Sputterpub's Blog

I never got the charm and I can’t remember who did. I never served a cake myself with a charm in it. But I was always pleased with the idea. Charmed, even. Like the concept of a cucumber stuffed with pearls, which I read about in one of the Arabian Nights tales. Useless but enchanting.

Many of my memories from that neighborhood are indistinct; my family moved away when I was barely ten, and Siesel left a year before that. But I have some true recollections – little scenes never captured by my father’s avid camera and therefore remembered as life instead of slides. The annual polio vaccines and the Halloween parties at Siesel’s are vivid points like moonbeams caught in a net.

The first year, the year of the yellow ballerina, Siesel’s mother outshone all the guests. I was in kindergarten; I had just begun to notice other people who weren’t family or kids, and I remember being fascinated with the bracelets and the melodic voice. Siesel was pretty and happy, but no one was as happy as her mother.

The second year Siesel wore a Southern belle costume. Her beautiful red hair was longer, and fashioned for that day into ringlets. I remember the amazing lace on her corseted gown. Gretel was a mature St. Bernard by then, but she trampled mud on Siesel’s hem, and I was surprised at how angry that made Siesel’s mom. I remember watching Siesel’s father lead her mother aside and talk to her, hug her, apparently calm her. I also remember learning that week that my own father wasn’t going to vote for the President. We had been visiting my grandparents, collecting the fallen maple leaves, and as we got ready to go my grandpa asked my father who he was going to vote for. My father answered with the question, “Have I ever voted Republican?” and that started a train of surprise and understanding in me.

The third Halloween party came at a tough time for me. I’d had a tonsillectomy early that month, and my throat was still sore. Worse than that, my spirit was sore from the ether and my attitude was sore from hospital treatment. Worse than those, my parents were fighting daily and my nights, already disturbed by a tender throat and anesthetic nightmares, were punctuated by the sounds of my parents’ quarrels and spiced with hallucinations about divorce.

I was not happy. I acted out in school, sassing my second-grade teacher, and my parents tried to discipline me with words and room arrest. They even said “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” and “Because I told you so.” They made me so angry that I scared them by coming home late, with my hair looking bloody because I had smeared wild berries in it in the field near my school. My mother yelled at me while she washed my hair, and didn’t seem to care when I got shampoo in my eyes. Not long after that, she took me to the beauty parlor and had my long hair cut.

I went as a hobo to the party that year. It was easy to fashion some raggedy clothes but I was jealous as a snake about Siesel’s fairy princess costume. She even had gossamer wings: glitter-spattered tissue over thin wire frames, made by her mother of course, who that year flitted from table to table in a belly-dancer outfit, purple, blue, and green, with yards of gold coins around her slim waist.

By the time of the fourth party, my mother was very pregnant. The baby that would be my second brother was only three weeks away from emerging. I would have rather had a dog. I really wanted a St. Bernard like Gretel, but I would have been happy with any shape of canine. I longed for a companion.

My parents weren’t quarreling at the time. In fact, my father appeared to be devoted to my mom, and my mother seemed reasonably content. They didn’t pay me much attention. My first brother made me seem more like a kid than a baby to them, and with a second infant on the way I took on relative maturity in my parents’ eyes.

The one time I remember doing anything with my father that season was the occasion he took to introduce me to opera. He loved Puccini, and he had me sit with him through an early television broadcast of Madame Butterfly.

Of course I didn’t “get” opera. I was accustomed to suspending my disbelief for “The Howdy Doody Show” or Crusader Rabbit cartoons, but those were for kids; they were supposed to be absurd. I knew opera was for grownups. I sat at my father’s right side on the green damask sofa, and I watched it very seriously. I thought the way the people sang so loudly at each other was silly. I found the story disturbingly, progressively, sad. But what stunned me, what smashed me like a board and flattened me like a falling piano, was the moment when the beautiful lady plunged the knife into her kimonoed breast. It didn’t matter to me whether the death made sense or not. I just couldn’t believe anyone would see such an act as any form of entertainment. It seemed to me, then and forever after, to be a poor choice for any performance. I’ve never understood the sad ending.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

The first thing I noticed about Siesel was her dog. Gretel was still a puppy when we all moved in, but even at six months a St. Bernard is hard to ignore. And she was a perfect example of her breed. Heavy-footed, rounded of back, cotton-white with fields of auburn and umber. She was too young for the characteristic loose lip – it would be a little while before she began spraying us all with clear mucus when she shook her big head or sneezed – but she made opaque messes with big-puppy energy.

The second thing I noticed was Siesel’s hair. It was naturally curly and the color of buffed copper. I hadn’t seen a redhead before, and I would never after meet one of better hue. My books all pictured blonde princesses, which made my brunette self feel second-string, but something about the color of Siesel’s hair moved her out of the arena of normal for me, and into the epic.

Siesel, for her part, probably wasn’t feeling epic. She was nearly nine years old and she had just moved away from all of her friends in New Orleans, yanked with her mother from their homey humid delta to the suburbs of Long Island. She knew the move had something to do with her father’s job; she heard her parents fighting late into the night, and she must have believed what her mother told mine: that her dad wanted to get them out of the South, back to the area where he was raised. She acted lonely. She didn’t like appearing exotic. She considered altering her name, to Cecile or Cecily. Even those were too odd. She paid no attention to the younger kids on the block. I was only five.

The neighborhood in Glen Cove was hewn out of an old berry and clover farm. The developers took pasture two acres at a time, carving streets and cul-de-sacs, laying sewer and water lines, basing and framing and finishing blocks of ranch and split-level houses with rail-fenced backyards. A year after our block was settled, a draft horse broke through the fence into my backyard and caused my visiting cousin to have hysterics. Three years after, all of the farm had been turned into single-family first-time homes, everything except the original two-story wood-frame farmhouse, where the big O’Neill family lived, with the twins Shelly and Stephen and seven other kids.

The way tract homes were developed, entire initial neighborhoods moved in at once. The houses were in such demand that they sold immediately upon completion, and approximately sixty days later the street became narrow with moving vans, and nuclear families ranged around in relocation chaos. There followed additional periods of shelf-building, lawn seeding, and patio development, during which the neighbors took each other’s material and cooperative measure.

My household was friendly. My mother was always outgoing and energetic, my father was competent and cordial, and my baby brother was adorable.

Siesel’s family was exuberant. They weren’t from the Northeast; they couldn’t help but be interesting. Her father was enthusiastic and her mother was vivacious. She wore bright flowing clothes and almost sang instead of speaking. She stacked a dozen gold bangles on her wrists, like a princess from the Arabian Nights. She made a big decorative deal out of every holiday. Especially Halloween.

The neighborhood was completed in August and no one was set up properly for Labor Day; Halloween was the first big holiday after the houses filled. It happened that Siesel’s birthday was on the 30^th of October and their family tradition had always celebrated it with Halloween, so Siesel’s mother threw the first of what would be an annual party, and invited every kid on the block.

That seemed extraordinary. Siesel was a few years ahead of the post-war tsunami, and most of the neighbor kids were four or five or six to her nine, but all of us were invited and Siesel was gracious.

They decked the house out like it was haunted. Cobwebs and strange lights played on the flat back yard and eerie music whined from inside the study. Siesel’s father greeted everyone dressed like Dracula, whose movie wouldn’t be out for two years and would then be deemed so terrifying that I for one, and several other guests as well, would not be permitted to see it. Siesel’s mother appeared as a beautiful Gypsy. Siesel herself was a ballerina that first year; I condensed with envy at the sight of her yellow satin toe shoes and horizontal tulle skirt.

There were lanterns and crepe paper strung from the back of the house to the edges of the fence, and several wooden tables with attached benches and matching cloths. I was seated at the table farthest from the house and the rituals, but Siesel’s mother made sure all of the guests saw the big cake before she cut into it. It was iced in orange and chocolate-so-dark-it-was-nearly-black, and it looked like a flattened pumpkin. It was moist dark devilsfood beneath buttercream frosting, and there was a charm baked into it. That was a tradition in Siesel’s family; the guest who found the charm would receive a prize.

(to be continued on Wednesday)

Kevin got away as soon as he finished high school. He went to college in another state, married there, and began to live quite carelessly with his young bride. They partied hard. They traveled thoughtlessly. Tracy was a little obsessive about air schedules, and Kevin couldn’t resist mocking her. Apparently he’d expended all of his tolerance for planning with his parents; it sometimes seemed to Abby as if he married a woman he could pick on because he’d been too easygoing for too long. He sniped at Tracy when she worried, which led to a lot of arguments between them, which fueled his drinking and drug consumption, but Tracy was into altering her consciousness, too, so they usually ended their evening groggy or passed-out together, and they stayed married.

Abby on the other hand tended to stay home, once she had a home she loved.

She went through two houses with two spouses but the third piece of real estate, with title taken as “an unmarried woman,” was the one with charm. She hunkered down with her dog and her son Matt. She ventured out easily for work, because she liked her job and she knew she would become mentally ill if she never left the house. She vacationed less willingly, nagged into it by parental or fraternal comments like “it just isn’t normal to stay home all the time,” or moved by the occasional idea that it would be good for her and her son.

It was Matt, in fact, who released her from homebodiness. He was twenty before he found the occasion to articulate it, but he finally told Abby that a vacation shouldn’t be so much work. He expressed a desire to go camping, and that sent Abby into paroxysms of list- and itinerary-making. “Whoa,” he said. “As long as we have wood and water, bags and a ground cloth, we’re good to go.”

So they went. Abby added a tent and some maps to the rudiments, but they took off rather carelessly in her old Maxima. They had a few days’ worth of firewood in the trunk, and a five-gallon water container in the back. The styrofoam cooler chilled drinks and fresh vegetables; paper bags held the groceries they acquired on the way to Mono basin. They camped a thousand feet away from an untraveled road, on a field of pumice, beside scraggly pines. They only needed the tent to shelter them from light, because the moon rode above them all the nights of that first trip, blazing enough to read by and blaring into their dreams.

Abby began to learn then, about the liberating pleasure of just going, of being prepared to encounter anything. She began to venture into adventures.

She never was able to show her parents the other way to vacation. By that time, her father had lost his balance and her mother had lost her patience, and they were neither leaving their home of forty years. But she did get to show Kevin. There came a season when his hard drinking caught up with him. He started abusing coke, again, and began to flip moods like a lunatic. Tracy wouldn’t take his passive-aggressive sniping any more, and he landed for awhile back in the company of his big sister.

Matt wasn’t any help. Abby soon discovered that her son had no respect for his uncle. When she looked at Kevin she still saw her sweet brother; she was startled to note that Matt saw a mean, sniping man.

So she tried to show Kevin what she’d learned. She took them on the road. She aimed her car for the high desert but first she made sure they wouldn’t be mooned. She selected the long dark weekend of August, and she parked them at the edge of a rock-bound hidden lake, on clear ground, near trees. Kevin’s nose started to bleed at 6,000 feet.

But the new moon didn’t blare at them. They slept outside under a star-shot bowl of black sky, and they made no plans. They couldn’t tell where they looked and when they dreamed.

Abby’s brother and father seemed to enjoy the camping trips. She and her mother didn’t. For her mom it was just too much work. She was always in charge of meals and cleaning, but when confronted with the narrowness of the Coleman stove and the coldness of the Sierra water, what were simple tasks at home became chores tolled like rosary beads: sort; clean; prime; grill; serve; scrape; scour; rinse.

For Abby, camping was too constrictive. She had to live in even closer proximity to her family. It wasn’t like she had the freedom to range (“you’ll get lost”) or sleep beneath the stars (“bears!”) or even to draw. The first time up there she sketched, taking special trouble with the pyramid shape and steely hues of Lembert Dome as seen, foot-frozen, from a matching rock in the middle of frigid Lyle Fork, and after she returned home she made an oil painting of her careful sketch. She was then enrolled in art classes because she showed some elementary watercolor promise, and her mother had found an old lady instructor who made her mark in the art world by scraping the brand name off oval bars of Camay soap, highlighting the floral framing curlicues with colors, and adorning the scraped central area with a portrait of a President, Elvis, or Liberace.

Mrs. Jukes looked for some moments upon Abby’s painting of Lembert Dome. Then she raised her own palette and recolored the picture, reddening the stone and yellowing the foliage to present Grand Canyon tones. Mrs. Jukes had never seen the Sierras.

Abby didn’t sketch the sights after that. She preferred to take notes and try rhymes. Kevin and her father liked to fish. Her mother seemed to enjoy complaining. Abby’s only favorite part of camping was to get up before anyone else and make her way, quiet like an Indian, to the mound of granite in the middle of the adjoining meadow. The ground was a little soggy and there were annoying clouds of dawn mosquitoes, but it was worth it to get to the stony bump, to perch on the cold rock creases and to watch the dawning sunlight sweep like a curtain of gold across the green basin. It happened every morning. Just once each day. And it happened fast.

Even with all of the planning, accidents occurred. Once Kevin whittled into his thumb, gashing his hand rather deeply just after his nosebleed had subsided. He had to hold his arm above his head for more than an hour before the wound coagulated enough. Another time, Abby’s father twisted his ankle, rushing away from what he was sure was a rattlesnake in the basalt rocks by the side of the road where he’d stopped, near Bakersfield, to pee. Even with all of the tire checking they picked up a nail on the drive home one trip out of a total of six. And although her father took all the recommended precautions to keep bears out of their food, securing most provisions in the storage locker and stringing the rest up from a tree branch, he didn’t protect them from the ravages of nesting rodents; the one time they left their shoes outside the trailer they awoke to find all laces chewed off at the eyelets.

Abby’s parents got very upset when things went wrong. Then they redoubled their planning attempts for the future. The pre-drive check became so rigorous that their departure was always delayed by at least thirty minutes. Her mother spent that whole time reconcluding that their arrangements couldn’t get more reasonable, and chirping at Abby to agree with her.

Kevin didn’t buck the parental planning. Abby tried to avoid as much of it as she could. Soon, his behavior was approved and she was called lazy. He seemed agreeable and she was difficult. She might have hated him for that, except that he was too nice a kid to hate. In fact, Kevin had no problem cooperating but he thought all the plans and checks were silly. He agreed with what Abby said about it, but he thought she was wasting her time trying to change their parents’ ways.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

The biggest misconception Abby held, growing up, was that adults had the answers. The most erroneous lesson she learned was that her parents knew how to live.

There were sufficient reasons for her mistakes. “Mother knows best.” “Because I said so.” “Don’t do as I do; do as I say.” “You’ll understand when you’re grown.” Although she contested each phrase they had their cumulative effect. There must be something to them, she then thought: a fundamental truth like in cliches.

Her parents acted like the road to happiness was narrow and bordered by perils. They were satisfied with their own level of fortune, and they firmly believed that their way was the only way to be safe and content. Their way consisted of plans.

Her father was careful and logical. He retained all original packaging. He never commenced a road trip, not even a two-hour drive, without first checking the tire pressure and the windshield fluid. Her mother hummed with unharnessed energy. She put as much acuity into comparison shopping as a Nobel-scientist employs in analyzing lab data, so the family was always satisfied that they had the best airfares, motel rates, and fuel prices.

Superficially, Abby learned to never leave home without maps, provisions, and a clear plan. Viscerally, she learned to never leave home.

It seemed like way too much trouble. And no matter how much care she took, she was bound to miss something. Her mother had a mind like a steel-trap, for finding bargains or renegotiating transactions; Abby preferred to spend her quickness on puzzles and poetry.

When she was small, she made a secret place inside her room. Each of the bedrooms in their tract house had one wall papered, and hers pictured four different versions of moonlit stylized trees against a pale background. Abby would crawl into the knee space under the desk, and she’d sit there pretending to rule a camp in her own forest. She’d read. She’d lay on the floor with her feet wedged up under her desk drawer, and she’d contemplate existence.

Her parents hauled her out for weekend outings and summer travel. The day trips were often picnics and the vacations were usually camping, so planning was involved.

Her father collected topographical maps. He had them for the High Sierras as well as the surrounding areas. He stored them flat, sorted them by number, and taught the kids to treat the paper with care and the contour lines with respect.

He also owned a Coleman stove and a matching lantern, and a quantity of carefully stored fuel to power them. In time he added tarps and ground cloths and storage bags, each slotted into its special niche in the garage shelves, all extracted and checked like a moon launch whenever the family left their suburban home for a nature visit.

Meanwhile, Abby’s mother collected cooking utensils. She scooped up painted metal bowls and plates at church thrift stores, and she acquired cheap flatware at Army surplus outlets or with supermarket stamps. She investigated trailer rentals and annually recommended the tent/trailer unit they could pull with their compact. The top flipped open when it was parked, so that it became grownup-tall with canvas-framed upper sides and ceiling. The two big top pieces turned into the bases for double beds at each end, and the permanent area in the middle held cabinets and the rudimentary kitchen. They always camped in reserved sites, with a water spigot and picnic table at hand and public toilets nearby. Unless it was raining all they ever did inside the trailer was sleep and change their clothes.

They usually made their camping trips to Tuolumne Meadows in upper Yosemite. They’d travel up the Imperial Valley, often with a daytime moon riding like a nickel out the rightside windows. They always knew when they were nearing the 10,000 foot level on Tioga Pass because Kevin’s nose would start bleeding. Abby’s little brother was prone to those messy events. They were normally triggered by colds or falls off his bicycle, but they also heralded his first venture each summer into the low air pressure of the High Sierras. He had to tip his head against the car seat. He had to swallow the slide of blood down the back of his throat. He was little but he was used to it. After the first cresting eruption he probably wouldn’t have another nosebleed all week.

(continued Wednesday)

Marty marveled at Jane’s ability to be, as Jane herself coined the word: complainatory. She put her feet on the floor and stepped the heating pad switch through its temperature settings to off.

“You ready to walk?” Jane smiled and her face widened sweetly.

“Oh yeah.” Marty placed her palms on her thighs and pushed as she straightened to a standing posture. She needed to keep moving. Always. She’d had a bout of immobility when she was thirty-five; that’s when she learned her legs were more important to her than her eyes. Now she moved a lot. Even right after the fall: maybe she should have iced her sacrum but she kept walking, reasoning that nothing could seize up if she just kept using all parts.

She’s still moving as much as she can. But slower and with balance. Now she avoids dropping things by carrying with more deliberation. She likes these restorative rambles with Jane. They do their best talking while walking.

“Have I mentioned my symbiosis idea?” She asked the question as they passed through her gate. Jane didn’t have to answer. “I read somewhere that the mitochondria in our DNA isn’t really part of us. It’s some other organism that entered us millennia ago and formed a relationship with us that’s beneficial to both. I don’t have details, but it got me to thinking about how many other organisms I might host that aren’t really part of me. Whatever me is, of course.

“See, there’s the dreaming me. The sleeping me. The puzzle-solving me. I mean, I don’t know how I get a puzzle when I don’t use logic, when I just sit back and see the whole picture. What’s intuition? It’s like these are all inhabitants of us, of some sort, that we can harm or twist but we can’t control. We’re best off if we provide a thriving environment for all these inhabitants …”

“I get it; no, I do.” Jane stilled the Slinky and turned to Marty. She didn’t stop walking. She spoke fast. “It’s like when I have a new idea for a toy or something. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s just suddenly there, like a blossoming in my head, or like a wonderful shape that just found its receptacle. I witness it, but I’m not really doing it.”

They turned the corner, edging around bulges of jasmine. A few clumps of wisteria pushed through the fence slats like faces.

“So it occurred to me,” Marty reported, “that my subconscious symbiote has found a successful strategy for getting me to slow down and pay attention. For two years in a row now, right during the height of my busiest season, it manages to injure me just enough. Remember last year and the broken toe? Now I have a cracked butt. Not enough for casts or crutches or postponing pleasure, just a reason to make me reassess. Seems to me I have to find a way to readjust before my subconscious has to injure me.”

Jane looked ahead and laughed. Her chin tipped up as she said “It sure can’t hurt … as much.”

Marty took the Slinky. She juggled it up and down as they walked, enjoying the weight of metal gathering in each palm, the sound of it coiling down, its slow pull forward.