Clicks and Morning's noises

I used to hate mornings. "I'm not a morning person," I'd moan into my palms, as if rearranging my cheeks would help me wake up.

On the other hand, I'm not an afternoon person (hunger, boredom, self-flagellation for not accomplishing more this morning) nor an evening person either (fear at the close of the day, heavy eyes, lassitude -- or the feeling that somewhere there's person who looks just like me wearing a dress with a splash of sequins at the shoulder stepping into a red-boothed cocktail lounge from some 1950's movie who's about to enjoy a smart cocktail and witty conversation and she's not me but I was her or she could have been me and I'll bet her couch doesn't have this weird musty smell).

I've learned over the years to like mornings. The only person in the barn, no music yet, just hay sifting and pellets crunching and the sweep of a broom, cold damp air, and birds. Once the horses were all fed, retiring to my kitchen, making my own cup of coffee and sitting at my funky table that never met up with the wall. Sipping that coffee. Cold feet, stained hands, warm throat. Best part of the day.

Now that I don't have infants my mornings are back.

Hobbes wakes me up at either five or six in the morning. He doesn't even consider going to Dear Butcher's side of the bed. He stands next to me in the pale dark wagging his tail so that it slaps my bookcase. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. He's not anxious or annoyingly eager or begging. Just steady. Slow. "Hey Lady." Thunk, thunk. "Sun's up." Thunk, thunk. "It's time." Thunk, thunk. Doesn't that hurt, Hobbes?

It's cold in the kitchen. It's a stupid kitchen. Lots of windows that don't open and drafts that come through them anyway. The guinea pigs rattle their water bottles at me as I walk past. Tikk-a. Morning, lady. Tikk-a. Mr. Herriman, my aged neutered boar, often chews on the bars in the morning. Odddly, he doesn't "WHEEP! WHEEP!" like the girls. His wheeper seems to be broken. He wheezes faint puffs of air instead, like an old man stepping down out of a bus. I think he took up bar-chewing in the mornings the way an elderly bus rider might take up rattling his cane.

Dog goes out, gets hopelessly lost in the back yard and needs me to leap-limp out there to rescue him. He's blind -- sometimes he finds something in his vision, like today with the quilt thrown over the chair, targets it, and snakes towards it with desperate authority. Head down, front paws taking huge high steps, straight body lancing right towards the edge of the cliff. "I have no idea what this big white object is," his body says. "But it must be important if I can see it."

"No! No!" I'm calling out to him. "Here." His body stops, his head lifts to catch the breeze, as if he can smell my voice. And he decides the white thing must be the house and starts churning again. "No, Hobbes. Over here." And I have to tiptoe out the door, stepping over globs of dried mud on the patio, prickers everywhere, shards of wood my son has left in the aftermath of some experiment involving a hammer. Lay my hand on Hobbes' neck and talk him home. Always an adventure, dude. Can't wait until it starts raining again.

Dog can't be fed until 7. So that's an hour for me. He flings himself to the ground by the front door, bones clattering on the wood floor. The cat's gone out now with all the fluttering around the back door. The guinea pigs have rediscovered last night's hay and are burbling to themselves. The backyard birds are chuttering.

Blissfully, the chickens are still asleep. I don't mind the chickens too much during the day, but we've got one who Announces Her Movements with hugely loud cackles once or twice a day. If I could identify her when she's silent, I'd gladly remove her from the premises. As it is, I'm left with pelting her with wood shards and globs of dried mud once she gets going. That doesn't stop her, and it only makes me feel guilty, so now I just imagine her cartoon self exploding once I hear the first of fifty -three or more "ca-CAW!"s. Sometimes a random thought goes through her Jurassic head and that sets off a long string of ca-CAW! ca-CAW! ca-CAW! comments on how the world ca-CAW! ca-CAW! ca-CAW! needs to listen to the birthers ca-CAW! ca-CAW! ca-CAW! and Fox News and ca-CAW! ca-CAW! ca-CAW! show more respect for Sarah Palin. I hate that bird. But thankfully she's still asleep.

I need to make coffee. Problem is that running the water in the kitchen sink seems to make the guinea pigs think that a commuter train somewhere is going to leave without them. Many zoomies and laps around the cage. Where are my keys? Rosa, where did you put my briefcase? Get OUT of my way! Well, I was just sitting here eating breakfast, what's your problem? Hey! What? Hey! Did you see the time? Where are the keys? Lettuce orgies, festivals of veggies calm them down, but I was hoping to just make myself a pot of coffee without having to -- OK fine. Have some lettuce. And radishes. And tomatoes. Do you want some cucumber? Gosh, you guys are cute.

By then the coffee's done, the sun is up. There's some time to sit on my oddly musty couch (I must clean this thing. Maybe this afternoon. Stop kidding yourself.), inhale coffee steam, warm my hands and breathe.

The animals and me and warm hands. I think I am a morning person.

Sixes and Sevens

I should blog more.

I should talk about what's on my mind, but I don't want to seem pushy about it.

Look at meeee.

Or don't. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Lengthy ramblings of a confused person. I'm at sixes and sevens as they say. Sort of all over the place.

I set up a visit for next weekend at a friend's horse farm about an hour away. Someone I've never met, but whom I've talked to on a guinea pig care message board and with whom I've exchanged long emails is meeting me at my friend's farm. This girl was posting on the guinea pig board about her riding lessons, the descriptions of which were appalling, and a group of us told her to "go find a better instructor." Long story short, the owner of the horse farm I'm visiting gave me a suggestion of a horse trainer in the area for this girl I don't really know. My good deed for the month of May. Or was it April?

It's weird that I've invited her to come along -- I'm fairly protective of horse farm visits -- they seem private to me. The farm owner, M, was a dear though. While I was trying to set this up he pointed out that I *could* visit more than once a year. As in, be social. Drop in with or without your friend.

Stuff like that throws me.

Yeah, I know I could. And I know I would be welcome, and all that, but ... I dunno. I worry that I'd be a hanger-on, wearing out my welcome because I can't read the social cues that say, "Now would be a good time to head home." So I never begin. Which is too bad, because I think M could use the company.

Who knows, maybe Leslie will fall in love with one of his horses. Maybe he gets a sale from this? Maybe a new convert to preservation breeding and Arabian sporthorses?

Horses. A few more of my aunt's horses have died since the last time I wrote about them. Hardly surprising, but I'm like the neglectful older cousin who shows up at Thanksgiving -- all the horses I knew are permanently stuck in their first grade school pictures. The ones with the weird stripey shirts and bad glasses. Frozen in weird shy gawkiness. But actually, they're really getting old some of them. The fine old man I wrote about before, the one I visited in Georgia a few years ago recovered from his liver failure, but has had to have an eye removed due to cancer. Or glaucoma? I don't remember exactly. But I'm not going to update my mental image of him -- he's still an iron grey twelve year old in my head. Jeez. She died in 1991. Some days I'm surprised there are any left at all.

Stuff like that throws me too.

Neo's doing well in home school -- I'm making her read and write a ton. So far we've done Ethan Frome, To Kill A Mockingbird, Shane, and now she's working on Lord of the Flies. Her writing's improving, but she's still not in the habit of finding examples in the text. I think she doesn't take notes.

I'm still on the Middle Schools' autodialer list though. Since I've pulled her enrollment, I've been invited to sell cookie dough for the PTA, attend the Back to School Night, and bring my daughter (!) to Muffins for Moms. Neo really wanted to crash the "Muffins for Moms" event just to stir shit up, but no, I'm not gate-crashing an event I never much liked in the first place.

Saul's doing well at school -- we've started him on Prozac. Finally. Of course now is when my mother starts sending me "THE STORY" from the New York Times Magazine about how awful it is to live with a bipolar child. Ugh. Shake it off. I didn't go to her seventieth birthday, nor did I send my brother glowing remarks about her which he was to have read to the assembled masses. Dear Butcher told me just to rewrite the obituary (three pages) she sent me. See if she'd notice. But I didn't bother. She didn't get flowers either. I can't afford them. So I'm officially on a Do Not Call list from my mother. She doesn't call me now, and I'm not gritting my teeth when the phone rings. It's OK. Still feel bad for my Dad though. Poor guy stuck in crazy land.

Dear Butcher's away in NYC with the girls. My nephew had his Bar Mitzvah. Saul and I stayed home. Apparently a good time was had by all. I sort of thought that maybe I'd "get something done" while Dear Butcher was away. But it's been hot and mostly I slept. Today I raked the entire back yard, scraping up the brown straw that stands in for a lawn in my back yard and made an enormous compost pile. Sort of a stupid chore, but one I've been meaning to do. But it's not what I *wanted* to get done while I had time to work on the house, but it's what I chose to do, so it must have been what I wanted to get done at some level.

Anyway, while I was raking, I kept thinking about The Last of The Mohicans (movie) and The Last of the Mohicans (book). I tried reading the book when I heard the movie was coming out -- Daniel Day-Lewis was quite an attraction even in the trailers -- and I realized pretty quickly that the book does live up to every awful thing Mark Twain ever said about it. Yet it's beloved but boring as hell. The movie on the other hand.... ::fans self:: Wow. There's a bit of a story. Good visuals. Good characters. Good romance. How in the WORLD did someone get from Hawkeye (wise-crackin old man) and Alice to Nathaniel (shirtless hunk) and Cora? It's like the difference between The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Anyway. It got stuck in my head, the movie I mean. When I came inside to make dinner for Saul, I discovered (after much scrolling through excessively long menus -- I hate you Comcast) that The Last of the Mohicans was a free movie on On Demand. I love you Comcast!

Ugh. My neighbors are being loud. I want to either throw something at them or go hide somewhere under a blanket. Snarl.

Anyway. Thoughts on the recent viewing. Great romance. Still love that part. Action? I dunno. I think Michael Mann sort of overdid parts of it -- the battle scenes aren't quite as I remembered them I guess. Dialog? Not so much -- sometimes Nathaniel seems folksy and sometimes he seems modern. But what absolutely works one hundred percent is Nathaniel's brooding devotion to Cora. Perfect. Faint-worthy.

But I must be all out of sorts. Or something. Because now it's like a seed in my teeth. I'm disappointed in how much I liked it? Or annoyed that it's not based on a book that I can go linger over? There aren't any scenes at all that I can replay in my head. Nathaniel runs. Right at Cora. Nathaniel runs again. Nathaniel looks at Cora: "What are you looking at?" Long Pause "You." Uh, guys? This isn't working for me.

And don't remind me of the dialog under the waterfall. I'm not going there.

OK, maybe I am.

He's yelling so loud you can't hear what he's saying other than that he's going to leave her so she can die because he might be able to save her if the marauding Indians decide not to kill her outright, even though they've been trying to kill her THE ENTIRE MOVIE specifically targeting her in not one, but TWO battle scenes. Yes, if they decide suddenly not to kill her then, once he's jumped through this waterfall and once his gunpowder has dried (Does jumping THROUGH a waterfall help this?), then he might have a chance to save her which he doesn't have now, so stay alive until I come back, here's a romantic farewell for you -- I'll find a way to find you no matter what.

If I were twenty, I might be melting. I was pretty stupid at twenty. At forty, I sincerely want to stomp on his instep and assuredly grab a hold of him as he thunders past. I prefer to live too, you know. I remember seeing this in the the theater and trying to figure out what scene had been cut because the damn thing made no sense. Still doesn't.

Oh look, now I'm all whipped up over a scene I don't much care for. That's helpful.

Here, what I meant to say when I started this thing about Hawkeye/Nathaniel is that I'm reminded of a rather painful conversation Dear Butcher and I had the other night about early romances. I had this long on-again/off-again relationship with Woody just before I went to the circus and met Dear Butcher on my first night. Dear Butcher started off as a rebound fling after Woody. (Obviously he's not that anymore, but still. That's gotta be some sort of a diss. Isn't it?)

Woody looked A LOT like Daniel Day-Lewis. Even when Daniel Day-Lewis was all twisted up in "My Left Foot" he reminded me of Woody. If you could imagine Daniel Day-Lewis playing Hugh Grant, with the slightly raised single eyebrow, cocked head, and sentences that always end in questions? That would be Woody. Tall. Thin with oddly broad shoulders. High forehead. Long fingers. Nervous mannerisms. Piercing eyes. Lovely hair. And totally unable to commit to moving out of his parent's house, getting out from under the thumb of a ridiculous boss, and really, when it comes down to it, loving me.

But boy did I love him. Wow. Infatuation much? Yikes.

I left for the circus in 1989, came back in 1990. My aunt died in 1991, and by 1993 was living with Dear Butcher in Boston. We married in 1994, moved to CA in 1995 and had Neo in 1995.








The Last of the Mohicans 1992
Age of Innocence 1993
Four Weddings and a Funeral 1994
Sense and Sensibility 1995 (Although Alan Rickman did steal some thunder there. "The air is filled with spices" indeed.)

Each one of these films, I sort of, I dunno, felt like I was cheating on Dear Butcher when I watched them? Kind of? I keep thinking that they must have been made in the late eighties, when I was dating Woody, but no. They weren't. Don't delude yourself. But really, come on now. Liking the looks of a famous actor and enjoying the movies he's in; that's not bad. (Oh wait, there's two actors. Shut up.) Dear Butcher has his crushes too.

Agh. I'm at sixes and sevens.

I meant to talk about this weird conversation. Dear Butcher asked me (brave of him) what it was about earlier relationships that cause me remember them in detail, or with what seems like a higher intensity. I think he even asked if I ever talked about him that way. I replied in a rather off-handed way, "I don't do that sort of love any more." Or something like that -- I don't remember exactly what I said, but I'll bet Dear Butcher does. It was pretty callous. And mean once it was out of my mouth. And then I had to hurriedly explain myself, as what I had said was so awful.

I used to create fantasies about people and let myself get all washed away. I hung around Woody for years, having long (three hour) conversations with him in his car after work. We made out. We went clothes shopping together. We worked the same shift at the same store. And then he announced that he had asked another girl to go out with him, and he hoped that I would be happy for him. I so wanted him to be happy. I told him I was. And still we had three hour conversations. I knew his work schedule -- he had to have been spending more time with me than he was with her. We spent the weekends together going to crafts fairs. He brought me over to her apartment one time to listen to her Billie Holiday records when he found out that I liked Billie Holiday. (Gee. Did I let that slip?) And she wanted him to be happy, so she invited me to sit on the couch next to him while she sat on the chair.

And then she broke up with him and I held his bony shoulders while he cried on my bed. Later that year we made out while my dad was near death in the hospital. My memories of Woody always include being half-undressed on the warm side of an iced-over windshield. And then we broke up again. This went on forever. The man liked Winnie the Pooh for goodness sake. I think he wanted to be Christopher Robin and hide in a tree somewhere. And I would be his ever faithful Maid Marian. Or Rabbit, or some such thing. Just as soon as he noticed me long enough to realize that I was in love with him. But it wasn't love? I think? Maybe it was possessiveness? Or desperation? I think he was too desperate for constant companionship to leave me behind and go get a girlfriend, and he was too scared of possible rejection to commit to me as a lover. I was no better. I let him ooze around in his discomforts because he was so endearing while he was damaged and so euphoric when he told himself he was strong. One day we would be euphoric together. I just knew it.

But finally, ultimately. It was enough. He broke it off with me after I told him that his ex-girlfriend was a jerk for showing up to my house on Valentine's Day when she knew I was cooking him dinner. He said I wasn't supportive enough of his needs. God, that killed me. Now, I'd just laugh in his face or cut him down to size with my quick little tongue. But at the time, I crumpled.

So after the fascination with the abusive guy, and after the sweetest infatuation with the wimpiest guy ever, I don't do that kind of love anymore. Not in real life. Which is too bad for Dear Butcher, because he deserves it. But I can't crack that goo-pot open. Too much. Too much like drowning, I think. Beautiful while you look up at the sky from underneath the water, but deadly.

Somehow, I don't remember how, I explained this to Dear Butcher. It was awkward, but those sorts of conversations are in real life. That I relied on him and I loved him, but I wasn't ever going to wax rhapsodic about him and this was a good thing.

So all this is to say that I'm thinking about fantasies. That fantasy of the guy who stares into your eyes for much longer than is comfortable and is intriguing rather than frightening. The fantasy of the guy who is strong enough to protect you and who proves it by jumping through waterfalls to survive only by the force of his own will. The fantasy of the action that would piss you off or terrify you in real life but which is endearing and romantic in a story. The fantasy of a clean house that never needs cleaning, or having the unerring need to demonstrate your love for someone by keeping the ranch running straight and true. The fantasy of the conversation that sounds poetic and heartfelt in a story but feels harsh and awkward in real life. The fantasy of a slow walk with a good friend through a sunny field filled with warm horses where the wind is gentle and there is no conversation other than the exact one you want to be having at that very moment.

I had the strangest dream last night

I had been invited to John McCain's house to meet his wife Cindy. He's running for president, but in a quiet way. Something we won't be bringing up in conversation as this visit isn't about him or his aspirations. In fact, he isn't even expected to be there.

I'm there with someone else, a woman, but I can't tell if she's older or younger than me. I do know that she is much more interested in meeting Cindy than I am. We walk into a large screen porch in the back of the house. The ceiling is vaulted right up to the exposed green-painted rafters. The frames of the screen panels are pale green as well, and the floor is slate. There's a bedroom off the back of the porch, around the corner, where we can hear ladies' voices. The rest of the porch has been decorated in decorator-magazine fashion. Flowering plants in clear ball jars, cane sofas with patterned silk pillows, throw rugs on the diagonal, hardcover books on the end table with a key and a tassel carefully draped over their ever-to-be-unopened edge, potted orchids swaying as we walk past.

We walk into the bedroom (another magazine spread, pink and fluffy now with accents of red) to find Cindy sitting on a large bed. She sits in her carefully tailored suit with her legs tucked to the side. She reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men. Cool and elegant, she is pouring coffee into tiny cups laid out on a tray balanced on the bed. Plates of cookies surround her.

She's talking to a friend sitting in an armchair. The woman I came in with walks briskly up the to bedside and starts talking in a breathy way about how exciting this is, and how beautiful the home is, and oh my goodness, thank you so very much for inviting us this afternoon, and would you like some help with that lovely tray?

I can't sit on the bed -- everything will spill -- and there's no other chair. Not knowing quite what to do with myself, but not feeling at all flustered, I nod a "Hello" to Cindy and wander back out into the green porch to sit in the breeze.

There's no one else to talk to, but it's pleasant enough out here, and I'm enjoying the orchid on the low table near me. There's a silvery green-backed bug daintily making its way across a sea grass mat near my foot. And somewhere around the corner I can hear the flapping and twittering of finches. There must be an aviary. It's as if I'm sitting inside a large Portmerion china bowl.

With no sound at all, a large unique bird soars into the room and lands on the arch of the orchid I've been admiring. His body is grey and blue like a dove or a large parakeet, but his beak is large, striped and hooked like a toucan's. He cocks his head at me and I tilt my head back at him.

"I'm glad to see you like our bird! Cindy found him one day in the barn!"

I turn around to see John McCain standing near me, his hand held out in greeting.

"Um. Hello. Yes, he's quite nice." John McCain sits in the chair near mine. "Thank you for having us over."

"Oh, that's Cindy's thing. Glad you're here though. I wonder if there's coffee. Would you like some?"

I'm totally at sea. I don't really like this person; I don't know why he's chosen me to talk to; I don't know what to say. I hear women talking louder now. "Is that John? Oh! Bring him this coffee. He'll want these too. No! On the tray. That's right." And a china platter piled high with large cookies appears in my lap, threatening to tilt and scatter cookies all over me and the floor. A thin porcelain cup of coffee is pressed in my hand (Too hot!) and John McCain and I are alone again.

I thrust the platter of cookies at him (Too fast!) hoping he'll take them, only to watch them slide towards the far edge. He grabs the other side of the heavy platter and the cookies slide back towards my hand. With those two movements, the entire bottom of the platter has been revealed, and I'm startled to notice that it's the same pattern as my grandmother's china.

(True non-dream bit of background: Years ago, my grandmother purchased an *enormous* quantity of Staffordshire blue lustre china at a London antique shop. It has something like 23 place settings, twelve covered vegetable servers and to many platters to count. There was so much that she gave half of it to my aunt Joyce for her to use and to store in her house. When Joyce died, that half of the china service was sold -- no one told my grandmother until it was well and truly gone. She was furious. A few years later, when she moved out of her house into a retirement condo, she shipped her portion of this mythic china service to me. We have an insane amount of china -- Dear Butcher counted it up once. I think we have complete service for 13? It's heavy, it's blue, and after researching the registration marks, I discovered that it was made by Johnson Brothers in England in 1873. Or the forerunner to Johnson Brothers? I can't remember exactly.)

So anyway, there's John McCain holding a piece of my china pattern.

"Where did you GET that? That's amazing! I can't believe you have this same pattern."

I tell Mr. McCain the history of the china, saying only that my grandmother had purchased an enormous amount of the stuff and that it's quite rare to find any of this pattern in the US, leaving out the bit about Joyce's portion. There's a lengthy and confused conversation between John and Cindy about one insignificant plate amongst many, and he comes back to inform me that Cindy bought it a few years ago from the Massey China and Porcelain Museum when it went out of business a few years ago in Boston.

"Really. I've never heard of the Massey China Museum."

"It's quite well known if you're a collector. Cindy is, ha ha. I just follow her about opening my wallet."

Not funny, John.

In the manner of dreams, I'm now walking down the sidewalk in front of their house thinking about the visit. An image flashes in front of me, a black museum exhibit card with white block letters.

Staffordshire dinner collection
c. 1873.
On loan from the [my mother's name] collection

A flash of understanding. Funny that John McCain would have pointed the way. Or rather, Cindy.

In my dream, when my grandmother gave me her china my mother had begged and pleaded with me to have some of the china. It wasn't fair that I got the china. She should have some. I don't believe this actually happened, although I remember her being upset in real life that Grandma sent me her silver, as my mother had just had hers stolen, so I should give her my gift of the silver set, even though it had been promised to me since I was ten years old. The gift of the china was a surprise. But in the dream, she had kicked up a fuss, so I had split the china with her and only taken half (a quarter of the original set).

So in the dream, it has come to me that she never used the china at all, but put it out on loan to various museums. I know, in the way you know things in dreams, that when the Massey went under, they sold her china to the public for her on commission. She never used it, only profited from it. And that's how Cindy McCain ended up with Grandma's china.

------------------
Odd dream, no?

Part Three: Wherein we question, "Who is the Rock?"

Ah, the drama of this week.

I remember living like this all the time. One more phone call. One more dissection of "What did she mean when she said that to him? Why didn't she tell him that other thing when she was saying this thing over here?" You can spend decades parsing one tale and the twelve conversations it sprouted from its twisted trunk. I know. I have.

A few months after I moved away from my family to California I said to Dear Butcher, "I have this weird feeling in my stomach, and I've been trying to figure out what's going on. I finally realized what it must be. It's the absence of a stomachache. I've had one every day for so long that I forgot what it felt like to not have one."

We fall now into the predictable pattern. My mother sends me a terse email with PROOF that she is correct in thinking that her former daughter-in-law is a creep. (And by extension that her son is not really that bad.) Ha! That'll convince you!

Which causes me to send her back an email saying "I love you; I'm not interested in abandoning all ties with you; I'm not trying to hurt you, but cut the crap already. I"m not reading confidential letters between patients and therapists even if they do prove your point. Shame on your son for giving them to you anyway."

Which causes my father to email me back saying that he agrees with me, but really, won't I just be that sympathetic ear my mother needs? You don't need to agree with her, but won't you just listen to her pain? For me? Hmm?

Which causes me to write....No. Wait. Back off. Shut up. Go away. Tell the chamber orchestra playing that ever so familiar waltz in the corner to pack up their instruments. Now is not the time to dance with these wackos.

On different days in different ways this has been going on all week.

I decided finally to try to get the other side of the story by calling my ex-sister-in-law. (I long ago decided to shorten all that crap to just "sister". I'm old enough; I get to choose my relatives.) Well, that was enlightening -- the best part being that she had no idea that DSS had been called, after my mother had been gloating "that now that the social worker has been in touch with Steph the shit will really hit the fan." We kibitzed, we laughed, we agreed that this is a whole truckload of crazy. Then she called back and things started getting weird with her, which I regret.

I sat on my conversation with her for a few hours (that's when I started writing all these posts, to try to process some of this stuff) and then decided that I had to call my Dad. I don't know who is telling the truth, and I can't spend time ferreting out the conflicting details, but I felt as if he deserved to know that in at least two stories that I had heard this week, he was being lied to.

I got him on the phone and told him that. When he tried to find out what I knew and when, I told him I wasn't playing that game. I only called him to warn him to look out, because either my mother or my brother, or both were lying. The sequence of events (whose gory details I won't bore you all with) simply do not add up.

Steph may not be telling the truth in all things, but I absolutely believe her reactions to shocking news. Being asked about a social worker sent her right over the edge. Therefore, she hadn't heard about it before, and either mom was lying to me, or brother was lying to mom when he said that there had been contact and the investigation was well under way.

At which point my mother, in all of her five foot three inches of blue flaming rage, stormed into my dad's office. He's trying to pretend that I'm not on the phone, but all the while trying to tell me what she's saying.

"Give it up Dad. Put me on the extension."

Much yelling and scuffling ensues.

My mother huffs, "What did you DO?"

"Excuse me?"

"What DID YOU DO?!"

"Hey. I'm not going to be spoken to that way. Calm down. I called Dad to say--"

"TELL ME WHAT YOU SAID!"

"To whom? What?"

"TELL ME WHAT YOU SAID!"

"Enough. I'll talk to you when you're calmer." Click.

We went through three rounds of this. "Screech!" Click. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

In a rather sick way, it was a little fun. "Oh, here she is again trying to yell at me." Click. "Ahhh."

Upshot of the whole fiasco is that apparently the social worker HADN'T yet contacted Steph, so my telling Steph that I was sorry to hear that she was having such a difficult time, and then my having to explain to her what I had heard (in very limited detail) was enough, in my mother's eyes, to ruin the entire investigation. "Your brother had DOCTORS lined up." And the role of the DSS is what, exactly? "Now she'll KNOW what to say." Like she wasn't going to know what to say beforehand? The social worker has to SET AN APPOINTMENT with you for the interview. Duh. It's not like the police: "OPEN UP! It's a social worker!!"

All of which left me saying, "You told me in your email that the social worker had already spoken to her. I went off your email."

"Well, that's only what I believed."

"Exactly. Which is why I called Dad to say that somewhere someone is being lied to."

"All I want to know is, why do you hate us so?"

Huge guffaws of laughter. And freedom. Finally. Peace in my chest.

Click.

---------------------

That was last night. Since then. Nothing. No emails. No phone calls. And FINALLY for the first time in a week, I'm not spinning on this crap in my head. I'm not preparing for the next phone call, I'm not trying to figure out where my boundaries are.

Because I'm done. She's too much for me. And I feel no guilt whatsoever. I haven't ever felt this solid regarding her and her insanity.

I admit to feeling a little bad for my Dad. I think I'm hoping that he'll still find a way to, I dunno, think well of me? Respect me? I hope all this drama doesn't give him a heart attack either. But that's all that I've got left for those fruitcakes. Curiosity and a mild concern over their well-being. Sort of like when I walk past that koi fountain in the lobby of the old medical building. "Isn't that an awfully small place for them? Don't they get bored swimming in the same circles?" And the concern passes as I turn to read the directory by the elevators.

Part Two

A few days later Dad called me from his office phone (his office is off the dining room, but it's a private line). As soon as I saw the caller ID, I knew this would be the "Please call your mother" phone call. I took it, and we talked respectfully like adults. He apologized to me for continuing to support my brother, and said that he was the one who wrote the second check, because he's terrified that my brother will do something dangerous to him or to my mom if he says no while he's in the house. Dad's a little fucked up too, but I appreciated his calm apology.

I told Dad that I would call Mom, that I wasn't trying to freeze her out, but that I needed some time to calm down and pull myself together. However, I wasn't going to apologize to her for saying things she didn't agree with. I can try to not fight with her again, but I'm not going to pretend to believe something that I don't just to make her feel better. He agreed that I shouldn't, and he also said, "I'm not sure you have to apologize. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm just saying that she needs to hear from you, but I think she's scared to pick up the phone." Fine, no emotional manipulation there, NONE AT ALL.

So ok, I spoke to her again. Told her right out of the gate that I wasn't going to rehash the last conversation, but that I was calling to say that I was concerned that she was going through such a rough time. Immediately she hops back on to her train of proving herself right. Nope. Not playing. If that's all you got, then I have to go.

Then she pulls out of her hat the funniest thing I've heard her say in a long time.

She's going on about how evil she KNOWS her grandson's mother is, "After all, she bought him a LIGHTER for his POT."

"What?! How many teenage boys have lighters?"

"No, no. She bought it for him. She's the one who buys him his pot too. Where else would he get it?"

Bwa-HA-HA!! Huge guffaws of laughter spurt out of my throat with such force that I think pulled a tendon in my neck. (Testing. Yep. It still hurts if I touch my ear to my shoulder.) After I stopped choking and wheezing I said, "Mom, she's in her middle forties. 'A' is in High School. It's a hell of a lot easier for a kid to get pot than an adult. YOU are an IDIOT."

"Well, where would he get the money?"

"You're insane! Have you never heard of dime bag? As in ten bucks? It's sold by the joint, you know."

Much sputtering. Some more handwaving. Some yelling. I hang up the phone again.

"Where else would he get his pot?" Good Lord, I'm still laughing over that one.

------

In the quiet moments after the phone call, I realized that we really are dealing with a caged animal here. Challenge her convictions and she comes flying at the glass, teeth bared. Somehow over time she lulls me into thinking that she's slowly getting more rational. That one day she'll get her narcissism and mania under control. But this week. Uh uh. Nope. Truth is what you see before you. She's never been calm or sane, only the facade is still.

She is one busy gerbil though.

Part Three is where I get the other side of the story, and finally, calmly, step out myself for good.

Dancing with the Rock of Gibraltar: Part One

Who really would believe that we are stuck in the SAME OLD DANCE year after year after decade? Doesn't it all get old after a while? Why then was I crying when I got off the phone Monday? I guess that's what makes me want to write about it, because I cried. (Humph. There's something wimpy in tears forcing a blog spot.)

I've been meaning to write about this, but then I've been holding off because it all seems so whiny and repetitive somehow. But it's also so amazingly otherwordly -- the turns of the gerbil wheel that is the drama of my family. Again I say, if I read this in a book, I'd never believe that people stay on this track year after year after year. Novels are about change, but not life. Not in my family.

I'll talk about the aftermath in Part Two, which I had to pull off into a separate post because this one got sooooo long. In fact, you may want to brew a cup of tea before settling into this one. I'll wait.

----------
My mother called Monday to tell me how horrible her weekend was. Fuck me, why do you have to do this? Isn't there someone else you can complain to? My brother (now finally divorced) learned that his ex-wife was allowing his eldest son's girlfriend to sleep over and in the same room, so he called the DSS (which is child protective services in MA) to start an investigation on his ex-wife for neglect and contributing to statutory rape (Dramatic much?). My mother was positively gleeful. (I'm not sure I believe the story as presented either. I'll be interested to hear what the DSS investigation turns up.)

After a lengthy pause I said, "Wow. Well, I guess if he goes ahead and proves her unfit this is an opportunity for him to grow up and actually take responsibility for his kids."

"I don't think that will happen really. I don't think either one of them have the skills to take care of their kids." (Wait. Is that honesty I hear? What the hell?) "Of course, you know what that means. I'm going to have to be the one to raise those kids."

"Could be. You know, if you think that's where this is going, you really should just file for partial legal custody so that you'd have some say in what happens."

"I can't do THAT! I'm not going to be taking them into my house. Teenagers. All that loud music. The noise, the food. Fighting about homework. I like my life. I'm not doing that again." (And the honesty lasts for about point three seconds. Start up that gerbil wheel, here we go.)

"So you aren't going to raise them -- I thought you said that you were going to end up with them."

"Not in my house. But if your brother (I love when she does this. When she tries to explain a point, relatives often lose their names. Your aunt, Your brother -- like it's somehow my fault that they're fucked up? What is that?) gets custody of them, I'll be the one paying all the bills, taking them to classes, making sure they get to tutors. That will all fall to me."

"But you do that anyway. How is that him taking responsibility for them? You don't have any control over them or him as it is. What's different?"

"Oh no. If he gets them away from Her (She-who-shall-not-be-named) then he'll listen to me. He will. I'll be all he has."

Whoa. Red light. What?? Think highly of yourself, do you?

"He doesn't listen to you now. He doesn't give a shit what you think or what you want, as long as he's able to head off to his spin class at 5:30 in the morning. Are you going to go get them up for school? Are you going to pack their lunches? Nothing will change if they get taken away from Steph. In fact, it will all be worse. I didn't say take them into your house. I didn't say physical custody. I said legal custody. Get some legal control. Legal. Not physical."

Very huffily, "I'm not going to do THAT. File for custody. Hmn."

"Great. So once again the kids will learn that no one gives a shit about them. Their mother wants their idiot father to have them every weekend so that she can have those free. Their father doesn't want to take care of them on the weekend, nor does he want to pay $200 a week in child support. What is that: groceries? And you can't be bothered to be responsible either. Excellent."

"I am responsible. I take them to the museum. I pay for everything." (The museum. Yeah.)

"Then why does he have a judgment against him for non-payment of child support? They're garnishing his wages. For two hundred bucks. He's never going to get another salaried job again. He knows it will all be sucked up in the DOR judgment. Some responsibility there."

"Oh I know. It's awful. He's so impossible. Do you know that this weekend he came to us saying that he couldn't pay his rent (Oh shit. I know where this one is going.) so we wrote him a check for fifteen hundred, and he deposited it in an account that had been seized? His accounts have been seized! And then when we wrote him another one, he was yelling at us. At us! He's not even grateful. I don't know what to do with him."

Something nasty and vile just fell inside my chest. A hunk of rotten flesh fell from my sternum, a putrid stalactite letting loose, landing in my belly, bursting open on impact. I can feel the maggots wriggle. I'm going to vomit. But then I'd be vomiting worms. Swallow down. Swallow down. Jesus H. Christ. I can't believe I'm listening to this shit. I can't believe I'm here. Swallow down.

"Wait. You spent three thousand dollars on him this weekend? You gave him more money after you KNEW his rent money had been seized?"

"We had to." (Her Shirley Temple Voice. Little Miss Sunshine. On the Goo-oo-od Ship Lollipop.)

"No you didn't. He can't pay his rent. Make him be a man. He's forty six years old. Let him pay his own fucking rent."

"But he can't."

My head explodes.

"Oh my Good God. Cut him off. Stop it. Read a fucking book on co-dependence. Why are you doing this to him? You know what, forget about him. What about his kids? 'The Boys' as you call them. Their father is always going to be like this. Think of The Boys in their thirties. Their forties. When you die, he's going to come around to them, 'Pay for this. Why won't you support me? After all, I'm the one who took you away from your horrible mother. I need money. You need to pay.' No wonder they hate him now. They'll hate him more later. Why would you DO that to your own grandchildren? Every time you bail him out, you are condemning your grandchildren to a horrible adulthood. Can't you see that? Jesus Christ. You are helping him be this way. He's dependent on you. He's damaged. You are co-dependent together. Stop it. Step out of it. Jesus Christ."

There's a lot in here that I don't quite remember, or is too repetitive to transcribe in intimate detail. We went round and round and round. She absolutely doesn't see that she is bailing him out. She has this incredible fear of homelessness, that much is clear. "I can't let him end up on the streets" and" He can't live in a cardboard box" and "He needs clean clothes, not rags from some thrift store." Such a snob. She buys him clothes from Macy's and Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers!!

But my favorite line, when I kept harping back on co-dependence ( You think you can control other people's actions and emotions: co-dependent. You are addicted to the drama he brings you: co-dependent. You are made to feel as if you are the center of someone else's universe : co-dependent) was this gem. I'm not sure I can type it so that her inflection is clear.

"So I read a BOOOOK on co-dePENNdence. Then what?"

Giggling, me.

At some point I realized that this was hopeless, a mind-fuck, and a complete waste of my morning, so I started saying, "I can't listen to this anymore. It's too much. You do what you want, but I can't hear about it." And, "I can't listen to this. I'm warning you, I need to stop." And, "OK, enough. We need to change the subject because I'm not kidding. It is damaging to me to listen to you go on about this."

Said in a nasty whining, snitty tone, "Oh, it's daa-maging to YEW."

At which point, I held the phone out in front of my chest and said into the air, "I'm sorry. I've had it. I can't do this anymore," and hung up the phone.

And cried for about ten minutes. Huge gulping sobs.

I'm better now, but wow. That was a bit more intense than I had expected. What's insane, above all else, is that she's been in therapy with the same psychiatrist (whom she sees once a week and who she calls at home if she's having a crisis) since 1989. Nineteen years of weekly therapy. Nineteen years. Rock of Gibraltar she is.

Or he's a really bad therapist. Or both.

My subconscious is beating me over the head

I just woke up from a bizarre dream.

Well, not just. It rattled my stomach so badly that I had to go throw up first and then had to lie down on the couch for an hour to get the vertigo to go away.

I had a dream about eventing. Jumping brush fences, ditches, and lamb creeps. Every lurch of the pony, every thought of "Oh SHIT that's a big fence. Gonna die gonna die gonna diegonnadie right NOW!" was accompanied by the fence coming right at me, feeling the horse trying to evade left, evade right and then power down with a determined focus to that leap. Ears forward, chest thumping, legs driving, no evasion, no wiggles. Power Power Power Uuuup and land.

My stomach can't take the swooping any more.

Eventing? Oh sorry. Let me explain.

I only ever did it at training level, but eventing is where the horse and rider compete on the flat in dressage the first day, then cross-country over wide high natural obstacles (which do NOT fall apart if you hit them) at speed, and the final day the horse and rider compete in stadium jumping over mostly very high jumps with tight corners in an enclosed space. Three different disciplines to show that the horse is trained 3 ways.



Here's a good page with examples of different types of X-C fences: A description of Cross Country facilities.

Ditches scared the hell out of me -- which scared the hell out of the horse. Great. You can be asked to jump OFF a ditch or up onto a "step up". (Same structure, just approached from the other direction.)

When you jump a ditch, you basically are asking your horse to jump off a cliff with you and having him land on the other side. Jumping a step-up is obviously a bit easier, as he knows where he's supposed to land.

But the worst for me, for some reason were what they call "lamb creeps". It's sort of like jumping over a low shed roof. You can find examples on the page I just linked there -- pheasant feeders are basically the same thing. It's hard to judge their height, and the horse doesn't get a good sense that they're wide. It looks like a straight vertical fence until you're on top of it.

You just have to trust that when you give the horse the gas that he's going to take that signal and jump WIDE. Not UP. (That conversation obviously gets easier with training. But it's also just a trust thing.)

Anyway, I had this dream where I'm on a horse I haven't ridden for a while. I'm in the middle of a course, and I can't remember ever walking the course. Every time I approach a fence, the horse just almost wiggles. He probably doesn't even change his footfalls, but his weight is shifting while he's thundering at top speed to see if maybe he can avoid jumping this fence. Ugh. NOT what you want on a cross-county course. Go. Go. Go. Go. Do What I Say. Go.

Ditch to water. falling falling oh shit, land already. Step up to brush fence. wiggle. GO! Turn to the left, a wide galloping arc. Build your speed. Make up for the jumps. Gallop. Straight. Holy Christ a lamb creep. Wait. What's past it? Am I jumping an in and out? A corner? Damn. Are there TWO fences? Jump it as a corner and hope you can get the width to jump the far one.

Mid air. I'm sailing over the lamb creep, which was set up at right angles to a single low heavy rail, I look ahead and realize that the horse hasn't jumped wide enough. If I had jumped him farther away from the point, we could have jumped it as two fences. Jump into the box, jump out of the box. But I tried to get him to jump two fences as one in the corner, and we're going to crash.

I wake up just as his front legs connect with solid wood.

Ugh.

Apparently something in my subconscious would like to sit me down and have a little chat. Because it's pounding on the inside of my head as I sleep. I could have done without the motion sickness though.

Bagheera was happy to sit on my tummy though and purr himself into ecstacy.

SBD: My Favorite Laura Kinsale Book

I just love great writing.

I haven't been reading much of anything these days, but I do keep opening up the copy of Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale that lives in my purse whenever I find myself sitting around waiting for something. (Hmm. Looking over my calendar, it would seem that I sit in waiting rooms waiting for various children to come out of appointments two to three hours a week. I guess I have been reading. Just one book, over and over, and not really from front to back.)

It's been weird, because I've been doing this while the whole Cassie Edwards THING has been going on. Read some pilfered passages online, bang my head on the desk, hop in the car, read some great passages in the waiting room. Quite the dichotomy, this romance genre.

Which Laura Kinsale is my favorite? Generally, the one I'm reading at that moment. Prince of Midnight: A swashbuckling masked hero with vertigo meets up with a young girl who needs him to act as her avenger. A swashbuckler with vertigo? LOVE IT. Midsummer's Moon: A hero who's desperately afraid of heights falls for an inventress who climbs to the top of roofs to examine weather vanes and who desperately wants to fly. LOVE IT. I could go on and on. But today it's all about Flowers from the Storm.

Forget for a sec that this is a Romance, with breasts and sex and dukes and stuff. How about just reading it as a book? This is why I love Laura Kinsale.

(Well, not her as a person or an online personna, just her as the creator of these books I love so well. Her as the crafter of a phrase. Cause I don't know her personally, so I can't say if I love her. There, now I've defined my fannish behavior appropriately, and can move on to the blogging.)

There are so many things that I love in this novel, but others have pointed them out before. The way the author demonstrates the hero's inability to understand language or to speak while incarcerated in an asylum after his stroke:

He wanted to say "don't go," and instead it emerged, "No...no."

She gave a little sigh and started to stand up; he realized she was leaving and shook his head violently. Don't! Stay here, don't leave yet, not now!

"No, no, no, no," was what he heard himself uttering, and cut it off, tilting his head back and yanking at the bonds in his wrath.

"Peasdon sethee! Clietcliet!" She put her forefinger up to her face, the tip just below her nose.

He gazed at her. It meant something, that gesture; he knew it meant something, but he couldn't think what....

"Weebwell, "she whispered. "Vreethin wilvee well."

Wilv well. Will well.
Vreething will well.
Everything will well.

He hadn't really comprehended it; it came after his mind seemed to sift down through the sounds, settling finally on an intuition.
But it was something, anyway. It was something to keep as she turned away and took the candle and the paper. One small glass ball to float when he was drowning; she thought everything would be all right, and he'd almost understood her when she said it.*

Readers have already spoken about how well Kinsale deconstructs language in this novel; she turns it almost into poetry at times. But that's not truly why I love the book.

There's setting a scene. The introduction of the Duke of Jervaulx on page one has been commented on before as well:

He liked radical politics and had a fondness for chocolate. Five years ago, the Honorable Miss Lacy-Grey had verifiably swooned on the occasion of his requesting her hand for a country dance--an example of that category of incidents which one's friends found endlessly amusing and became fond of recalling ad nauseam in their cups. The circulating quip had been that a marriage proposal would have crippled the girl for life, and that an offer of a baser sort killed her on the spot.

Since Christian lay now with his head pillowed in the smooth curve of her back, his fingers indolently sliding between her stocking and the skin just above a blue-and-yellow garter, he had to assume his friends had been slightly out in their predictions. She seemed perfectly alive to him.**

Maddy, the Quaker heroine also has a perfect introduction, bustling about in her small home where the parlor bell doesn't work, commenting to her father in mid tirade, "A duke can scarcely be supposed to care seriously for such matters--the square is above thy left hand--as must be perfectly clear when his integration has not been prepared for the past week."*** Gently done, we know her father is blind, she's easily offended but efficient, and that they are certainly not noblity.

The Duchess de Marly, I already wrote about in an earlier SBD post. I love how she's so cranky, so stubborn, and so respected by her wayward nephew, Christian. How Maddy believes that she will one day be just as cantankerous as the Duchess, and how we know that Christian will love her when she's mild or when she's fierce, just the same.

The speech at the Quaker meeting house at the end, others have written about. It's Christian's last chance to bring Maddy back to him and to his disordered state, to make him a better person and to convince her to leave behind her personal lie that she is nothing but a meek Quaker. When indeed she knows she can make him bow down to her. "The Devil's Gift."

But all of that is still not what makes this my favorite Kinsale book. (Although I admit to being particularly in awe of the introduction of Every Character. Durham with the dogs. Fane in his military oblivion. Gill in his wide hat. Eydie swooning on the stairs.)

What makes this my favorite Romance is the lack of kisses.

What makes this my favorite Romance is the drama of the sex when it shows up, and the lack of it.

Laura Kinsale manages to get down on paper the very essence of mute longing. Of a need to touch that is enormous. The tension is crafted so well, that by the time a sex scene finally shows up, the reader doesn't even need the full description. Just a view into the wanting is enough.

There isn't a passage I can pull out and point to -- there are bits and pieces scattered throughout the book. But I love when Jervaulx leans into her at the top of the stairs when the thunder has caused her to drop the candle. No kissing. No dialogue. Just him holding her and breathing into her hair. I love when Jervaulx can sleep in his own bed again only because he knows that Maddy is in the dressing room. I love when Jervaulx unbraids her hair the morning after their marriage. I love when Christian prays to god and she walks in the room to rescue him from himself.

All those bits, a glance over the table, a moment on the stairs, and it's Romance.

And good writing.



---------------
OK, OK. The sex is good too. Fine.


All quotes from the Avon Books reprint edition (with the mansion on the cover)
Flowers from the Storm, copyright 1992 Amanda Moor Jay
*pp. 61-62
**Prologue, page 1
***Chapter One, p. 7

I just gotta say,

HIAWATHA???

Perhaps the most parodied poem ever?

Oh Cassie, you have taken this into a bizarre new place. Behind the Looking Glass even.

----------------

My grandmother had a *thing* for Lewis Carrol. She was also surrounded most of her life by other extremely intelligent women who were not allowed to work. But they were allowed to volunteer. Churches, community centers and, in Grandma's case, the Girl Scouts, all benefited from their crafty dedication.

At one point, while Grandma was on the National Council, she discovered that the most of the rest of the leaders of Girl Scouts in the USA were nuts for Lewis Carrol too. They traded quotes, they dressed up as him or some of his very obscure characters for parties, they were hooked. Towards the end of her term, in an homage to Carroll, they wrote their Council minutes in the metre of Song of Hiawatha. No one noticed. Hee! So they did it again. No comments. Hee Hee! (It should be noted here that Grandma took great pains to speak glowingly of Longfellow, and she was accomplished at reading "Song of Hiawatha" in a flowing manner that really was moving. These girls were doing an homage more to Lewis Carrol's "Hiawatha's Photographing" than they were making fun of "Song of Hiawatha".)

For decades after that, there were sections of Christmas cards passed around this group (ominously nicknamed "the seven", peppered with Hiawatha drumbeats. Grandma got so good at it that she could just start talking in (help me wiki, are they trochees or dactyls?) trochaic metre.

---------------

Wikipedia has the intro from Lewis Carrol to his parody, "Hiawatha's Photographing". This is so clever:

In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of 'The Song of Hiawatha'. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal metre I must ask the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.

Anyway. Dear Cassie, you've brought back some humorous memories.

Norman Mailer, perfume, and me.

When I was a child, my mother was on the leading edge of the feminist movement. A true activist. A marcher in parades, a letter writer to the editor, a researcher for the League of Women Voters. I had an ERA button pinned to the lampshade of my white and pink porcelain bedside-table lamp. We hosted ACLU meetings in the living room. Ms. Magazine arrived at our doorstep and was cherished, cradled in our arms with reverence, to be carefully placed on the center of the inlaid coffee table, whereas Time, Newsweek, Life and the daily papers were chucked on top of growing heaps of mail, slithering off the kitchen table onto the floor.

Norman Mailer was despised. Right up there with Nixon. (And John Updike too, come to think of it.)

I can recognize his gravelly timbre immediately. There's a bone in the back of my neck which tenses when I hear him on some documentary or another. I'm on alert. It's HIM. My husband watches a fair amount of boxing documentaries on cable, so I'm slowly getting used to the old fart opining about Ali. I'm beginning to tolerate the old boy.

Today I was putting off climbing the stairs to go to bed (Why is the house so Cold?), and I caught the better part of a PBS documentary. There was Norman, looking rather frail and elderly, actually. He was sort of having trouble getting his longer sentences out, which made me sympathetic, I guess.

My defenses must have been down. Or maybe it was the fact that he spoke over Mozart's Requiem, which always get to me. Tonight, I can't quite forgive that old sod, rest his soul. He fucking made me cry. With this:

Oswald's a ghost who sits upon American life. It's a ghost that lays over a great many discussions of what are some of the real roots of American history.

What's abominable and maddening about ghosts is you never know the answer. Is it this or is it that? You can't know, because the ghost doesn't tell you.*

Simple. Well done, Norman.

Except for me. I'm surrounded by ghosts. By perfumes on the breeze.

The L'air du Temps with the little doves on the stopper Grandma gave me for my sixth birthday. I never used it, but just watched it go darker over the years, collapsing in the bottle on my dresser, because I never wanted to use it up. It would be gone then, and I'd never be able to ask her for more. What if she had stopped loving me by then? What if I used too much until she called me a Painted Woman as she frighteningly did that time behind her hand about the checkout girl in Waban Market? There was love all in its little fragile bottle. Better never to touch it. I watched the level go down and got more and more anxious. Should I use it now? Would she forgive me if I did? Is it this, or is it that?

We had an attic room in my house. Up the tight steep stairs to the attic and to the left. A single bed, an old dresser, a slanted ceiling and a memory of Laurie painting my nails while she fed me circus peanuts. The peanuts were fat and orange and she had to carefully place them into my mouth one by one so that my nails wouldn't smudge. My nails were candy pink. I was a little fat bird with my mouth open to her care. Feed Me. Feed Me. And then one morning she was gone. Her long honey hair, her patchouli, and the white wool coat on the hook. Gone. Her clothes and books stayed in the room right above mine for weeks. Gone. Her white painted desk at the window with the little nail polish bottles lined up at the sill was still there. Gone. Not a word and we were not to speak of her. Gone. Someone (I later found out it was her mother) came one day while I was at school and packed up her bags. No one ever told me. I went up the stairs one day to sit on her empty bed only to find the desk, like Laurie, was gone. Did you want to leave? Did Mom fire you for wearing the short skirts? Did we get in trouble for the circus peanuts? (Come back, Laurie. I'm on a diet now.) Is it this, or is it that?

Joyce used to enter and exit my life with icy swiftness. One moment she was there at Thanksgiving, holding me on her lap, asking me to take down, take down, take down her luscious thick hair to brush it. No one brushes it like you. Have a trinket. Have a piece of barley sugar. And then she was gone. I can't come to your birthday party, even though I live across the street from the pool. Splash under the cold willow and think of me avoiding you for my own conceits. It's not allowed for me to call you, Joyce. Please can you remember to call me sometime? I'm too young to sneak out of the house and run to Grandpa's shop, although I'll learn to do that later to find you. Find you. But for right now, can you call me? And then one day you did. And I don't know why. I don't know why you offered to take me to the horse farm for years. I just don't know. I think maybe you needed free labor with all those stalls. I think maybe you were finally lonely enough that you needed me to sleep on your couch for months on end. I think maybe you needed someone to brush your hair, or at least to talk to once she moved out and on with her life. Was it me you wanted?

After you died, my mother (Chanel No. 5) made it a point to tell me that I wasn't your favorite. That you had taken my cousin Melissa out to lunch at least twice too. Yeah, but did Missy sleep on her couch? Huh? Huh, Mom? Did Melissa get Joyce's Iranian coat? Huh? Oh Christ. That coat. It held your scent for months after you died, Joyce. 4711 and leather and roses, maybe Oil of Olay, with a top note of Chapstick. I used to lie on my bed with your coat over my chest and breathe you back into my lungs. Until one day it was all gone. The incense had finally guttered -- the perfume was spent. Just memories now.

And I still have so many questions for you, and I'll never know the answers. Some about the horses, and some about the men in your life. Some about the women, come to think of it. But most painfully about me. ("It's ALWAYS about me," said the narcissist.) Did you love me, or did you tolerate me? Did you put up with me because you loved me, or did you put up with me because you felt as if you should love me and then felt as if you HAD to tolerate me? Is it this, or is it that?

Fuck you too, Norman Mailer.

"Is it this, or is it that?" You're talking about Kennedy, assassinations, American History and collective grief, yet with a simple turn of phrase, you have me pulling up my ghosts and memories and questions and grief, just like a good writer should. I didn't need this tonight. Thanks a hell of a lot, you old creep.




*PBS, The American Experience, "Oswald's Ghost", copyrighted, etc. etc.

Uri, Randi, and the Fairies

Hey Joyce.

The fairies are back. The ones with the gamin faces and the silver wings. They hold their little slender arms out, their sleeves and scarves and bits of flowing fabric catching the breeze. Remember how you tipped you head to the side and chuckled at them? How very silly they were, the paper cutouts? Remember? I do.

I remember when you went up to Lily Dale to meet the mediums. I remember how offended you were that all the spirit guides were some gross stereotype of what whites thought American Indians looked or acted like. Chief Bear Paw and Squaw of the Rolling Hills. The Indians who knew the truth of the world because only they were connected with the trees and the bears and the earth, unlike us, the Anglo-Saxons stumbling though life in our clumping boots.

You wanted to know the Spiritualists so that you could write them into your book. But you came away being thoroughly disgusted with their obvious tactics of trickery and deceit. "How can people be so gullible? Can they not SEE that the envelope reading is a ridiculous fake? The men in particular don't even try to make it look real. Their mouths move as they read the messages. To help them memorize it all I guess."

Remember how we talked about Phario's blind eye? And how if we wanted to we could make up a story as to why he was terrified of trailers? And that maybe he had injured his eye in a trailer accident? And we could set ourselves up as "animal psychics"? I do. I remember sitting at your antique farm table, cradling an iced coffee in my sweaty hand, the red glass pushing its lumpy smoothness into my left palm. It was never sweet, your coffee. It was milky and bitter. Like a Cadbury bar left too long in a desk drawer until the surface blooms white and the texture goes to sand.

Remember how we spent that afternoon drafting Phario's reading? Yeah. That was a good time. Why didn't we write that down?

Joyce, where ever you are now, you should know that animal psychics are all the rage, only now they call them animal communicators. And the American Indians, by way of Gawani Pony Boy, have taken over parts of the horse training industry. Don't bother to teach your horse manners, just commune with him as the ancient and knowing American Indians did. Then you'll achieve a true relationship with your personal spirit guide. Your horse.

But anyway, for all that I laugh at the charlatans, and hate the tricksters, I do somehow love part of all that craziness. As did you, I know. We're all attracted to the depth of a crystal and the purity of a flame.

I don't really completely believe in ghosts. They're too tangible and recognizable somehow. They're too easy to create out of a slip of paper, a camera and a willing audience. But I do somehow believe in spirits. Bad of me, I know. I think we can chalk it up to a deeply Christian upbringing. I can't quite imagine a death without an afterlife. How could something so rich and powerful just end? Pffft. A flame blown out. Doesn't seem possible that there's no smoke lingering in the air.

Hey, but I needed to tell you.

Those bells I heard when I was trying to sort through your stuff? It was nothing major or dramatic, just the small unbroken ringing of an alarm clock miles away when I sat at your computer that hot afternoon in May, hoping that searching all your files would deliver unto me a written record of what the hell you intended me to DO with all those horses you left behind. Yeah, that bell. Is that the sound of fairies laughing? Crying? Or just a touch on the shoulder? I'm guessing you know.

But I needed to tell you that the fairies, or the bell, or the memory of a bell and a chunky red glass of iced coffee, they're all fluttering in the wisps of my hair that won't stay back, won't stay tamed, and keep getting tangled in the hinge of my eyeglasses and tickling the edge of my upper lip.

Call me when you get a minute. I need to tell you something.

Toe the line

Is it toe the line or tow the line? I've seen that question go around the net a few times. I lean on the side of TOE the line, as in step right up to the line with your toe upon it and get ready to start running.

Emails are a great source for these annoying idioms people get Wrong. I have a colleague who peppers his emails with these little bon mots and usually gets them wrong. Enh! Buzzer! Makes you look, uh, not so witty, you know? I wish he would just stop, but on the other hand, I've started my own collection of his malapropisms.

Intense and purposes.

No. No. No. It doesn't make sense, you idjut. Here's a general rule for writing, if the phrase makes no sense, then you have it wrong. For all Intents and Purposes. I have an intention to go do something, and there is a Purpose to my actions or my decision. I'm not being "intense", I have an intention. Spell checker is not your friend.

Could care less

Well, I'm sure you could care less, but I could NOT care less. If you could care less, then you obviously care a little bit. If you couldn't care less, then you do not give a whit about the subject at hand. Spell check is not your friend.

Wit

I don't care a whit about your larger plans, as you are fast proving yourself to be inane. Whit, with an aitch, is a word. Wit, as in joyful clever use of language, is also a word. Whit means a tiny amount, a speck, a drop. Don't fling those two around together in sentences. Spell check is not your friend.

To the manor borne (so wrong in SO many ways!)

Oh, this one sent me right over the edge. First, to be borne usually means to be carried, although archaic spelling sometimes uses that spelling to refer to childbirth. But hey, you're writing in 2007, right? So spell it like you mean it. The original phrase is "to the manner born", as in, I was born to a certain social class and there is a way of carrying myself or speaking, which demonstrates that status. That's the meaning of "manner". If I happen to have been born as a working class bloke, but soon I toddle about wearing tweed and sporting a certain accent, then I carry myself as if I were "to the manner born." No one can tell.

OK, but then this ever so clever fellow working for the BBC started a sitcom oh so cleverly entitled, "To the Manor Born." Cute! Love this show. Excellent. It's about a Manor, an estate! Love the witty (not whitty) Brits. But my ever so dim friend thinks that this spelling is the real one. Oy.

First, .... Secondly, .... Third of all, ....

Picky, picky, Suisan. If you have a list, you are supposed to use the same construct for the beginning sentence of each part of the list. (Although I do think that Firstly sounds dreadful). It's OK to use "[blank] of all" at the end so signify that it's the end of the list, but it's so much easier to turn "Secondly" into "Second" and resolve the stupidity.

Proof is in the pudding

No. It's not. Sorry, but it's hard for puddings, whether steamed or stirred, to generate logical proofs of anything. Brain capacity is minimal. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Shortening that aphorism changes its meaning. So don't bother.

Free Reign

This one's all over the place. If I'm riding a horse, and I don't particularly care where he's going, maybe we're just strolling along the side of the lane, then I "give him his head." I give him slack in the reins so that there is no tension between my hand and the bit. The reins drop down on his neck in a slack curve. This is called "walking on a free rein." A rein is that strappy thing on a bridle (NOT bridal) that goes from the bit to the hands. A reign is a period of time that someone has a crown on his head. I don't know what a free reign is -- on that doesn't charge taxes or end with a beheading? Say it with me folks, "Spell check is not your friend."

Mute point

It's a moot point at this juncture to point out that you should stop trying to fancify your language to impress me. Stop. Please. (A moot point usually means that there's no point in talking about it anymore. I don't know what a mute point is.) Spell check is ....

Epigram for Aphorism (although now I'm just being snotty and looking for this guy to screw up.)

An Aphorism is a witty, pithy phrase. An Epigram is a poem. The last email you sent to me, a paragraph of which I've quoted below, sent me into such a tizzy that I had to write this screed. Please stop writing in your highfalutin manner. It's giving me heart trouble.

I know that you have expressed an interest in stepping off our committee, but I need to ask you to reconsider. There is a role for the school board here, and we have a duty to the community to provide watchful oversite, especially for the young children. I've heard that the rest of the Board has agreed to cease sending a representative, so perhaps this is a mute point. We do good work on the CAP, and I hope that your worthy experiences here have not proven the epigram true: A committee is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit to do the unnecessary. Should I address the Board on this matter?

Oh really, please don't. It will just make my ears explode. That's messy for the secretaries, you know? Oh look, he misused oversite too. What is an oversite? An overpass perhaps? (It's overSIGHT, you idjut.)

Making my current low mood plummet some more...

After reading this, "Pumpkin Man" porn teacher released from prison, I find that I'm right back to this post from November of 2005: A Proustian Bargain. (You'll need to go read it if you have any hope of understanding the rest of this.)

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I hate that he's now known as "the porn teacher," and he so deserves the title. So brilliant and so evil and so damaged and somehow still captivating. He was one of a small number of people at school who made up my strong substantive memories of Andover. He's a unique, integral, and essential part of those memories, which makes his actual person and his actual deeds genuinely horrifying.

(And I can't help thinking of a certain other dustup which just happened, about pardoning the sins of those who are behind bars simply because they are capable of engendering love. That theory doesn't wash with me.)

I'll admit though to feeling tempted by my recent viewing of Capote. I have an evil curiosity to find out where he lands. Just for my own purposes, not to reengage with him in any manner. I want to discover what he does with his brilliant intellect. To find out if his wife will take him back. To find out if his daughter.... Oh hell. Look at that: "tempted by Capote" and "his daughter." I swear I didn't mean to put those in the same paragraph, and here they are. It's an infection. You're a bruise. It's as if you are latent there in my subconscious. Capote. New York. Your daughter. Damn you, Mr. Cobb.

Mr. Cobb once told us, in what may have been an exaggerated dream of his own history and personal experiences, that he worked for the government (in some secret agency, he broadly hinted) dissecting speeches of foreign leaders looking for frequencies of word choices. By examining the frequencies of various phrases, grammatical patterns, and word choices, one could determine authorship. His lovely girlfriend worked as an interpreter for the UN, and they would meet for lunch in Manhattan. Just outside a world renowned landmark.

Their only daughter's name was Tiffany, as a memento of that romance.

They met at Tiffany's, just like in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and you told us the story when you commented on the three most mellifluous words in the English Language: Tiffany, diarrhea, and, what was the third? Nonetheless, you've infected my mind. You've infected my writing, Mr. Cobb. I place adjectives and clauses in an attempt to please you in my rough drafts. Mr. Cobb, what have you done to my memories of your brilliance? And of your charisma? I can see your hands shake as you stand in front of the class, see your tremor as you lift your hair, so dark, off your forehead. I can't hear Prince's "Purple Rain" without thinking of you on that motorcycle. Your costumes, your masks. I feel bound to you in some odd dream where you turn onto the road towards Thebes, and I can see the cart ahead and Laius himself.

I know it all ends in death and destruction, but there's an attraction to Oedipus as he walks into his fate which is awful to behold.

Were you never smart enough to save yourself?

It is an evil thing to have known you at all.

For you are an evil thing. A Lucifer.

House hunting

Doug was reminiscing about his strangest house hunting experience. I started to chime in, but then got too wordy, so here's a trip through the weirdest floor plan I ever encountered while looking for a home.

We were looking for a two or three bedroom house and kept stumbling into fixer uppers in our price range. One day though, we found one that had been "flipped" by enterprising contractors. Contractors who had apparently never lived in this house, or perhaps any other house, in light of the way they moved doors, walls, and even entire rooms.

From the front, the 3-bedroom house was fairly non-descript, typical of the many types of California bungalows, built in the twenties, that pepper the Bay Area. The house in question was raised a bit farther from the ground and didn't have hedges obscuring the view to the garage.

Walk up the steps to the front door, walk in the door to a typical "craftsman" living room. Fireplace on the right with built in bookshelves all around, windows to the street over the couch, entrance to the kitchen to the left. Cute. Typical. Fine.

This was the last bit of sanity we were to experience.

Walk into the kitchen. Whoa! Blue! Contractor likes blue! Mexican glazed blue tiles on the floor. Uneven tiles. Granite countertops. Hee hee. Look at that, they've staged the kitchen with bright blue Le Creuset pots on the induction cooktop. And they haven't taken the price tags off. OK, enough giggling about the staging. Let's look at the kitchen. Loooong. Really long. Why so long and so big and no place to eat? Wait a minute, where do you eat in this house? That little teeny table set for tea I passed in the living room? I though that was just decoration. That's IT? Seats two at the most.

OK, go through the back door of the kitchen -- table must be back here.

Huh? Mud room? Washing machine and dryer. Oh my god, these were in the back yard or in the garage before because I can't quite squeeze past them. (Note to self. Put them back in the garage hookup if you buy the house.

So. Eh. Wait. Bedrooms? Did I miss something here? Oh. OK, if you go through the mud room (with all the pegboard for the tools and the closet for the vacuum cleaner, and squeeze past the HUGE washing machine), you get to the master bedroom.

And what a bedroom it is. White. No molding on the window. A wall of closets. Wall to wall carpets with no baseboards. And white. Huh. There's a smallish master bath to the left. That's it. Wait. Where's the other bedroom?

This is where the insanity really kicked in. The seller's agent toddled in just then as we were walking in circles in the isolation chamber. Why, it's right over here. Just open this closet door and walk on through.

Wait. Through the CLOSET?

Dear Butcher and I stumble through, and no, it's not a door disguised like a closet door, it's a passageway through a closet. As in: step into closet, open door cut into back closet wall, step out of closet. The second bedroom has original architecture, the right moldings, hardwood floors, although it is quite small. The wall on the right looks strange though. Too big. No broken up space.

Then it hits me. There used to be an entrance to the front living room here. This was probably the dining room, but with the living room being so small, they took away a door. That's why they could get more furniture in the living room. Ah hah! (Still don't understand the closet theory. Crack?)

Our buyer's agent is squirming mightily at this point, and she wants to leave. But I want to see more! This place is insane! We come back through the closet (Alice in Wonderland? The Secret Garden? The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe!) to find the still grinning seller's agent in the white bedroom.

"Where's the third bedroom?"

"Come with me!"

At this point, Dear Butcher mutters under his breath that they must have it hidden in the washing machine. I'm voting for the kitchen cabinetry.

Out we go through the side door, down a new set of wooden porch stairs to an outside patio. Mind you, the stairs are on the outside of the house. As is the patio. The patio under the stairs features tumbled brick set into the ground in a herringbone pattern. Nice, except the bricks are all popping up. No one bothered to prepare the ground, or compact sand. They just laid out bricks in a herringbone pattern on the ground. (Next time guys? Don't spend the money on the Le Crueset pots, OK? Actually BUILD the patio first.)

We reenter the house at the bottom level and discover that the garage has been renovated into a modern efficiency apartment. Camel walls, beige Berber carpet, overstuffed armchairs, and, uh, a kitchen too. (At this time I was pregnant with Saul and Neo was three. Sure, she can cook her own breakfast. No problem. Here honey. Let mommy teach you how to use the microwave.) But even here, the weirdness abounded. No shower or bathtub. No room for a table. Wait a minute. No OUTLETS? OK, there's one. But eh, don't you sort of need them all over?

(We discovered the no outlets issue when we noticed that one of the lamps was trailing its cord along the wall like a lost snake. Perhaps the stagers shouldn't have pointed that out to us?)

Anyway, it was an interesting experience, that house. Should have been marketed as a one bedroom with an in-law apt, but it wasn't. Some nights as I'm sending the kids to bed, I still giggle about the staircase to the bedroom which was outside of the house. (Time for bed! Don't get wet!)

Glad I'm not house hunting any more.

Under the Sofa

When I was a kid I used to be able to sqeeze under the sofa. One day I discovered that I was too large to fit under it, but on the same day I also discovered I could go behind it and squeeze into the space between the sofa, the upright piano, and the side table. It was a little dramatic, squeezing under the furniture, and it tended to scare my Pomeranian, who would sniff at me and whine until I either moved over to let her in or came out myself.

This past week, I've been under the sofa. Possibly sucking my thumb. Definitely muttering and whimpering to myself.

My mother's been in town all week.

Dear Butcher said to me this morning, when he found me crying in the bathroom, "Once again, your mother comes to visit leaving destruction and despair in her wake. When is she coming back?"

She laid off on the laundry this time. (Thank GOD!) But, she replaced that obsession with a need to take out my trash. We had this conversation three times while I was working on the computer:

"Suisan, do you have any trash can liners?"

"In the pantry, " I call back from the computer room.

A few moments later she calls again, "Suisan, where in the pantry are the liners?"

"On the floor!"

"On the floor? What color are they?"

(Good god woman, If you just took the liner out, can you not see that they are white, and therefore the replacement ones would ALSO be white?) "White! On the floor! In a box near the dog food!"

A few moments later, "Suisan, where does the trash go?"

"Outside in the bin!"

(Swear to god. Three times she asked this:) "Where's the bin?"

OK Fine. Clearly I don't need to get any work done. Clearly I need to stop everything so that I can take out the trash which must be done at that exact instant. Excellent. So I go into the kitchen to grab the bag of trash, and she says, "Oh, don't do that. I'll get it. I'm just trying to help."

verra verra helpful. thnx so much.
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Weirdest quote of the week. After we've eaten Chinese food for dinner she says (while spreading all the clean dishes on every counter top because she cannot figure out where they go. Sigh.), "That was very good. You know, I've sworn off Chinese food, but I enjoyed that."

"Sworn off? Why?"

"Well, I read about all those people in China with the bloody noses and the gluten and the pork and I decided never to eat Chinese food again."

Ummmmmm. Yeah.

"Mom. It's American food."

"But those poor Chinese!"

Is she somehow unaware that the restaurants actually cook the food here? That just because it's Chinese food that the food did not actually come from China itself? WTF? I'm still trying to work that one out. She's got a Ph.D., for god's sake.
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But the thing that just drove me over the edge this visit was all about My Idiot Brother. I showed her the "Best Of" award Dear Butcher received from the regional paper. "Oh, how nice. I wish your brother could have gotten one of these for his bookstore. It might have made him profitable."

Complaining about how my brother won't leave her alone and then five minutes later getting a call from My Idiot Brother on my cell phone. He's complaining to me because she called him an hour before ("While I Was At Work!") to tell him that he should quit this job and get one which paid 30K with benefits. ("Who does she think she is? I'm worth more than 30K! I place college graduates in jobs for 70K starting salaries! What an insult!" He's a commission-only recruiter who's made one sale in about three months.) So I get him off the phone, walk down stairs to hear my mother on the phone with My Idiot Brother. She gets him off the phone and spends the rest of the day complaining about how he's ruining her vacation by calling her.

"Did you call him this morning?"

"Well. I had to check in with him. I'm the only person he has left now."

Well then, it's hard to complain when he calls you back, then isn't it? Same gerbil wheel, different topic, different year.
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My extended family is very wealthy. Sort of obscenely wealthy, actually. My grandfather, up until the stock market dived in the early 1990's, was free to travel, spread cash around, and buy properties with no concerns. If you wanted money, all you had to do was ask.

Except, I have a really hard time asking. It kills me. My fingernails itch. It makes my stomach hurt. Because in our family, money was love. Cash was love. My grandfather always wore deep pocketed blazers, and when you went to visit, you were encouraged to put your hands down into his side pockets to grab the prize.

It was always a roll of cash, hundreds usually. (And this was when I was six. What six year old has a use for a hundred dollar bill rolled around six or seven twenties?) You were not to count it or open the roll--that was considerd rude. You were supposed to crawl up into his lap, give him a big hug and a kiss, rub your face against his Bay Rum neck, and say, "I love you Grandpa." When you got home, you could run up to your room and unroll the cash, count the bills, and know that this was your gift from Grandpa. My parents never would have asked for it. It was given to the kids. It belonged to the kids. Grandpa's wishes were not to be questioned.

I never spent the money. I had no way to spend it as I wasn't allowed to bring the money with me if we went out (It's too much. You'll lose it.) and I wasn't allowed to walk around the neighborhood by myself, unlike my brother who went into Boston by himself on the T and invested in magic tricks at Jack's Joke Shop. So I stuffed it into my top dresser drawer until the day a baby sitter was putting away my clothes and opened the wrong drawer. Honest woman, she told my parents that there was about a thousand dollars in the youngest child's room, although she hadn't counted all of it, and did they know about it?

I still remember my father sitting me down that evening to tell me that we were going to have to open a savings account for me. He was so stern about it. So serious. I thought I was in trouble for most of the conversation. Here's your penance, young lady. You will have to carry a passbook. A passbook savings account because you are too young to sign a withdrawal slip. You are the only member of the family with a passbook savings account. We have checking accounts. Your brother spent his money, so he doesn't have a savings account. Only you, young lady, will have this passbook account. The passbook will be dark blue and will make you nauseated when you find it in your desk drawer, peeking out from under the ribbon barrettes and origami turtles. You will have to make a Special Trip to the bank and talk to the Bank Manager, who luckily is a friend of the family, before you can get your money out. OK?

I'm not sure where that whole experience went sideways, but I am as sure now as I was then that my father was deeply embarrassed that I had cash in the house. Then I thought that he was embarrassed I hadn't spent it, but now I think he was embarrassed to have been told by the babysitter that the eight year old had an entire drawer dedicated to cash. Talk about clueless parents.

In this strange system, cash was love. It was kisses and hugs. Checks, big yellow checks, were support and admiration. You got into the best private school in the land. Here's a check. I love you. Here's a twenty. I'm proud of your A. Here's a check. I see that you're sad, and I'm scared to ask why, so here's a fifty.

And since no one ever bothered to SAY "I love you", no one except my grandmother and my aunt, I grew up feeling completely unlovable.

Not unloved. I "knew" logically that people loved me, but I felt marked and damaged as the one person in the family who could not feel love and was not to be loved by edict from on high. Ultimately I was sure that everyone in the family felt as if they were supposed to love me, supposed to say so in a polite way to make me feel better, but actually, they couldn't love me becuase I was an unlovable person. I used to dream about the mark on my forehead that labelled me as the unlovable one. It was green. It was a triangle.

(Interestingly, neither my grandmother nor my aunt ever gave me money. My grandmother had a trust fund for me, and she would pay for things for me, but she never handed me a check in her entire life. My aunt also bought things for me, but she gave the objects as gifts, not straight cash. Odd that those are the only two people whom I believed when they said, "I love you.")

So for me, to ask for money from my family is really to beg for love. (Yeah, I know that's insane, but that's the way it feels.) Please love me. Please. I'll do anything. I'll be really really good. You won't even know that I'm here. Please can I have some? About This much? Or maybe more? But I don't want to overdraw your account of love. I know how limited you are and that the overdraft protection is costly. So, could I have some? Whatever you can afford?

I knew the whole time she was visiting that I was going to ask her for money. Dear Butcher and I could use some. Seriously. And she's got some. And she's my mother. And she's got enough to spend on my brother. So um, time to gird my loins, swallow back that discomfort, get rational about this whole topic, and just ask her and my Dad if maybe they could help us out. Besides, we have gone for years without asking for money. Years. Almost a decade, I think.

At one point during Mom's visit to me she said, "Your life is so stressful. I wish there was something we could do to make it easier."

(Ah HA! Perfect opening!)

"Mom. I hate doing this. I really do. But seriously, we could use some money. We're about to be delinquent on the property taxes, which we'll pay, obviously, but there's going to be a penalty. Our health insurance is really expensive, and April was a hard month for the businesses. We'd try to pay you back, if that's what you need. But seriously, it would make my life a lot less stressful, at least for the summer, if we had a cushion."

"I already do so much for your brother, you know. He's draining us dry. Maybe we can send you a check when we get home."

Which means that really, she's not going to send anything.

Which also means that I'm right back to feeling like shit. There's a small kid inside me who's squeezed behind the sofa, smelling the dry dust and the rich lanolin of the Oriental carpet, listening to the Pomeranian's nails click on the side table legs as she digs at it so that I will let her in.

Fuck. I hate being pathetic.