Sputterpub's Blog

Lilah was never a good vomiter. Her whole family avoided the process, opting instead to suffer through the clutches of stomach cramps until the problem descended into their intestines, where they were all more comfortable about the issue.

Of course she had no memory of spitting up as a baby, but she had a younger brother who was capable of projectile vomiting, according to her mom. Lilah must have heard a hundred times how Sam only quit the disgusting habit at two, after their mother made him lie in it for all of one nap time.

She did have a memory of being sick in school. She was in fifth grade and her mother’s father was visiting from Florida. He took them all to a fancy place and Lilah ate something wrong. She said she was unwell the next morning but her mother didn’t listen. She declared that Lilah would feel better if she just got up and moved herself, dammit, and she made her go to school anyway. Immediately after the class said the pledge of allegiance, as she took her seat at the corner of the six square desks arrayed like a rectangle, three facing three, Lilah’s stomach clenched and sent its contents exploding up her throat, burning past her teeth and all over the desks.

Her problem then was compound. She was ill. She was lastingly humiliated by her seatmates’ grossed-out reactions (She’d forever be able replay “Eewwww, Mr. Tucker, Lilah barfed!”). She was escorted to the school nurse by the teacher’s pet, a short girl named Betsy who made her feel hulking and ugly as well as sick.

Her mother came for her and felt so bad about sending her to school that she rubbed Lilah’s back and let her have as much ginger ale as she wanted. But regurgitation remained a distasteful experience. Lilah learned to battle any nausea to a salivating stalemate. She must have refused that form of relief a dozen times as an adult. She didn’t want it herself and didn’t understand it in others. When her seven-year old stepdaughter threw up on the back steps, Lilah looked for a dietary cause. That was early in 1990, when they all knew the family was done – the last time she saw little Polly, showing her the house. The child puked all over the classic brick steps and it wasn’t until 1996, one morning vacuuming, catching sight of bright pink under the sunroom baseboard, digging out a cheap plastic barrette, Polly’s, that Lilah finally understood that puke.

It only got worse over the next two years. Bill and Mary had no more babies, partly on purpose but mostly because they rarely had sex after Eric. Bill started to dally with other women. He’d always been outgoing, chatting easily with men and women alike at the car lot and in local taverns where he lunched, and it was a short step from talk to tango, as he’d say. His first encounters were one-night frolics with barflies – standup activities in the bathroom or nape-guided nuzzlings in his car – but within six months he had a real affair going, with a young employee at the dealership, in an apartment he leased near the freeway.

It was a little outrageous. She was only nineteen. He got a thrill out of teaching her how to please him. Her name was Pam but Bill always called her “Baby.” He was done with her within eight months but he paid her community college bills for two years afterwards.

Mary was complacent. It wasn’t that she tolerated philandering – Bill was usually careful, and he acted like a normal suburban husband when he was home. Mary appeared happy with her house and her children. She didn’t seem to expect much from Bill. She was okay transporting the kids in the big car, grocery shopping and planning meals, while Bill zipped around in the roadster and made money.

Bill liked being married. Mary was a nice person. She was boring, but a very good mother to his kids. Home was a comfortable place for him, and if it weren’t for the non-sex he thought it would be good.

He only fell in love with one girlfriend and she wouldn’t have him, so his marriage was safe on that score. Her name was Amy and the near-wreck occurred in 1984. (Apple introduced the Mac computer. The AIDS virus was discovered.) Amy was an environmental activist whose group picketed Bill’s car dealership, and they formed a hot relationship from the debates of that day. They were very different, off as much as on, but they persisted for three years. After Amy, Bill never let his heart get hooked. He was careful to choose partners he didn’t even like.

In 1995 the kids started leaving. That was the year of the Oklahoma City bombing. OJ Simpson was acquitted, and the Ebola virus ransacked Zaire. The twins were twenty-one and flourishing. Emily was engaged to the son of the richest family in neighboring Laguna, and she worked in her chosen field of archaeology. Ned was at the top of his class in medical school.

The other offspring weren’t doing so well. Liz’s decadence had caught up with her and at eighteen she had AIDS. Her promiscuity hadn’t hurt her but sharing needles had.

Laney was healthy but obnoxious. She was sixteen and a fish-eating vegetarian, which meant she thought she had the right to all the lobster and shrimp in the paella, since she wasn’t eating any sausage, ham, or chicken. She believed her blue eyes were owing to her diet instead of to her mom.

Little Rick was the one who made the big news. He was thirteen that year, blonde and cute as the boy next door. He was also impulsive and distractable, often angry or moody, prone to fantasies about superheroes. He picked the lock on Bill’s gun safe one Tuesday. He loaded the revolver and smuggled it to school, where he unloaded it explosively toward the front of his English class. He winged his teacher and injured two kids. Then he turned the gun on himself but it was out of ammunition. Four students jumped on him and held him down until the police arrived. His face was understandably bloodied. Himself was understandably locked up.

Bill has legal problems because it was his gun. He has emotional problems because it was his son. Bill has headlines.

They settled in Terra Vista, where Bill grew up. Mary came from a little town fifty miles inland, but she got to know Terra Vista in the three years she and Bill dated, and she liked it well enough. They could afford a house there, one of the pastel ranch homes close to the newer schools, and Bill’s family was around to help with the kids.

The twins came in 1974. Tiny things with full heads of dark hair. They were born thirty-three minutes apart but they had different birthdays. Emily emerged at 11:40 p.m. on January 11^th, and Edward made his appearance shortly after midnight on January 12^th.

Mary insisted that both names start with E. She liked the EE initials and pouted that twins should have some similarities. Bill went along with her then, and he didn’t argue when she told him she wanted to continue the EE tradition with all of their offspring. In fact, each name was okay with him, and the nicknames queered Mary’s idea anyway, for Edward was known as Ned, and his younger siblings Elizabeth, Elaine and Eric went by Liz, Laney, and Rick, respectively. Only firstborn Emily, also called Em, used the EE.

The twins were born early in 1974, but Bill connected them to events later that year. It was the summer of Nixon’s resignation, when Gerald Ford took the White House without winning an election. And on October 10^th the word “Internet” was first used.

Liz came in 1977, blonde as sunlight. “Star Wars” was released that year. And Laney was born on May 31, 1979, which was the day Rhodesia changed its name to Zimbabwe. Bill wanted to call the baby Rhoda but Mary wasn’t having any of it. 1979 already had the accident at Three Mile Island and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ouster of the Shah, so Bill knew it would be memorable, but he was tickled to have a world event occur on the actual birthday of one of his kids.

Their family was completed on June 14, 1982, with the birth of little Eric. Argentina conceded to England in the Falkland Islands war.

That was the summer Bill first knew discontent. He had time to be introspective because he took the 2 a.m. feedings; when he didn’t doze off with little Eric in his arms (the nipple of the bottle often migrating to the ear of the sleeping boy), he found himself contemplating his life. He was thirty-five and the father of five. He made a decent living but he did it by selling cars, and he’d always known he was capable of more. He’d meant to get around to it; the car dealership was just something his father went into after retiring from the Navy – went into and then bought and somehow was in the process of passing on to Bill, and how was Bill, really, going to switch to something else? With kids aged eight, five, three and new, what could he find that would pay anything like his current job?

Mary didn’t work. That was the agreement they made when she got pregnant with the twins and the doctor advised her to quit her job: she’d mind the babies and the house while he earned the money. At first the arrangement was fine with Bill. Mary was beautifully rounded then, carrying her pregnancy proud-forward, her ankles still slim, her neck long, her hair sleek. Her face glowed with blushing fertility, and Bill felt virile, protective, attracted.

But that was the past, before Bill felt trapped. And Mary had put on weight with each baby. Her face was still lovely, but her neck hid beneath folds of fat, her belly was soft, her thighs were lumpy. Her ankles were still good, but they would have been better if they had been peasant-thick; the contrast between the race-horse elegance and the load of leg was to Bill’s mind ugly.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

Bill Essex is a news junkie. From birth he was interested in his surroundings and attentive to even his mother’s friends’ gossip, but he was bitten by the news bug in fifth grade. He had a good teacher then: one of the too few each student remembers. Mr. Bingham came up with unusual ideas for motivating kids, and the current events quiz was one of his best. Each morning, right after the required pledge-allegiance (this was a few years before the phrase “under God” was temporarily removed from the oath), the class listened to a five-minute, top-o’-the-hour newscast on the radio (AM radio, powered by tubes instead of transistors). Then sometime in the next hour Mr. Bingham would call, “Okay: quiz time! Grab your pencils!” and he’d fire off a few questions about the broadcast they’d just heard. Bill was good at the quiz and got better. Within a couple of weeks no one in the class could beat him. He retained the facility as he grew. He paid attention to the news and he marked the memorable moments in his own life with the current events headlines of the day or season or year.

He was sixteen and a half, for example, and had just kissed the first love of his life, when JFK was shot in Dallas. He forever mixed the memory of Gwen’s warm tongue with the bleakness of that funeral weekend, when all normal TV and talk was pre-empted, when shock and suspicion and amorphous worry prevailed.

He turned twenty-one the spring King and Kennedy were killed, but that was also the year he met Mary. She was a smooth-haired blonde with deep blue eyes and a lyrical laugh. She had long shapely legs and full deep breasts. She was the prettiest girl he ever dated, and she became his wife and the mother of his five children. For awhile Bill thought meeting Mary was the luckiest event of his life.

They were married in 1971. He remembered it as the year of the catalytic converter. The state of California began requiring one in the engine of each new car, cutting down on fuel economy and making home tuneups elusive, for the sake of the environment. Bill and Mary had grown up in the car culture of southern California and, frankly, they resented the state telling them what had to go under the hood of their new Chevy. It made a difference; their honeymoon was a road trip, and Bill’s business was cars.

(to be continued on Wednesday)

The Hyge

The thing of it was, they each thought they hugged too well to quit. It was as if they had an aesthetic obligation to continue, like a talented artist or a brilliant mind.

Sometimes Robert put his arms around Jill’s waist and she wrapped hers about his neck. Sometimes they crossed arms, each placing one over a shoulder and one around ribs. Occasionally they did it all wrong, he up she down, like slow dancing on the opposite sides.

No matter how their arms went, their bodies fit together. They liked one another. Each lived alone and the warmth and pressure felt good.

The thing of it was, though, they did quit. They got in a tussle.

We can imagine them having sex if we wish. There’s a pungent Anglo Saxon word for that. We can picture another night, in Robert’s car, when they park and talk about Deborah’s death, when Robert tells Jill about the tumor emerging through Deborah’s skin, and the last time they tried, unsuccessfully, to make love, while Robert and Jill hold hands lightly, and both their tears fall on them. We can even picture those emotions leading them to form the two-backed beast, but there wouldn’t be much to write about. Jill wanted a stronger mate and Robert was not highly sexed.

Or we can imagine them refraining. Hugging with firmness and attempts at comfort after Robert’s narration of his wife’s last days, but with neither the timing nor the inertia-conquering impulse to advance beyond the boundaries of that hug. Jill just didn’t feel motivated to make the first move. Another description of Robert is sexually retarded.

Either way, it was only three months later that they had the little skirmish that led to estrangement. Robert was into his new phone and became so frustrated when he tried to demonstrate its features to Jill that he spoke carelessly to her, four times. Jill advised him to screw himself, and he took umbrage. She didn’t apologize.

A short time later, Jill heard that Robert was suffering from some cognitive infirmities. Memory and mood disorders beyond his years. She had noticed he was misplacing nouns when he forgot the word “usher” in her presence, but she attributed that to normal aging. She didn’t appreciate the extent of his failure till a mutual friend reported the diagnosis: acute progressive aphasia. Eloquent Robert was losing language. She heard that his mood was always confused or frustrated now, so she sensed it was worse than words. Surely his condition accounted for the way they had clashed. And it just as surely barred any reconciliation.