Sputterpub's Blog

That was the day I learned about the molestation. I don’t know why Evie never told me about it when it happened, but we sat down with coffee right after Jessie stomped off and Evie started talking. A decade earlier when Jessie was seven, there was a situation with a guy at church. He was a nice enough man, around thirty, but it turned out that he had a strong attraction to little girls and he’d already been in trouble. His faith and the church had helped him conquer temptation then, and he moved and started life over. Of course he continued to go with what worked, so he joined the church in his new community. Immediately he became involved and in time volunteered to work with the children, so that’s where he was when he failed to resist temptation again.

Luckily he didn’t get far before he was discovered. He’d helped Jessie and a few others out of most of their clothes and he’d taken some photographs, and it turned out he touched one child. That’s the girl who talked, which resulted in his dismissal and prosecution. The little girls’ families were offered counseling. Mike and Evie switched to another church.

“Didn’t they run a background check on the guy?” I asked.

“I guess not. I don’t think they were as aware of these problems then. And Mike handled all the negotiations with our old church. I was too upset. Mike thought they should have paid us something, to compensate us for all the grief, but they just tried to make it go away with comfort and sympathy and dismissing the perpetrator.”

I cast back in memory. Sure – both of us were having kid problems then. Jessie and David were each acting out. My son was so prone to outbursts when frustrated that he kept getting kicked out of all programs. Vividly, almost viscerally, I remembered the horrible cycle of time-outs, behavior contracts, suspensions, and finally ousters. We went through three therapists before we found Pam.

At the same time Evie was reporting big problems with Jessie. One of the consequences of her prematurity was a slight learning disability, and I remember that Evie attributed Jessie’s violent tantrums to her continuing failure to read. Evie and Mike got a tutor for Jessie but they didn’t seek a shrink. I thought they should have – it’s no different from hiring child care or an accountant or any other expert to whom you can delegate some of life’s work – but Evie said at the time that the reading tutor and family prayer would be enough.

(to be continued on Monday and concluded on Tuesday)

The shock to me about Jessie, when I noticed her a year ago, was her size. She has thick mahogany hair and a creamy complexion, but all I saw was body. For a person who started out so small and doesn’t have big parents, she’s grown into a tall, large-featured, heavy-set girl. I’d heard about her weight now and then from Evie, who prided herself on her size six figure and was always irked by her daughter’s girth, and I’d seen the annual Christmas photo card and sometimes the child herself, but it wasn’t until I was sharing house space with Jessie that I realized how ungainly she is.

A lot of the problem is her posture. That’s the only thing she seems to have inherited from her petite mom, and it’s bad. Jessie has wide shoulders and she carries them slumped. She might wear her weight with grace if she’d let her chest open but as it is she reminds me of a big titian-haired troll, lumbering around so her arms look too long compared to her thick legs.

Evie has always had horrible posture herself. It wasn’t that she’d had teenage height to hide, or an embarrassment of early mammary riches; she was five foot four and an average C cup. She got tested as a kid for scoliosis: negative. Five years ago she reported normal results from a bone density scan.

But she slouches. She walks with her head jutting forward so the back of her neck always bows. Her posture is so bad it counteracts her good figure, the same way a cheap cut undoes the effects of her thick dark-blonde hair and her rampant freckles diminish her skin tone. It used to be I couldn’t stop myself from advising her to straighten up; I’d even poke her gently in the middle of her back between her shoulder blades, trying to tell her body without words to align itself. But she never made an alteration and over time she seems to have built up a hump and resentment. She has also developed asthma and blames it on work, but I read somewhere that chronic bad posture can cause respiratory problems. I wonder if she’s hanging herself on a cross of skeletal imbalance. A chiropractor would have a field day with her.

Of course I don’t mean to sound critical. It’s not like I’m perfect. I’m so phobic about commitment that I not only didn’t marry my son’s father; I’ve never been able to bring myself to own real estate. I even lease my car. But I have good posture. My father saw to that. And I taught David to align his spine, use his stride, carry his own weight. So he stands up straight but he’s on an obsessive quest for a mate. It’s not like I could guard all fronts.

David broke his wrist when he was ten, so I knew a bit about the limitations. And I once sprained mine badly enough to require a brace. I’ll never forget what a challenge shoe laces were, and how long it took to get into my jeans. One of my funniest memories from then was of my boyfriend trying to help me with the jeans; he pulled straight up and hoisted me into the air by the denim. That’s when I realized we girls wriggle into our pants for a reason.

I remembered that the first time I saw Jessie help her mother into jeans. I had just arrived at Evie’s house to run errands and get her to the doctor. I had a key then because I was coming by so often. I let myself in and there was Jessie trying the same upward move my boyfriend had used. She must have yanked Evie a foot off the ground. Jessie grunted at the same time that Evie yelped. “Hey. Easy,” advised Evie. “Jeez, Ma. I’m just trying to help. You’re never happy with me.” Our eyes met as she set her mother down, and Jessie looked sullen to me. But she had low thick brows and no one was plucking them, so she would have appeared to glower no matter what. And I only saw her face for a second; then she left for school.

“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)