Sputterpub's Blog

It was unfortunate about the unreliability of Vickie J’s parents’ absences, because otherwise her house would have suited the three girls best. Her father had a wonderful hidden collection of magazines with provocative pictures, and her mother had fine clothes and cosmetics for them to examine. There was always Coke® and aspirin if they wanted to experiment with getting high (they tried and failed).

Vickie D’s house had its own pluses and minuses. Her mother was often there, but she was completely lenient. She smelled like tobacco and beer. She looked like an older version of her daughters: freckle-faced, buxom, with mouse-brown hair (which took color well). She let the girls eat tacos and watch “The Twilight Zone.” Vickie’s sister was sometimes there; Lavonne was obnoxious and fascinating. But Vickie J was seldom permitted to visit; her parents always found some reason to prevent her from passing time up the street at the other Vickie’s house. Beth has memories of spending nights there, ensconced with Vickie D in the sofabed in the family room, watching high-risk TV and overhearing the high-risk affections of Lavonne and some greasy-haired boy, and Vickie J is no part of those memories. Beth can recollect unsolitary bathing by the light of the glowing wall heater, what-iffing about life on earth and heaven afterward, and there were just the two of them in that tub. It was only four decades later, while randomly recollecting 1963, that Beth got to view them in perfect class perspective, and saw that Vickie J’s parents were faithless snobs, and Vickie D’s family was trailer trash, and Beth’s own mother had been too self-absorbed and busy to notice any of it.

In 1963 the girls were thirteen and looking for a place to be alone, and one late summer day they found the barn. They had been out behind the high school, exploring cavelets and reading in a book called The Amboy Dukes, which Vickie J had liberated from her father’s closet. They were dusty and thirsty and overheated, walking abreast on the rutted dirt track. Vickie D was telling them about her big sister with the kid from around the block; she leaned forward and her brown hair bounced as she described Kevin groping under Lavonne’s blouse and grabbing at her lap. He was Lavonne’s age: sixteen. He was the nasty red-haired kid in the neighborhood: the one who egged them on Halloween and taught the boys how to masturbate. “Ee-ewe…” came from Vickie J, as she twisted a hank of her smooth blonde hair behind her ear, “Gross.” Beth walked forward between the two Vickies, her eyes unreadable behind the glare off her glasses.

“What’s that?” Beth stopped and pointed to their right. “Is it a machine?” She moved toward the object before anyone answered. Whatever it was looked stationary and rusted, stalled in tall dry weeds fifty feet away from them. Beth continued her approach, careless of foxtails, and the others straggled after her.

“I think it’s some kind of spreader,” she said as the two Vickies joined her. The object was spiky-round and rusty, and looked like it needed a horse to pull it. There was no doubt it would have an effect upon the ground. Then the girls noticed other machinery, in pieces and whole, dotting the meadow in which they stood. And off to the left, shaded almost unnoticeable under big pepper trees, an old barn. “Look,” Beth pointed. They approached together.

They made an unlikely gang. Unalike and not likeable. But they dressed the same (in tank tops and Koret™ shorts) and they spoke in code (transistor radiospeak), and if they hadn’t been white suburban girls in 1963 they might have been threatening.

Sometimes there were several of them, but mostly it was Beth and Vickie and Vickie. They lived on the same two blocks and were naturally reduced to each other’s company. Their tract homes were set on rectangular lots on a grid of streets named “East” this-or-that for the already-established developments, of the same dull names, on the west side of town: the old side of town; the poor side. This was the eastern edge of Chula Vista, south of San Diego, in the early 60s.

They were thirteen. Old enough to sometimes stuff toilet paper in the bras they made their mothers buy them, and too young to know what “whore” meant or how to find it in the dictionary, when Vickie D’s older sister used the word on them and told them to look it up (as it happened, the closest to a whore in the neighborhood was Vickie D’s same big sister, Lavonne, but they didn’t have an inkling about any of that then). They played with dolls, but the dolls were no virgins; they were early, ugly-faced Barbies, and when they tired of the exquisite clothing complete with miniature accessories, they tended to drape the dolls in provocative dresses made of scarves, with predictable consequences (this was before Ken; these Barbies had patent pending on the right cheeks of their asses, but the girls cut their hair and swapped their straight-pinned heads with no regard for how those acts sank the future value of the toys).

The only things they had in common were their sterile neighborhood and their birth year. As they moved through junior high they would be separated, with Beth in the fast track for college and Vickie D in the fast track for life. Vickie J would move to Maine the following year; she’d be sent to a girls’ school and become as elegant and snobbish as her own pedigreed long-haired dachshund. But for that season they were still hanging around together.

Their houses were three-bedroom, two-bath, ranch-style. Their back yards all had six-foot high redwood fences edged with iceplant. Boring lawns and obvious porches. The sidewalks were made of big concrete blocks. The homes presented themselves driveways first. Everyone had a front lawn, with hibiscus or bird-of-paradise or both. Some had pepper trees, or lemons. A few had backyard swimming pools. It was six-tenths of a mile to circle around the block.

Beth and Vickie and Vickie sought other better places. They were girlish young women, and they wanted to be by themselves. Beth’s house never worked for that. Her mother was hospitable to a fault. And Beth had younger brothers. There was always plenty of food around, lots of warmth, no privacy. “Want to try a real pickle?” or “Here: I just learned how to make these shakes,” was the sound of Beth’s mom presenting one of her energetic kitchen experiments to them: the bitter dilled cucumbers she brined in a vat but was too impatient to wait the necessary weeks for … or the milk-ice-and-jam blender shakes she read about, hurriedly between self-interrupted errands, in a ladies’ magazine. “What’s new at school … Phil-UP!” was Beth’s mom asking the answerless parental question even as she swung her dark-haired head around to yell after one of Beth’s maniac brothers. They were always welcome to be with Beth’s family, but they didn’t want to be with a family. And Beth’s made them uncomfortable in their several ways. Her mother was pretty, abrupt, pushy: she smelled of onions and evergreens and she expected Beth, smart, frizzy-haired, myopic Beth, to be into clothes and cosmetics and not to be into sex and philosophy. Her father was professorial. Her brothers were little brothers. The girls were chatty with Beth’s mom, respectful to her dad, and elusive with Philip and Bruce.

Vickie J’s house didn’t work either. She was an only child and both parents were often out, but the girls couldn’t count on that. Her father might come home early from work. He was a handsome man, and he always dressed in fine soft fabrics like cashmere and silk, but his presence put a damper on their conversation. Her mother was usually out shopping or golfing or doing her volunteer work, but she too was known to breeze in unexpectedly. She always smelled of expensive perfume and sometimes of powdery scotch. Vickie J had smooth blonde hair like her mother and a lithe body like her dad. Her nose was too big, and she was then two years away from getting it fixed, which made it odd how she ribbed Beth about hers (referring to “a nose like a toucan” in her inscription of Beth’s yearbook, for everyone to see).

Yaya loved working with her mother, but she thought she had to work too hard. Meshie was older and stronger than she, but he didn’t have to do as much. It seemed to Yaya that this was only because he had a penis. He and his father got to sit around while the women kept going even serving them food and drink, as if the men somehow worked harder. Somewhere. Meshie knew it, too. He had a way of sitting behind their father and making faces at Yaya that neither of their parents ever saw. An insolent way of requesting that she bring him something, soup or beer, so if she refused she would appear even to her mother to be mean. Meshie was not smart but he was sly.

Their climate was mild but they definitely had a winter. Occasionally it snowed. Yaya loved to bundle on her cot under a warm woven blanket while she drifted into sleep after a day’s work. She’d imagine that she was sinking deeper and deeper into a welcoming place. She’d envision the patterns of weaving in degrees of wool and twine. She had ideas for incorporating ceramic beads into her work. Guarding her precious seeds from the birds, she even had some notions about filling blankets with small feathers and making tassels of large ones, but the problem, always, was that she had too much work.

As much as she loved retiring under her blankets, she hated to emerge from them on winter mornings. The air on her lower legs stung like a slap, the water was cold, and she was still tired. She avoided her grumpy brother as she started the morning meal. She greeted her mother with affection and usually made a plan with her for some secret weaving. She saw her father watching her. She knew he was arranging her marriage, assessing her as nubile, needful of metal and sheep. She considered her few options, for she was twelve but she was not naive, and she decided to hope for a kind man who wouldn’t take her far away.

The religions of the area, even in that last degenerating decade, had nothing to do with afterlife and everything to do with a person’s time on earth. And there were enough cases of senile dementia around Yaya for her to understand that personality has no necessary permanence, even in life. She had to take her best shots while alive. The thought depressed her. Best shots. She was constrained by her father. If he wasn’t around, Meshie was in charge of her. To be superseded by a husband. She wasn’t likely to get too far with her creative ideas. No farther than her mother …

Yaya figured her best bet was in progeny. She could raise fellow-weavers and thinkers. And they, at least the female ones, could raise more.

She gathered her best beads together, some feathers and her only gold ring, and she tucked those treasures in the suede bag she wore under her shift. While her mother combed the hemp field and her father dreamed of bride-price and her brother schemed for the coin to get drunk and laid that evening, Yaya piled up a little shrine near the river. She made a private sacrifice to Inanna, for health and babies.

Mesopotamia, the land “between the rivers,” invented writing. They didn’t do it for religious or artistic purposes, or even to improve communication. They were record-keepers. They established writing so they could maintain commercial information. They shaped the wheel so they could get their goods to market. They developed the first code of law (Ur-Nammu headed up that project, three centuries before Hammurabi), and it was all about protecting contracts and personal property.

They were busy. They created business.

They were also healthy. Contrary to ideas four thousand years later, Sumerians tended to live long and rather comfortable lives. There were few plagues and no colds. VD, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, and AIDS were unknown. But infections were dangerous. Childbirth was the biggest killer of women. Battle was the number one cause of death among men. Absent those conditions, a person could expect to live eighty years.

Meshie and Yaya knew their paternal great grandparents and all four parents of their parents. Their father’s big family lived close by, near the center of Larsa, but their mother’s was still in Ur. Meshie and Yaya and their folks occupied a cluster of buildings on the outskirts of town, near the fields where the sheep grazed and where Yaya and her mother could experiment with fiber crops. They only saw their mother’s family once every year or so. They spent more time than Yaya wished with her father’s brothers and nephews. Of a dozen cousins there was only one other female and she was a baby; Yaya at twelve learned to be watchful, because she attracted far too much attention from her male relatives.

She once overheard her male cousins conspiring to catch her in her bath. She stayed closer to the women after that, although she found her aunts demanding and dull. She was safer with the females.

She avoided even her own father and brother. Not that they would touch her sexually, but they teased her and commented on her and sought to embarrass her. In her opinion they were too aware of her, and she tried to stay out of their way.

The men in her family had impulsive tempers. The women gave them what distance they could. While her father and Meshie worked with the sheep, Yaya and her mother tended their experimental garden. In addition to dependable flax plants they were trying to grow the fibrous perennial that would be known as hemp. They had visions of hangers made of the twiny string, open weavings like hammocks and cradles. They’d traded a month’s worth of fine wool for a ladle of the tiny seeds and then lost half of them to birds before they learned how to shield them. Their first season of plants was scrawny, but they’d let the hardiest females go to seed and with each year after they’d had a lusher, tougher crop. They harvested in the autumn, plied the fibers and spun them like yarn and braided and wove them all winter while they burned the chaff in braziers in their workroom, and together produced shaped-rope containers that were getting some notice in the market.

(the rest tomorrow)

They remembered the winter of 2002 as the season of Polartec. It started with the 4×6 throws (in varying colors) available from Lands’End for $39 each, and ended with robes of the same material and hues. In between there were occasions of Primaloft and good old down and even a bit of knitting (although the yarn was nylon Tactel microfiber which never came near a sheep). Coziness was a recurring theme.

The weather drove some of the impulses. It was wintry early that year, with rainfall at 180% of normal by New Year’s Day and temperatures chilly enough to redden noses and water eyes. But the twin insecurities of economic recession and the war on terrorism also created a lust for safety and soft comfort. Home and the hearth.

They weren’t knitting to help the war effort or even to save money on clothes. The exercise was therapeutic and meditative. The mind stretched while the hands moved. The knit chevrons took shape, rhythmically, from the dance of yarn around long needles, and the brain loving those patterns sought others. Drifted into dreams of ancient textiles.

They called her Yaya. Her full name is transliterated “Erishti-Aya,” which the family shortened to “E-Aya” and the human mouth, then and now, transformed to “Yaya.”

She was at the bottom of the family; her parents only had two children, but the other was older and male. His name was Meshiaggasher, and he was a bully.

They were an attractive household. Meshie and Yaya were well-formed, olive-skinned, chocolate-haired. She was petite like her mother and large-eyed like her father. He was big, strong, and handsome.

From the perspective of a meditating knitter, Yaya was born in 2002 B.C.E. But her culture had their own ways of measuring time: she began her life in the second year of the Elamites, or in the twentieth season after the Amorites first attacked her city-state, or during the forty-third winter of intermittent war between Larsa and Isin.

Her family could trace itself back, maternally, to the enlightened age. They flourished during the reign of Ur-Nammu, in Ur itself, then the center of art and trade. They were weavers and they were innovative. But they mostly had ideas instead of offspring. They never produced enough children to establish a textile dynasty. Yaya and Meshie were the only bearers left of that line, and they were expected to meld like their mother did into their father’s customary ways.

Larsa was one of the prettiest city-states in Sumer. Nestled in the angle where the Euphrates meets the Tigris, overlooking the long delta but just high enough to withstand the floods, it was a metropolis of 20,000, with regular streets and attractive mud-brick houses, surrounded by fields of cultivated grains and hemmed by grazing pastures. The climate was mild. The agriculture was easy, provided they managed the silt. But the skirmishes and battles with Isin and sometimes Uruk and Lagash left its marks: gouged garden terraces; lacerated canals. Temporary military encampments crystalized and were immediately outlined by purveyors and prostitutes, scoring the crooked circumferences of the world’s first slums.

(more on Wednesday)