Sputterpub's Blog

Her neighbor Olga begged her to come. It was a wine-and-cheese gathering to collect money to feed the homeless; normally Polly would donate and avoid. But this was abnormal Sunday. And she gave herself a way out. She set up her home for comfort when she returned, the heat and lamps just so, and she put food in the oven she’d need to tend in an hour.

So she walked half a block to the party, which was overcrowded and seemed inhospitable to her except for the few minutes she spent talking to Olga. It was hot and she was trying to figure a graceful way out when someone had the sense to open the door for air, and Polly smelled jasmine mingled with an undercurrent of musk and then, just as he swung his large-featured face her way, she noticed Hank.

I had no idea it could be like this. Each moment is identical to the last and yet a transformation has occurred… at once I feel more excited and more mellow. Dense and light. My siblings and I conjectured, in our little grooves and pockets, but never this, this smoothness. I find myself dreaming of fat, of slipperiness and lubricity, conditions I found repulsive to imagine, when I was young…

Hank was discombobulated in a different way than Polly. He didn’t work quite as hard at his job, but he was four months divorced after a 33-year marriage, and although he was the one who left, he wasn’t happy. His ex-wife was pressing him for money, his grown children distressed him with their disapproval, and he was lonely. He also felt confused and a little rebellious. Just that morning he’d smoked a joint for the first time in almost 20 years. He got the stuff from a work colleague, remembering how much he’d enjoyed it when he was younger, and that morning he rolled a joint, took a deep toke, and sat back into his cheap new couch. It only took about three drags before he was flying into memories of Anna, the one woman with whom he’d had an affair while married, who always smoked pot and who held his head when they made love.

Hank had to come to the fundraiser because he promised he would when Pete sold him the weed. He’d rather have just written a check to the cause and been done with it, but Pete insisted. Hank was there but only half-present until someone opened the door, and he never knew whether there was a skunk outside or some people smoking dope, but either way he got a whiff of his favorite scent along with something floral and at the same time he spotted Polly, who with her auburn hair and deep chest and glasses could have been Anna’s twin sister, across the crowded room.

Love at first sight takes 75 minutes. It could happen faster if we allowed it in the young, but we think they don’t understand love. Their province is infatuation. Adults require 75 minutes.

The pheromones don’t take that long. They waft at an average speed of seven inches a second; they crossed the span in a minute and a half. The middle-aged people named Polly and Hank saw each other at the speed of light and sensed each other just a little later, but they didn’t follow their impulses for nearly an hour.

Ask me what I’ve always wanted and I’ll describe this. My roots are absolutely normal: salt-of-the-earth American, raised in the country among my own kind. But I’ve arrived now. This is my hour. After a lifetime in the dark, at last I sense heat.

The fact is, people are rather gross. Their palates aren’t as subtle as chefs behave, and their minds are not that susceptible to subliminal messages. In the grand scheme of human perceptions, pheromones and subtleties don’t matter much, compared to basic ego. That Polly exuded a molecule shaped like a receptor in Hank’s forehead didn’t promote their union any more than the ambient temperature in the room where they met.

The facts are, Polly and Hank were each present and ready.

She was 53 and he had just observed, grumpily, his 60^th birthday. She hadn’t been in a relationship for a decade. Neither had had sex for a year. Both were burned out by their careers, having risen to consulting positions in their respective industries, where they were so capable that all they ever worked on were the nastiest and most thankless problems. His environmental business had him flying so often that he suffered from a chronic respiratory infection, while her management consulting operation meant she drove an average of 700 miles a week, in all the traffic. They were both overweight and medicated for hypertension.

The warmth continues into me, and of course I soften. From starch I sweetly melt. I was raised with my siblings dreaming of sunlight and now, finally, I feel this. My skin eases. Yearning quiets.

Polly smelled jasmine as she saw him, and the scent probably made her more receptive. Someone opened the door to the back garden, tumbling the fragrance like low smoke through the stuffy room. Her brain zipped to memories of summer evenings from childhood, when the night-blooming jasmine drifted its incense through the screened open windows in the back of her aunt’s big house at the end of dinnertime, just as she and her brothers were about to burst out of doors for hide-and-seek in the late dusk.

She had decided that morning to take a day off. She tended to work every day for at least several hours, and it had been over three months since she had a free Sunday. But that morning she resolved otherwise. She did nothing customary. She didn’t exercise immediately; in fact, she never got around to it all day. She drank less coffee. She even agreed to stop by the little fundraiser.

And so it was. We had a wake for Mr. Fartham, and then we played Bingo for mementos. The wake was not about drinking out of pewter or any hope of Mr. Fartham rising again. Rather, we reminisced around him while we all got used to the idea of him dead. For although he’d had a cluster of small strokes a few years back and had become progressively more forgetful, frail and fearing, no one had expected the massive heart attack that grabbed him while he slept. His wife awoke to discover herself a widow while Valerie, who had lumbered downstairs and started the Sunday pancakes, had her father’s sudden death announced to her with hysterical shrieks.

The wake lasted that day and most of the next. We didn’t have the body but we had the time till the burial. Mrs. Fartham tried to stay in her room; she might have resisted the effect but for her older daughter. For Valerie got into it. She sat by her father’s stuff weeping at first but she was susceptible to the recollections of most of us around her, and gradually she became more composed than I’d ever seen her, and her face lost the grief-engorgement, and I saw for the first time that she was actually attractive within all the fat. Valerie O. performed little services for her, bringing her hot tea or warm slippers, rubbing her rounded strap-dented shoulders and the wide nape of her neck below her lifted lobes, and when she rose they went upstairs together, apparently to see Mrs. Fartham, who was better for their visits, but also (we learned later) to seek time alone together, for mutual consolation. The Valeries became a couple.

Elizabeth was not so lucky. My phony old friend tried to have everyone and lost us all. She flirted with Jimmy, teased Valerie O., even tried to vamp my brother John. She batted her eyelashes at her fathers’ old colleagues, and attempted to pad her dad’s obituary with references to herself (she elbowed me out of the way to tell the local reporter that her father’s pet peeve, as well as her own, was rudeness!). She made bulldyke disparagements about Valerie O. and then tried to gulp them back when her sister came out. She flirted so aggressively with Jimmy that I saw him blush; I overheard her promise him that he wouldn’t have to do anything – he could just lay back and enjoy.

She saw me overhear. She blushed redder than a redhead and retreated after that. And I’ll admit I got a thrill. It was a cheap thrill, yes, but powerful enough.

The burial was a brief ceremony between the wake before and the games after. We caravanned there in the traditional dark, slow-moving sedans, placards in the windows and headlights on, but we’d all said so much at the wake that the speeches were short at the graveside. Then we returned to the Fartham abode and more food, and Jimmy as promised ran Bingo games for the miscellany.

I took the classic Playboys when I won, and some of my old friends looked a little askance. But me behaving oddly wasn’t that strange to them. They knew me for weird. They did agree with me though: we did it right; we honored Mr. Fartham; we had fun.

Elizabeth strode into the room. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with all of Dad’s things…” She tossed her head as she complained, swinging her chin-length yellow hair toward the objects that filled the table. She tended to speak in italics. She tended to lie about her past. She claimed that she’d had red hair as a kid; she said she’d always been thin. When I knew her, she was mousy brown and fat.

If it weren’t for classmates.com, I wouldn’t be with her. But Valerie Otterholt tried to organize a 35-year reunion and that led to reconnections. She’d stayed close to Valerie Fartham and she let me know when Mr. Fartham died. So there I was with Valerie O. and Elizabeth, doing the funeral chores. Mrs. Fartham was useless with grief. Valerie Fartham had disabled herself with obesity. Somehow I and old Jim Wilson were roped into helping Valerie O. with the family.

There were two big issues: the funeral rites and Mr. Fartham’s “stuff.” His widow and daughters wanted to keep his best guitar for sentimental reasons, and most of his books for their library, but they had little use and less room for all the objects he’d collected. Most of the items weren’t worth much. Mr. Fartham had taken up many hobbies and then hadn’t pursued most of them, so there were parts of stamp and coin collections, beginner equipment for woodwork and tennis, used games, pre-computer puzzles, and classic magazine pornography.

Jim Wilson walked into the room as Elizabeth’s hair settled around her neck. He was still rambunctious, but he’d grown into his personality; he was no longer the completely obnoxious boy of my youth. I understood he was a slut – consistently unfaithful to his wife of thirty years – but he was the most interesting person around.

“God but funerals make me horny,” he whispered as he passed me, ambiguously caressing my waist.

I twisted a little away from him and made some unmemorable comment about a desire for life renewal.

“No, I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “There’s something about women at funerals: well-dressed, quiet, vulnerable I guess, that just turns me on.”

“Well contain yourself,” I advised him. “Help Elizabeth come up with a home for all these things.”

“I’d rather help you,” he leered. “I can’t stand her. She wasn’t too bad as a kid, but she’s a phony joke now.”

I reconsidered him at that. He might be a slut but it appeared he was at least a little selective.

“Bingo,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I mean the game! Let’s array the stuff on the dining room sideboard and play bingo for things! Really. I’ll run the show. Winners can select what they want.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Ack-shually,” Jim made it sound British, “it’s a damn good one.”

(to be concluded tomorrow)

I was a liar, too. Usually I told untruths to improve the story rather than to duck blame, which is a justification about as worthy as not making money at one’s crime. When I was seven I claimed I’d spun the hula hoop around me a million times, insisting upon it if anyone acted incredulous, and when they all stopped objecting I actually thought I’d snowed them. I had no idea how long it would have taken me to count to a million.

When I was eight and John was five, we broke one of our parents’ cards, playing Slapjack. We weren’t supposed to use their fancy double set of KEMs; we had our own rough-backed five-and-dime decks. But I so loved the slippery feel of their cards when I shuffled, that I talked young John into playing with them, and sure enough a jack snapped in two pieces, imperfectly in a diagonal making two useless polygons, when our palms dropped together on it before it was flat.

I was all for simple denial. Let the parents find the pieces; we weren’t supposed to play with the cards so of course we hadn’t played with them. But my brother John made George Washington look sneaky. He insisted that we confess. He confessed for both of us.

I don’t think I actually felt valued until fifth grade, with Mr. Fartham. He saw something in me, and he helped me see it too. Then selfish didn’t seem so bad.

He made everyone read or recite a poem each Thursday morning. Within a month the whole class had memorized the first stanza of the verse about Paul Revere’s ride, so even if you didn’t prepare you could always stand up and belt out : “Now listen my children and you shall hear …” But I always went to the trouble of finding something, and Mr. Fartham appreciated it. I’ll never forget reading “The Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb” to them. I loved Robert Service’s rhythms, and I got into it at the climax of the poem, when the bomb is about to blow. I had the class in suspense. Mr. Fartham led them all in actual applause when I finished. It was a shining moment for me.

He had a few other favored students, but I always knew I was number one with him. There was Valerie Otterholt, big and fat and lonely. She wasn’t stupid but I was pretty sure he paid her attention because she was sad. That and because she had the same name as his daughter. There was Kevin Sullivan, who had strange science ideas and stuttered. And there was Jimmy Wilson, who rocked in his chair and always got into trouble. I resented Jimmy. He was one of those kids who got attention by acting up. He made it seem stupid to be good.

Fifth grade was about the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Mr. Fartham used to read from then to us while we worked on art projects. I remember I was trying to build a toothpick tower when he told us that in the 1500s, people used to drink ale and whiskey out of lead cups. The combination could poison a person enough to knock him out for a couple of days. So folks would prepare such a person for burial but keep the corpse in the kitchen for awhile, to see if he woke up. Family gathered around for that vigil, and family has to be fed. Hence the wake.

(next 500 words next Wednesday)