Sputterpub's Blog

“It was so ironic,” Evie declared as she gently clunked her cast onto the table top. “We’d had a perfect day of skiing, and there we were in the parking lot, about to load the car for the drive home, when my right foot shoots forward on what must have been ice, and I start to go down. It’s like a reflex to put your hand out,” she continued, nodding at her broken wrist, “and the doctor said it never stops the fall.”

I heard, I sympathized, and I filled in for her at the office. There were only two others besides us, so we all picked up a pile of work.

That was a year ago, and it’s when I got to know Evie’s family. Maybe because we worked together every day, we rarely socialized out of the office. I knew about Mike and Jessie of course, but I wasn’t really acquainted with them. After the fall, when I often had to be Evie’s right hand, I interacted with her husband and daughter.

Mike is typically Irish. He’s short, rounding, red-haired, and he loves beer and chatter. He’s pushing sixty so his hair has faded to pinkish orange. His skin bears the fragile pallor peculiar to aging Northern Europeans: vein-translucent unless flushed. His fingernails are clean but a little too long. He earns money without ever seeming to have a job. He’s always networking but never really busy. I’ve been told about services as diverse as helping others buy used cars, providing neighborhood mediation, and negotiating with anybody’s home contractors. I’ve also heard about hours spent in coffee shops and packs of cigarettes smoked, and a high-maintenance, often grumpy man.

Jessica is three months older than herself. She was the result of a surprise pregnancy after years of disappointing tries, followed by several miracles of neonatology when she cut her own gestation short. She was born almost three months early. She didn’t come home to live with her parents until she was a month beyond her originally scheduled birthday. That’s when Evie and Mike started attending the local Lutheran church, but I don’t think it was about premature birth. It was about birth in general, the same theme that impelled them to buy the suburban house and the hatchback car we then liked to call their starter station wagon.

I’m not proud of it, but I never could resist comparing my life to Evie’s. I know it’s a fruitless exercise – what can it produce but feelings of either smugness or inadequacy in me? – but I think everyone has a tendency to look around at what others are doing, and I’ve always been enticed by our proximities.

We’re the same age. We work together in the same small office. We were pregnant at the same time. In fact, I was due before Evie. David should have been almost two months older than Jessie and instead he’s nearly that much younger.

I remember that time well. We planned for our maternity leaves by bringing in extra help, but we figured I’d go out first. Evie’s premature delivery disrupted more lives than hers. My own leave was cut short. I was never able to quantify the damage, but I know David would have been better off if I hadn’t had to rush back to work.

(continued Wednesday)

So she picks at him and today he hunches, but that matters no more than words. They don’t have time to prolong their hostilities this morning, but if they did they’d soon devolve into arguing about how they argue, she strident, articulate and unattractive, he semi-silent, scared and almost scary.

It used to be Marnie worried she would waste herself by being alone. She’d read the line about many a flower casting its perfume into the desert air, and when she was young she thought that meant it would be misuse for her to be single. Keith wasn’t abusive, after all, and he didn’t step out on her, and he earned a decent living. But lately she’s thinking it’s a waste to be with someone who’s such a drag. She hasn’t said that yet, and she knows Keith would disagree.

It used to be she thought a sad marriage was probably better than divorce, and a mediocre marriage was definitely better than divorce, especially with kids involved. Lately she’s started to question that. Now she thinks that marriage is useful if a couple is poor, but it’s a disadvantage if the participants can provide for themselves alone. It stifles, at least the woman. Anyway, the kids are grown and launched. And neither had ever been fooled about the quality of their parents’ marriage.

Again, Keith would disagree. He’d tell Marnie to look around at others. He’d assert that what they have is as good as it gets.

But there’s no time for that this morning. They’re nearing his building when they encounter one final snarl of congestion and Keith guns the car into the intersection. He’s accelerating through the end of a yellow light at the same time that he angles toward the right for the last turn when they encounter what feels at first like a big dip and then gives. The street beneath them drops away and their car falls seven feet straight down. Later they’ll learn that PG&E worked at that spot over the weekend and didn’t repatch/repave sufficiently. But at the moment they are stunned, unhurt, looking up out of their windows at a cloud of rising street dust.

They’ll be okay. Insurance will cover all damage. Marnie will laugh about it later, but Keith’s sense of humor may have atrophied by now.

As long as Marnie can remember, she has craved a witness. Someone who could watch her and see that, really, she’s a nice person. An interesting, sanguine, unthreatening soul. At her youngest she imagined her witness was God. A bit bigger, she fantasized that it could be her father. He loved her that much but he had his own life to witness. Like other strong desires of hers, Marnie has had to make it happen herself. And so it is that I am, projected out of her vigor, her first imaginary friend grown into an astral witness. I’m a packet of benign energy in the back seat of the car or lightly now on her shoulder as she is assisted to the gouged surface of the street. Ever watching. Mostly approving.

Keith is a somewhat silent man, and Marnie mistook that for strength. They met when they were young and he was frisky; she didn’t notice in all the excitement that he was boring. After they settled down Keith did what he always did with his dullness; he hid it in quiet service. He made himself useful by fetching and repairing things, industry that familiarized him with all the consumables that now inhabit his weekends. He didn’t reveal himself.

Unfortunately, revelation is what Marnie’s always wanted. She arrived with a mission and she has never let it go; she hungers to understand. Keith had that itch too, early on, but just enough grownups disparaged his questions for him to give up the game. “You mean you don’t know . . .?” was a response he heard too often as a questing child. And neither of his parents taught him how to be embarrassed, so he retreated into silence. He chose to appear to know and so gave up learning.

Marnie heard the toxic phrase but it didn’t stop her. She was raised by an energetic foolish mother and a didactic indignant father, and she early learned to push through any sneer or awkwardness, to get an answer. Her parents’ mistakes were obvious to her always, and she was able to overlook those mistakes, mostly, while she asked her questions and basked in their boggled pride.

She works to know herself, and she says she wants to understand her mate. She keeps pushing at Keith’s silence, and he, depending on his momentary love or hate for her, either tries to placate her with the answer he thinks she wants, or baits her with half-amiable passivity. He wants to be unbothered.

Marnie is easily animated by ideas, and Keith mistook that for gaiety. She gets so excited in a good debate that she trembles and her nipples harden; Keith misunderstood that for sex. He grew up alone and silent, and all he ever wanted was a talkative partner. He met, mated and married Marnie, and he figured as long as he was nice to her she’d be happy.

She starts on him again, after he changes lanes without signaling and two other drivers honk their objections. “Gad,” she begins with a mutter and increases her tone as she speaks. “It’s really a matter of elegance,” and she isn’t aware of the disparaging look on her face. “Remember the zipper?” We all recall the event: a chaotic afternoon commute; a mess of traffic trying to merge from four lanes to two as half the city workers aimed for their homes; horn honking and finger flipping and acceleration lunges when any space opened up; and one driver, a young attractive black man in a big old American sedan, who opened his door and rose to stand on what would be the running board of an older car and almost sang to the crowd: “People! People! Let’s all just make like a zipper!” It was classic, wise, humorous. It happened long enough ago that Keith and Marnie agreed about it, but now she’s brought it up so often when complaining about Keith’s driving that of course it’s one of the sore spots.

(concluded tomorrow)

They’d bicker more if it weren’t for the marijuana. They cut their freshmen brains on it, together at Cal in 1968. They’d smoke dope and play pool or do newspaper puzzles, or watch TV. Star Trek was first-run then, and pot made the show brilliant. It tweaked their classes more challenging and their arguments at once more esoteric and more entertaining.

They smoke it still, every night if they have it, and they usually have it. They get it from Keith’s old roommate Robert, who grows it on his place up the coast, or from Greg their gay gardener, who buys it from a guy who gets it from a man who acquires it for medicinal purposes and doesn’t use it. The marijuana is much stronger than it was 30 years ago, and it costs more than garnets, but Keith and Marnie keep smoking it every night. They still manage to get high enough that any motivation to argue with each other dissipates like the smoke tumbling upward in the lamplight of their room.

Morning is another matter. Marnie is often irked then, and she’d pick a fight if she didn’t have to get to work. Sometimes she’s irritated enough that she makes time, in the car during the commute and even spilling onto the street after they park, unhappy enough that she harangues Keith on a corner. That never looks good. It doesn’t accomplish anything either, but Marnie seems unable to control herself. She says it’s frustration but it looks like rage. She wonders if it’s hormones and tries to drink less coffee; I wonder if it’s her brain and bring the Prozac up again.

If they stop commuting together, and if they continue smoking at night, they’ll probably stay married till one of them dies. But they’re practical people; it just doesn’t make sense for Keith to drive alone.

The strange thing is how much better Keith looks than Marnie when they argue. The fact is, she usually has justification for her anger and an organized argument. But no matter what words or body language she uses, she comes off as bitchy and strident. He appears put-upon but patient.

(continued next Wednesday)

They’re so different. Keith says he’s the kind of guy who notices what’s right in a situation, while Marnie sees what can be improved and likes to think about how to accomplish the makeover. That was true when they were young; now Keith rarely sees anything right in a situation. Now Marnie is more inclined to accept things, because she knows that she has to allocate her energy. She doesn’t tilt at windmills or argue with pronouns any more. But the gulf between their attitudes has not gotten any narrower as they’ve matured.

Keith loves toys. He goes to warehouse stores. He buys appliances and electronic devices. Now that he’s pretty much stopped drinking and having imaginative sex, the only way he gets happy is when he has a new gadget to hook up or load or debug or play.

Marnie on the other hand is made nervous by things. Clutter agitates her. She says it’s like visual chatter. As far as she’s concerned every appliance and system has idiosyncrasies, and she’d like to limit her obligation to understand their quirks. The remote control unit that governs the bedroom TV, for example, has a fussy power switch. About a third of the time that it’s pressed, it turns the TV on or off, as commanded, but only for two seconds; then the machine reverts to its former, off or on, mode. Marnie and Keith have learned not to trust that button. Or their dishwasher: it has intermittent problems releasing the detergent from its little time vault, so Marnie has to pay attention for the click that indicates dispensation. Keith’s response to those issues is to look for improved governing gadgets. Marnie tries to understand and have a relationship with each of the systems, so she wants to reduce (or at least not increase) the number of systems. Their friends get each side of the argument, but just about everyone thinks Marnie is overreacting. “Just let him shop at Costco,” they all say. But they don’t understand that all the stuff makes Marnie feel a little ill in her own house – a little edgy everywhere – and she shouldn’t have to take Prozac for that.

Lately they’ve each gotten more extreme about their preferences. In the past half year Keith has gone shopping more, returning to their garage with large boxes and bags of dry goods, while Marnie has increased the time she spends in her small study. He constructs utilitarian shelf units for the basement and fills them with batteries, lightbulbs, extension cords and paper products, while she rocks in her old chair and rereads Jane Austen, or browses through Elle. She’d like to live in a smaller house. One large room with the kitchen in a corner and adjoining bath and laundry . . . that would suit her fine. Keith would go crazy in such a small space. He doesn’t imagine it or any alternative to the house they have.

(continued tomorrow)