Sputterpub's Blog

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.

Jane was not beautiful. Marty had been, and was still quite attractive, and Marty was a fair judge of beauty; she didn’t delude herself about Jane’s looks. To her Jane was lovely but she’d never be a head-turner. She was young, fresh, sweet, clean. To Jane Jane was hopelessly dull.

She had pale freckled skin, prone to burn and blemish. Straight dirty-blonde hair that looked oily if it wasn’t shampooed daily. Jane didn’t battle weight the way Marty had all her life, but she couldn’t see that as an advantage; instead she saw her elbows sharp, her knees knobby, herself a light-haired version of Olive Oyl. She had pale blue eyes, beige-lashed, thin lips, good teeth, a narrow bump-bridged nose. Jane said all she needed was a face wart and the right costume to make a classic witchy crone. Marty said, “Nonsense. You’re coltish and you have awkward grace. You look like Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter.”(Marty didn’t tell Jane she thought the Redgraves were a remarkably unattractive family).

Marty could have said (but happened not to) that Jane was too playful to be any kind of crone. That was her most charming characteristic. From infancy she had been delighted with simple classic toys; even as a toddler she cherished rag dolls and Jacob’s-ladders like they were collectible artifacts. Good Yo-yos, fine kaleidoscopes, weighty gyroscopes, Russian nesting dolls. She began modifying some, designing others. She developed into an incessantly creative young woman who enjoyed the glee of toys. (She also grew indignant about purity. Her first real outrage was about what Disney did to the folktale about the little mermaid. She could be as vituperative about those classical pollutions, as she called them, as she was delighted with well-designed playthings.)

So Marty wasn’t too surprised to see the Slinky. What grabbed her was the triggered memory. Jane entered the room while shuffling the shining coil from palm to palm, creating a waterfall swish as the spring cascaded down. That sound, that sweet whistle high-low, solo/multi-toned, transported Marty immediately to Chula Vista, spring, when she was ten. She got her first Slinky then from her neighbor Bruce, and she adored the sound, the feel, the look of it as it arch-stepped down the stairs. But her brothers bent it to deformity within three days, and her mother was glad for its destruction; it had begun to mark the wood where the stair runner didn’t cover.

“It’s outrageous!” Jane declared, followed by, “How you feeling?”

“Pretty much the same. What is?” Marty glanced at the Slinky and raised her brows about outrage. She pushed herself up on one elbow and adjusted the heat under her waist.

“I just walked by that bath shop on Solano, and they’ve got new-fangled yech Slinkys all over their window. It’s gross.”

Marty just looked at her.

“Maybe you don’t remember but when I was a kid they replaced the good old metal with plastic in Day-Glo colors – you know: loud yellows, shrill oranges, toxic greens. They never worked right, didn’t sound right, flopped after their first holiday season. The manufacturers went back to metal, kind of like Classic Coke.

“Well, someone dug some plastic Slinkys up, and they dangled them in the shop window: a visual pun – Spring? Would have been better in pastels but that’s the image they were going for.”

“It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, actually.” Marty shifted her legs as she spoke, beginning to sit up to stand.

“That’s my point. It’s a good idea. Now I’m afraid that display could make the bad plastic Slinkys have value: you know what I mean – the retro-nostalgia angle.”

(concluded tomorrow)

If Marty were as resilient as she says, she would have bounced off the brick. If she were as coordinated as she wants, she wouldn’t have lost her footing. If she were as responsible as she thinks, the path wouldn’t have been slippery enough to fell her.

But Marty is full of shit. Actually, that’s precisely inaccurate: Marty’s inner ass is currently so inflamed that it won’t tolerate the presence of shit at all. The minute any waste accumulates she feels it – she’s defecating half a dozen times a day lately, and thinks (sarcastically) she might as well take advantage of the emptiness and have that overdue colonoscopy now.

Marty thinks sarcastically even though she knows it’s the cheapest form of wit. It’s better than grumpiness, and that seems to be her alternative. She feels whiney a lot lately, cantankerous often, curmudgeonly late at night. The bottom of her spine aches when she sits, pulls when she stands. Like rocks in her hubcaps. Stutters in her steps.

She remembers ski patrol three decades ago. Back when she was blonde. Everyone they pulled off the toboggan hill had a broken coccyx. She watched it hurt then and never wondered how long it would take to heal. Now she’ll know.

She hasn’t been to a doctor. She doesn’t much respect them. Marty was subjected to a barbaric tonsillectomy when she was five: a trial-by-ether that made her choose between autism and willfulness, but that’s an injury for another story. The fact is, she’s never had a meaningful medical diagnosis, though she has received stupidity, arrogance, magical thinking, malpractice.

Dentists may be worse. Marty has chronic periodontal disease, so she knew to see her dentist immediately about last week’s sudden swelling in her mouth. Dr. Simmons tsked and prodded and directed her to the endodontist for a root canal. There a quick test found a live nerve and sent her back. The dentist shot an X-ray (the lead shield covers the neck now, because dental science finally discovered that those benign, preventative, wise, can’t-hurt-you yearly X-rays in fact do hurt people, in their thyroid glands, which causes havoc in their endocrine systems, and which was an obvious consequence to any patient who ever reclined there and submitted to having her or his head radiated by a technician who had to leave the room for the procedure). Then he tsked some more. “If it’s not the nerve it must be periodontal,” he concluded reluctantly, and finally he wrote her the referral she needed in the first place.

No, Marty called her friend Phil about her butt. He used to be an MD but got out of it because medical business drove him nuts. Phil told her she didn’t need a picture unless she were one of the unlucky 5% to have a consequence: a sharp bit of bone biting into the colon. She had no symptom of that. So it didn’t matter whether she broke or bruised; the important thing was all the muscles that attached right there – they got smashed and would take months to heal. Marty used to freedive for abalone with her father. She remembered pounding the flesh with the tenderizing mallet before flash-cooking it thirty seconds on a side. She imagined her muscles after that bright silver mallet. She cranked up the heating pad.

The doorbell rang. Marty began to consider answering it. She’d almost swung her legs off the couch, almost pulled her sacrum away from the heating pad, when she heard the familiar three raps and then the key in the knob. She sat back with relief, awaiting Jane.

If Marty could have chosen a goddaughter she would have picked Jane. But nobody ever gave her the chance. She’d never been close to anyone at that tender time of reproduction. Jane was the oldest child of Marty’s ex-neighbors. She was twenty-seven and on her own in San Leandro, but she’d lived next door to Marty from age two to seventeen, modeled hula skirts and cowgirl outfits for Marty when she was three, baked holiday cookies with Marty every year since she was five, had special overnights with Marty (buttered popcorn and movies) once she was six, and walked, ran, strutted, stomped over to Marty’s regularly during adolescence, for relief from her mother’s breast cancer, her father’s unemployment, her brothers’ tortures.

(continued on Wednesday)

Lanie was surprised that so few of her women friends had babies. That so few of the guys had careers. Not only did no one she knew grow wiser with age; the common consensus was that any good idea had already been thought, so there wasn’t much point in thinking.

All of that surprised her, but nothing stunned her so much as the way she saw people lie to themselves. She often watched her acquaintances at parties or on vacations. What she usually witnessed were people who were less than happy. Maybe they were good sports trying to have a nice time, but usually they were dissatisfied, putting in hours at an event that didn’t live up to their expectations. Wearing false smiles. Stifling yawns. Forcing gaiety. Growing testy.

That wasn’t the surprise part. Most of the time the event didn’t live up to Lanie’s anticipation either. No, the stunner was the debriefing. In the conversations afterward, those same participants claimed to have had a wonderful experience. Really. Best (fill in the blank) ever. And Lanie had watched that witness have, at best, a mediocre time.

It got worse. The person may have known at first that she or he was putting a positive spin on a boring party. But faster than Lanie could even record it, the speaker began to act as if she or he believed the spin.

It wasn’t just parties. When Lanie’s friend Nancy was around thirty-five she had a secret abortion. She was married and her husband would have liked a child, but they already had two and Nancy was convinced they couldn’t handle another kid. Lanie helped get her through the procedure; as far as Guy and the world knew, Nancy had a miscarriage and then a complication which resulted in a tubal ligation. That therapeutic abortion was called a miscarriage, miscarriage, miscarriage so widely, that by the time the aspiring fetus would have been ten Lanie heard Nancy refer to the experience as a miscarriage even to her.

She tried to talk to Nancy about it. Coming away from a good dinner at a downtown restaurant, Lanie broached the old subject. Nancy acted confused. Then she stammered out her pale insistence; she said she’d never had an abortion.

Lanie was stunned by Nancy’s denial. She went silent, considering the inaccuracy of recollection and also how estranged or even hateful some life partners are toward each other, when they were interrupted. As often happened, Lanie’s posture or stride triggered something in a stranger, and an interaction occurred.

They were about a block from Nancy’s car. Lanie was half-aware of a street person, young and female, in torn jeans, light shirt, denim jacket, athletic shoes, sitting on wide concrete steps, eating something out of a small fast-food bag. The young woman jumped to a stand and accosted her:

“I know you, bitch!” She placed herself about three feet in front of Lanie, a little to her left. She was a few inches taller than Lanie’s five foot six, with a fine light mahogany complexion and hot chocolate eyes. “I hear you talkin’ about blowin’ things up! I see your nasty grin!”

At first Lanie was scared. Then angry. A familiar stubbornness bloomed in her and she told herself that the street was hers as much as anyone else’s. She felt Nancy tense beside her, but she resumed walking. The young woman followed, still ranting. Every impulse in Lanie was to speed up, so she deliberately slowed down. And felt the young woman, behind her, slowing too. She stepped yet slower and she heard from the diminishing voice that her antagonist was allowing a gap to widen between them.

Suddenly she understood. That young woman had mistaken her for someone else. That young woman had, in fact, begun to realize her own mistake even while she confronted Lanie. There had been understanding at last, in those hot chocolate eyes. Momentary beautiful connection.

“Crazy street person,” Nancy concluded. Lanie couldn’t agree less.

Lanie works in stories. She records episodes in her diary from her experiences or from what people tell her, which makes her remember them, which prompts her to tell them again, better, to others, which often results in others telling her theirs.

It isn’t only that people are more disclosive to her. Around Lanie they remember things they are otherwise likely to forget.

The journal entries began when she was six and took off in junior high, but the tendency became marked in tenth grade. That was the year Lanie hated herself and longed to be catatonic. She concluded that nothing could be worse than self-disesteem. After a long bad wallow she started to talk more and then to recraft herself, using as her models book characters, random glances, classical traits. She carried visions around: the fierce independence of Howard Roark, the enduring wisdom of Athena, the serenity implied by the softness of an acquaintance’s palm, the erotic potential in her scarf-clad Barbie doll. Of course the recrafting process required that she face her own demons.

She felt insecure.

She felt like there was some rule book distributed to everyone but her, at birth or sometime.

She felt exposed.

She dreaded embarrassment.

No sooner did she enumerate those evils than she understood that she didn’t have any corner on them. Everyone she knew, everyone she watched, had exactly the same imps flitting around their souls.

That was her tenth grade epiphany. Only to Lanie it seemed more like a penetrating glimpse into the obvious. It was all there, in front of her and everyone else, but most other folks were too busy tending their own tenderness to notice (she carried the image of dogs curled into corners, protectively licking their own trembling limbs).

She talked about it at the time. Of course she did; Lanie always talked, and people always talked back to her. Over and over she witnessed the cascade of surprise as her interlocutor detected a common bond, a fellow traveler, understanding. She began to live the theory: from then on, until refuted by experience, she would assume everyone else was as insecure and imperfect as she was.

Nothing contradicted that assumption in the ensuing decades. But there was a greater charm to it than that. It was as if the theory – her understanding about the insecurity and flaws of all folks – acted as some sort of shield to prevent the veil of narcolepsy that benighted everyone else. Starting when they were in their mid-twenties, Lanie watched her peers stall, forget, and start to proclaim. They began to rewrite their childhoods as happier or sadder than they really had been. Most of them settled on certain opinions, once and for all – put matters to bed as it were – and ever after prevented the entry of any new information by continually projecting a settled stance. Somehow her friends had become people with policies instead of passions.

Meanwhile, some things became as clear to Lanie as if she were wearing night vision goggles on a scouting mission. Like all first daughters she watched her parents, and she saw them seek pity points as if they were carousel rings, competing about how much each labored or suffered (her mother needed roller skates to keep up with the household demands and a genie to fulfill her husband’s micro-instructions about home maintenance and car repair; her father had all of the trials of breadwinning, and also suffered from year-round hay fever). In time, Lanie and her brothers became expert at slightly exaggerating their efforts and their illnesses. And no sooner did she note the Pity Point game in her own family than she started seeing it in everyone else’s.

It didn’t stop when she grew up, either. That’s when she got to discover the myth about quality time vs quantity, the fact that laziness was the true mother of invention, the twist that work produces inspiration.