrari and racked up enough moving violations (including two DUIs) that car insurance became one of their biggest expenses. Cheryl joined a weight loss boot camp and decided to finally do something about her name.

They say you don’t have to formally change your name. Just start using whatever you like and soon it will be yours. But when she thought about that, it seemed impractical. Where would a middle-aged woman start that process? How would she get her first ID with the new name?

It’s a little work but no problem to change a woman’s name when she marries. The system is set up for that. The utility companies don’t require a credit deposit for name change due to marriage or divorce. But it’s another set of hassles entirely to do it legally and without a change in status. Cheryl had to petition the court, post notices, deal separately with every account registration.

And she had to choose the right name.

If she’d had a particular heritage she might have used it. But Cheryl was of mixed Northern European stock, with no strong Scottish or Irish or Scandinavian or even (despite her maiden name) German claim to chromosomes. So she went with what she liked.

She’d always been attracted to the “au” of Paul and Saul, but she didn’t want a feminization of some boy name, like Paulette or Claudia. She didn’t even want a terminal “a.” She settled on Laurie first.

And she’d had it with the last initial “S.” Even though she didn’t expect to be organized into alphabetical order now that she was middle-aged, she decided to move up. She liked the sound of Adams and took it as her new surname.

Laurie Adams sounded good to her.

As long as she was going to the trouble, she figured she’d take a middle name too. Her parents had given her Patricia, after her mother’s mother, and the only thing she’d liked about it had been the letter “P.” But she knew her classics – Greek myths had been her reading mainstay in 8^th grade – and she languished in the dark of every winter. What the hell, she thought and then giggled; she typed “Persephone” onto the legal form.

So it was as Laurie P. Adams that I met her. We struck up a conversation last winter while each of us awaited an appointment in our dermatologist’s office. Dr. Ringrose is still practicing medicine, still a great guy who takes whatever time is necessary with patients, and thus always running late.

Laurie and I shared our contempt for the People and US Weekly magazines in the room, and that led to a talk about good books, with a remarkable amount of agreement. We exchanged numbers and began an acquaintance.

I think it was during our second or third lunch out that I told her how much I like her name. I was surprised at her gratification. Her pale face seemed to pick up depth, and her skin looked younger. “Thank you so much!” she gushed. And she then began to tell me her story, about how she chose it for herself.

It wasn’t until she was 12 years old that Cheryl Schwarzkopf really began to hate her name. Actually, by then she was a prolific reader; she used “detest,” “loathe,” and “abhor” instead of just “hate.”

Her first name was bad enough, and she tried to modify it to Sherry, and then Cherry, and even Cherri with a daisy over the “i.” But she didn’t have enough sympathy or friends to make the change. Cheryl she remained.

It was her last name that was the unkindest cut. She preferred her father’s family to the Brents her mother contributed, but Cheryl was stricken early with acne and as soon as her schoolmates discovered what Schwartzkopf meant, they wouldn’t let up.

Some folks say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but Cheryl Schwartzkopf didn’t name-toughen throughout high school. The teasing diminished but the acne didn’t, and she winced whenever she was called by her last name.

Cheryl tried to heal her skin. She stopped eating chocolate and she eliminated all fried foods from her teenage diet. Her choices became so healthy that she lost the baby fat forever. She tried every topical cream she found.

Nothing worked. The creams dried her facial oils till her nose flaked, but still the pimples came. Even in college, when she had grown as inured to the sound of Schwartzkopf as she ever would, she continued to break out on the face, the shoulders, sometimes even her upper chest.

She was otherwise attractive. Her height was about average and she had a girlish but pleasant figure. Her long brown hair grew thick and glossy, with a natural wave and auburn highlights. Her fingers and toes were graceful, and her nails were large and shapely.

And she’d spent enough time alone, with books, being teased, that she had developed a personality. She spoke with a rich vocabulary and some wit. She had a few odd opinions and could defend them. She was never described as a popular girl, but she had friends and dates. She married younger than many.

It didn’t surprise anyone who knew her when she took her husband’s name. No one expected her to hyphenate – she’d made it clear that she thought that was as affected in an American as spelling center centre or favor with a “u” – and her friends knew her boyfriend would have to have a last name ending in “schitz” or “weiner” to make her keep her own. She married Alec and became Cheryl Smith.

Her acne persisted. There was a little improvement during pregnancy, but she was back to square one after she weaned Liam. Finally she gave herself something her parents never had: a visit to the dermatologist.

Dr. Ringrose examined her eruptions and diagnosed allergy. Unlike her parents, he told her she would not outgrow it; he referred her to a specialist for tests. It seemed beyond ironic to Cheryl when she learned that she was allergic to most of the healthy foods she’d been eating. She was warned away from all dairy products, citrus, most tree nuts, and even canola oil. She who was vegetarian by then had to resume eating meat; meals would have been almost impossible otherwise. And she enjoyed those steaks.

Her skin cleared. It wasn’t peaches-and-cream or anything lovely – too many years of insults had roughened her face and aged it prematurely – but finally Cheryl could look in the mirror without anguish.

She might have been happy then, but she wasn’t. Liam had reached the challenging age of 2½, and she and Alec were bickering incessantly. Some of the problem was caused by simple sleep deprivation, but most of it came from co-parenting. They had incompatible ideas about breakfast foods, how much TV should be allowed, what kind of toys to acquire. Alec had always been a serious fellow – Cheryl’s sense of humor was one of her attractions for him – but as he passed into his late 20s he became more quiet, prone to minor health complaints, morose, even curmudgeonly. He found Cheryl unsympathetic and she thought he was a drag.

Abby’s breasts didn’t bring her good fortune but her eyes did. The breasts got her lots of attention and countless free drinks, but the feeling of power she had in the parked cars and strange bedrooms turned out to be temporary and really just a function of blood pressure and body fluids.

Her straightforward eyes opened doors for her. She landed in banking with a sociology degree, and everyone liked her directness. She was trusted. She worked hard enough. She advanced.

Which was more than fortunate, because both her breasts and her eyes quit her early. She put on weight in her 20s, which made her boobs even bigger but her whole shape blocky. The chest that used to stop traffic became a shelf for her short folded arms. She tended to rest her breasts on the lunchroom table (to provide some relief to her aching shoulders, for even the best Wacol bra couldn’t uphold all day). Her bust became the stuff of office jokes. It didn’t help that Abby chose to collect cute little cow ornaments and decorate her office with them.

Her eyes became trouble again when she was 30. She started getting some cloudiness, which her ophthalmologist ascribed to a little corneal edema from oxygen deprivation from her hard lenses. He ordered the latest in gas-permeable material but she hated them (they worked too well for their own good, normalizing her corneas so she began to feel the irritation when a little grit got in her eye, which made wearing them less comfortable than her good old bad lenses), so Abby, in one of the rare disobediences in her life, rejected the doctor’s order and returned to her old pair of lenses.

By the time she was 36 the damage to her corneas was considerable. And hormonal fluctuations were playing games with Abby’s tear production; even after she switched to the most permeable lenses available she didn’t get more than an hour of clear vision before her eyes fogged up. Her days of contact lenses were over.

She returned to wearing glasses but she couldn’t see very well. She was starting to get the far-sightedness of middle age; as often as not she left her glasses on her desk and just read the computer screen without correction. Her naked blue eyes took on a soft-focus appearance which was not unattractive.

Sometimes she went without her glasses even outside. It was like the old days in junior high, guessing identities by posture and color.

Which was (again) fortunate, because it allowed her to notice what none of her able-eyed relatives did. If Abby could have seen her father’s face she might have been distracted from his posture. But as it was she detected the change in his walk, the shift in his stance, even the way he held his head a bit to the side. And it was she with her childhood memories of brain pain who paid attention when he mumbled about headaches.

Abby’s father had been having a series of small strokes. Because he never went for a checkup his atrial fibrillation wasn’t discovered until then. The doctors said it would have been very serious, perhaps catastrophic, if it had gone much longer undetected. Abby’s father said it would have gone undetected if it hadn’t been for her.

As for Abby, she said she doubted that. Hugging her father she’d state that it was just a matter of time, short time, before someone else would have commented about him. But she stopped complaining about her bad eyes after that. She settled back and looked at the world myopically, astigmatically, through pretty blue eyes, and found other things in her life with which to disagree.

Abby entered high school with eyeglasses and a damaged reputation. She felt self-conscious about both. It didn’t matter what style of glasses she tried; her correction was so substantial that it made the Abby behind the lenses appear much smaller than the Abby around them. The distortion line looked huge to her if she wore big Jackie O frames, and her round face made her appear grandmotherly to herself when she put on Lennonesque wire-rims. She begged for contact lenses but her father said, “They won’t correct your astigmatism” or “They’ll be too uncomfortable to wear with your allergies” or “It takes too much willpower to get used to them.”

As for her reputation, it grew along with her breasts. Boys paid attention to her and girls didn’t, and the attention some boys paid wasn’t just about sex. Abby felt a few were her friends. She drew a line between kissing boys that made her squirm and practice-kissing with friends, and the latter never seemed like it was wrong. Even when practice-kissing sometimes led to a little groping, it wasn’t too sweaty or weird; it seemed okay to her.

She hit her stride in college. Her breasts and eyes united and she felt more attractive than ever before (or since). She finally got contact lenses, hard ones because of her astigmatism, and she adjusted to them with ease. Her father had been incorrect; the process took almost no effort. Suddenly she had peripheral vision. Objects were no longer reduced in size by her correction. It was as mind-expanding for her as when she’d just gotten her first eyeglasses and had seen, from the car window riding home, individual leaves on trees and knotholes in wooden fences.

And there were her eyes. Unmasked by her glasses, they contended again for best feature. They were well-shaped and a fierce blue. She began to wear eyeshadow and liner and especially mascara. Those were the years when she was always on a low-key search for the perfect mascara wand, when she experimented with false eyelashes, when once even, she superglued individual lashes to her own and had a few Tammy-Faye months before they all grew out.

Her breasts were stand-out, too. Literally. Very large but not yet sagging. She felt attractive. She didn’t expose them but she never hunched. She had no trouble getting dates. As fine as were her eyes, most of her male friends tended to focus on her chest.

Abby’s father had spoken often in praise of direct eye contact. That, a firm handshake, and small jewelry (“Simplicity is class,” he’d say, ignoring the fact that while she was short she was not petite). Abby tried using eye contact to beckon men’s eyes away from her tits. It got to where she was noticed for it – a friend describing Abby to someone would always mention how direct and sincere she was – but it didn’t work as a distractor. Her breasts to most guys were like balloons to a toddler or yarn balls to a kitten: they drew the eye the moment they moved.

As a bearer of direct eye contact Abby came to laugh at the term. It wasn’t about eyes at all; it was face contact. When Abby addressed a group of people at work, she aimed at their foreheads and they thought she was looking in their eyes. When she spoke one-on-one to someone, she watched the other’s mouth and lips and teeth and tongue, the lines around the nose, the cords and wrinkles in the neck.

Not the eyes. Almost never the eyes. In Abby’s opinion, you only look in the eyes before love or war. As a prelude to sex or a fight. Actually, she’s pointed out that you can’t look in another’s eyes. You have to choose one eye or the other.

Her eyes were blue at birth and everyone expected they’d darken. Most white babies come with blue eyes, but Abby’s parents were brown-eyed brown-haired people of brown-eyed brown-haired stock, so her relatives all waited for the blonde fuzz to be replaced with dark curls and for those blue irises to melt into the liquid chocolate hue of the Grays.

Like a changeling, Abby persisted in difference. Her mother was delighted with the silky blonde hair; most of the baby pictures show Abby with a ribbon bow somehow affixed to her head. The progression of childhood photos have her hair in varying lengths and steadily darkening as she grew toward high school and the discovery of peroxide, but the eyes always stayed blue.

Her surname was Gray but she came of Llewellyns and Ahernes. Her genes were mixed northern European, with strong tides of Welsh and Irish. And Ireland, like Iran, means Aryan(land), and Hitler, the moron, thought that meant blonde/blue. But the original people had markers for pigment, and it was only those travel-mad, emotionless, horny Vikings who inserted recessive genes across the pond.

Abby’s eyes stayed blue. They were the best feature in an adorable face. She had a ring of silver around her pupils, over gray-blue edged in navy. They shined between thin lids, well-spaced above a small nose centered over a rosebud mouth that never grew beyond child-size. Her jaw was small. Her cheeks were plump and hid their bones. She wasn’t beautiful but her face was cute well into middle age.

When Abby was 12 her mother heard a strange tale from a facialist. While this woman named Michaela slathered fruit-based emollients over her T-zone and (always stroking upward) along her neck, she told Abby’s mother that blue eyes are a sign of somatic purity. Michaela had a degree in nutrition and had been her own guinea pig for a graduate project. Over a two-year period she followed a strict vegan diet. All organic, all vegetable, with little cooking and reduced calories. Michaela was of Italian/Romanian heritage – olive-skinned, dark-haired, brown-eyed – and within 20 months on the clean diet her dark eyes cleared to baby blue.

Abby’s mother immediately thought back to her daughter’s infancy, and wondered if all her care with the baby food, all the grinding of organic vegetables and steeping of whole grains, had produced this marvel of iris. “But that can’t be,” she reasoned back at herself. For she’d given the same care to the food she fed Abby’s brothers, and they both had the family coloring. Anyway, much as she tried to guard her kids from refined sugar and unrefined TV, Abby and her brothers had all found plenty of candy and cartoons at their friends’ homes.

From then on, Abby’s mother wondered if irises were like deciduous trees. She remembered being struck to learn that autumn leaves don’t change color; rather, they lose it as their chlorophyll goes, and the vibrant red, alarm orange, and sunset gold are what’s left after nature leeches out all the green. “Maybe eyes without color are watery blue,” Abby’s mother thought. “Maybe brown and green and hazel are added pigments, and my daughter’s striking eyes fall short.” It made as much sense to her as the idea that an attractive dimple is actually a deformity, but she’d heard that somewhere, too. Abby’s mother was an extremely social individual, and sometimes she couldn’t remember from whom she’d heard what.

When Abby was 13 her eyes retreated. The breasts which she began at 12 outgrew her training bra. They pulled at the front of her T-shirts and made her blouses gap. They were particularly prominent because the final spurt of growth which followed their painful appearance (and stopped a year later, when her periods started) only pushed her height to 5’1″. Those precocious breasts supplanted her eyes as her best feature.

Her eyes took revenge in headaches. The cutting pain came about twice a week that winter, but because no one else in her family needed glasses as a child, her parents didn’t think to have Abby’s eyes checked. She spent afternoons at home with her aching head on her mother’s lap, waiting for the aspirin to work. She would rather have been in her own bed in her room, but for some reason Abby’s otherwise impatient mother took comfort in supporting Abby’s head and neck and occasionally stroking her brow.

The best medicine for the headaches turned out to be eyeglasses. It took almost six months before Abby saw an opthalmalogist, and then he was rather impressed with how well she was managing, given her level of myopia. For Abby uncorrected was only seeing 20/400. Excellent as she was at recognizing people by the way they moved or the colors they wore, the strain to her eye muscles was producing headaches.

Also, although she could interpret people’s gross movements without her glasses, Abby missed small facial expressions. She didn’t acknowledge many smiles of greeting. A lot of the girls thought she was a snob. The boys didn’t mind it that she appeared to ignore them; her breasts were the stuff of their dreams and excused everything. They looked, they wondered, they admired, they snickered, they sometimes even told tales. The girls overheard, and some went from calling Abby a snob to branding her a slut (in 3 moves: snob-slob-slot-slut).