mercuryfern

Update

A voicemail was waiting for me when I got off work:  My father-in–law is hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Last night, my husband told me his dad started drinking again a month ago.  "As long as I'm drinking whisky I'm fine.   It's beer that gets me in trouble.  I'm staying the hell away from beer, don't you worry.  Whisky, though, whisky's no problem."

Thomas and I both think he's decided he'd rather die of cirrhosis than emphysema.  Can't say I blame him.   Well, yes I can, he's leaving four children and nine grandkids.  His wife, while admittedly my least favorite person on the planet, probably deserves not to watch her husband drink himself to death.  Deserves is not the word I'm looking for.  Sounds too much like something she might say.  What does any of us deserve, really?   Not to be typecast as an irredeemable asshole by our own spouse so she can enhance her wholesomer than thou self image, I might argue.  While we are talking about who deserves what, allow me to propose that having every dish one cooks for one's in laws ignored if not outright mocked is not treatment consistent with what I have reason to believe is my very low level of karmic debt.  The absence of glittery holiday sweatshirts in a wardrobe is not to be mistaken for a deficiency of hygiene or morals.

As I was saying, I think we all can agree that, drowning in a dry room, your lungs filling with whatever it is they fill with over the course of years months days while you fight harder for every breath, this is an awful way to go.  Maybe it’s only because the degenerate drunk in the family is my favorite relation by a long shot, but I’m inclined to sympathize with the desire to cop out of that fate.  And the accompanying hectoring.

Rick took the whole extended family to an indoor waterpark last weekend.  Over beers in the jungle themed bar, my husband and his two full sisters gave Jodi, their newly discovered half sibling, the lowdown on childhood in Chez Rick.  She cried.  Julie, the legitimate daughter only six months Jodi's junior, might have been a little mean, the way women in this family are, sometimes only out of habit, to other women.  Julie is vicious even to her eleven year old son's girlfriend of the same age.  You've gotta figure a bonus sibling from just bairly before Rick was married to Patti is gonna get hazed something fierce.  It doesn't help that Rick is his best self to this blank slate of an offspring.  He apologizes when he swears in front of Jodi, calls her nearly every night for no reason other than to chat.

I wasn't in attendance at the waterpark shindig, though Thomas tells me Julie’s husband wished out loud that I was there.  They do like me, in their own way.  I might not be Christian enough, I might not be trustworthy with children, but I have my charms, I am missed. 

Strange to say, I miss them, too.  I don’t like them most of the time, but I do love them, even Julie, even Patti.   It should be a comforting realization, but as is often the case, the epiphany comes too late.  My existential crises has taken it’s toll.  Barring the involvement of deities or groveling the likes of which I have heretofore been incapable, Thomas and I are getting divorced.  He’s leaving me, of all things.  If you’ve been following along, and noticed my absence of late, that’s why.  I’ve only got so much stomach for introspection just now.

Tune Up

On Monday I dropped my bike off for an extensive tune up I can't afford.  It'll end up costing me the equivilant of six tanks of gas, but unfortunate noises coming out of automobiles are always significantly more costly to remedy than those which issue forth from bicycles; best to preserve the car's health for something more important than these measly five mile trips about town.  My bike tires are starting to crack, and the snow we will be having in not so long is really managed best with knobbier ones, anyway; might as well true the wheels and clean the chain while they're at it.  With minimal friction, I will make extensive use of my balaklava and snow pants this winter, good little blood for oil opposer that I am.

The mechanic bore a startling resemblance to Thomas.  It’s not that he looked like him so much as carried himself the same way.   Must be a type: wrench with an art degree.  Marriage to a proffesional means you never have to think about maintaining your own bike.   For five years I haven't pumped up my tires or changed a single flat.  Pffft: and I call myself a feminist.

It was the first time in five years, only the third time in my life, that I walked into a shop through the front door like any old customer, and had to pay, actually pay money.   I let him talk me into expensive tires because that's what they had in stock and I didn't feel like being without a bike the extra day it would take them to get something cheaper from the other location.  Thomas would have been annoyed that I wasn't willing to wait for a better deal.

When I was ninteen, I brought my bicycle in for a tune up at Thomas’s shop.  How romantic: I even kept the claim slip in my wallet for years afterwards.   It resides safely in a photo album now.  At the time I was riding a venerable old Shwinn named Esmerelda, all shiny fenders and curved handlebars.   To those bikies for whom the sport is just another excuse for conspicuous consumerism, such a ride is laughable.  Ah, but once you’ve lived with bike messengers who tear through Philly on Frankenstiens built from garage sale cast offs and dumpster dived parts, purchased speed fails utterly to impress. 

Thomas cooed over my bike, how pretty she was.  He knew a gem when he saw her.  We both prefer objects with history, celebrating underappreciated beauty, defying greed by living simply.  Translatoin: we are cheap; he even more than I.

For a woman with serious badass credentials, I fall in obsessive debilitating love with embarassing ease.  Since I agonise over every little crush or fling much longer than the algorithms in Cosmo reccomend, I always figured I’d be a natural at forever.  Au contaire, dear reader.  Imagine my shock: this marriage thing is Hard.  Seriously.  Hard.  There are so many compromises, so many little things on which to find middle ground.  Turns out, I wasn’t done being selfish.  Sure, sure, I got married too young, that should have been obvious.  Yes, thank you, it is apparent to me at long last.  So, now what...

We are making it up as we go.  He gives me so much freedom it raises our families eyebrows.  This fall, at my insistance, we don’t live in the same city; not even the same coast.  So are you getting divorced?  No, no.  He’s finishing his novel, I’m staying with friends.  I need to be twenty-four now so I don’t freak the hell out over my lost youth in ten, fifteen years.

He’s the sort of guy 21st century strieght women dream of: sesitive, arty, smart, good with kids and pets, able to talk about his feelings, hilarious when the situation requires, but macho, a nice body, an athlete, able to fix stuff or scare off bad guys if need be.  (Not that bad guys aren’t scared of me.  I mean, they are.  I’m just saying.)  If I made a list, and for the sake of full disclosure I should tell you that I did, he meets or exceeds every criterion. 

In theory.

I find myself wondering sometimes if I love him enough, if I love him the right way.  If I love him.  How sickening to see it sitting there in type like that.  What the hell is wrong with me?  There’s that list with all the items crossed off, remember?  Missing now and always in my feelings for him, though, is an edge, a burnign clarity that I’ve caught glimpses of before.  I’d managed to convince myself it was not nessesary or real, just an illusory high of a greedy bipolar mind.  Lately I’m not so sure again.

There are paths I would have taken if I weren’t marrried.  One in particular.  Three years ago I got into Antioch College with a big merit scholarship but didn’t attend because Thomas thought we couldn’t handle the debt.  He never asked me to decline, but complained and worried so much about the money that I looked into the future and saw more resentment between us than it seemed we could weather.  Other chances that I thought for sure would come through instead collapsed in on themselves.  A cold calculation creeps into my mind these days when my defenses against it are down: is what I’m given worth more than what I sacrifice?

We have what I thought I always wanted, and yet, here I am, the bad spouse, thinking about giving it all up.   I bought myself those tires precicely because I knew it would piss him off.

I left my purse and the accompanying cell phone in my car last night.  This morning my voice mail held a message from my husband, the first I have heard from him in four days.  Yesterday a long letter arrived, full of observations made during his first three days in San Francisco, each and every one of them days we did speak on the phone.  The stories he wrote, the itineraries he outlined, I’d heard pieces of it all through a staticy connection already.  He’s never been much of a phone talker, not much of an emailer, either, but my goodness, that boy can put pen to paper.

At six this morning I curled up again with the pages and a hot cup of tea.  When I realized it had all been written before the last time we talked, I began to wonder if he hadn’t just fallen off the face of the earth.  It’s not like him to stay silent four whole days.  That’s more my style.  He’s without a cell, has been calling me frequently, but from pay phones, mostly at inconvenient times.  Last he called, I was at a party and kept it short.  He seemed fine, let’s talk tomorrow.   

It’s one thing to suspect your husband might kill himself if you really do leave him, but worrying that declining to chat on the phone could send him off the Golden Gate Bridge, that’s just plain old arrogance, if not a delusion of grandeur.

Stupid World

Usually, my husband and I take turns being depressed.  We’ve got the rhythm perfected; one of us wallows and the other comforts, then we switch.

This year, for a change, we thought it would be fun to have our quarter- and tertiary- life crises at the same time.  Now, he types sequestered in his parent’s Ohio basement with our cat, finishing the novel he’s been working on for two years, while I do the Walden Pond thing here in New England.  Last night he called me, bubbly with joy.  My dear one finished the rough draft after only a month, was full of plans to head to New Orleans with the local Red Cross.

This afternoon we had some trouble getting in touch.  When we finally did speak, he was incoherent with booze and sorrow.  An entire week’s revisions had been somehow destroyed in an attempt at printing.  The residents of his hometown conspired to convince him offering aid to a disaster zone was a fool’s errand. 

I will resist the urge to lambast his family as cowardly racists; I will not rage at their efforts to vacuum all passion from everyone unfortunate enough to come near their black hole of small minded provincial jealousy. 

The sentences will be unearthed again, there will be other chances to put the cerebral pain in it’s place by pouring his considerable empathy into something tangible.  Throwing my fury at such small injustices: files corrupted, enthusiasm extinguished, is pathetic; especially in times such as these, when starving people hide from trigger happy gun toters, fire ants, and despair, in attics made islands by corpse filled sludge.

Still, when the person who embodies all that is good and pure in my existence gets handed a day that makes him question the value of his own life, my fire and brimstone cannot be reasoned with.

Nonconsensual Guest Blogging

Awwwww, you guys, check out this email my husband just wrote me. The boy's got a BFA and he's not afraid to use it. Somebody get him a blog. No, don't bother, he wouldn't post anyway. *crestfallen sigh* Ah well, I'm just as bad. About a week ago I showed him a piece of which I was particularly proud, and he said, "Honey, I'll never understand why you are fucking around with this blogging business. You've obviously got a novel to write." Um, thanks??

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Sitting in a dirty strip club on the outskirts of Columbus at 3 am, a gyrating cunt 12 inches from my face, Jason turns to me and reiterates how especially odd and drowning in intricate moments existence is. The subject turns to how beautiful a subway explosion may look in infrared, how an atom bomb is a blooming flower when viewed from outer space. The next day we trespass to swim in a private quarry. It takes hours to cross over and back, I kick at the lapping water that cradles my head and fills my ears with another world's sounds. I drive home exhausted, watching a sunset I wish I could broadcast in Times Square for you to see. I want everyone to see it. The strippers, the swimmers, the fighters, the welders, the miners, the cheaters, the devoted, the missing, the ancient, the confused, the rotting, I want them all to see it. I want the universe to crucify me, tear me into molecules and spread me across the surface of this crumbling rock that careens precariously around a giant ball of nuclear explosions.

I want to save everyone.

Ode to Rickles: 1st movement

Because the protagonist had a plot advancing court appearance today, it seems appropriate to update this story now.

My in-law’s back yard faces a large empty lot, of, say, five acres.  Well, faced.  Twelve houses are being put in as we speak.  The whole family is distraught over this, as the field is very picturesque and features prominently in many childhood memories.  They are also aware that in Midwestern towns with lax zoning laws, when new houses are built, the old ones nearby flood.  The region is flat, you may have heard.

It was a month ago when, as Rickles told me, a sweet little old lady (his words) called him, crying, because trees she had planted long long ago were being cut down by ruffians.  Ever unable to resist the charms of a damsel in distress, Rick marched right over to discuss things with the chainsaw wielders. They explained that the trees were not on the little old lady’s land and needed to be removed so that a road could go in.  Each party asked the other to please go fuck itself.

Rick got to thinking then, and politely asked the guys to wait while he called the mayor.  For some reason the mayor wasn’t immediately available. Apparently, though, the secretary so enjoyed the tirade of obscenities issuing from my father in law's mouth that she did not want to deny her boss the pleasure of hearing them himself.

When you are talking to a government official, it’s a good idea to mention your gun.  If you have the opportunity, it’s best to theorize what activities you might engage in accompanied by said gun.  My father in law begs to differ with the quote attributed to him in both the police record and the newspaper.  Beginning a sentence with "What I should do.."  is entirely different than "What I'm going to do..." when you are talking about defending an oak tree with your deer rifle.

When the cop car pulled in, Rick logically figured the town government had come to see things his way and .  He confidently marched out to meet the cops, and was surprised to find himself subsequently sitting in the back of their car with a sore neck.

Lawyers are not necessary for one so well spoken as our hero, so he had no fears about speaking extensively with both the police and the newspaper.  Interestingly, the newspaper got wind of his little run in with the FBI last year, and felt that story added context to the current goings on.

My father in law’s interest in UFOs leads him to film the night sky and then search the resulting footage for inconsistencies.  Just before the president’s third campaign stop in this tiny town, Rick decided it might be fun to get some footage of Air Force One.  He went to the airport (an office in the middle of a cornfield) and asked if he could stand nearby and film the plane landing.  Permission was denied in a rude tone, to which my father in law replied, “Fine.  I’ll just shoot him from the roof of the hospital.”

Ten FBI agents awaited my father in law at home.  They were searching the house, questioning my mother in law, even restraining the Boston Terrier.  (This last struck Rick as particularly unjust.)  Apparently, my mother in law told the feds at some point, “I’m not bad, I’m good.  He’s the one that’s bad.”

Some of the guys eventually left, but my father in law was closely supervised for the rest of the day, some might have described him being under in house arrest.  My mother in law was escorted to her daughter’s house where she had preexisting plans to baby-sit the grandchildren, (two of whom are accomplished ackronauts.)

Rick has been researching up quite a defense for his tree protecting charges, based mostly on squatter’s rights and personal injury at the hands of the arresting officer.  The cornerstone of his legal strategy is an aggressive letters to the editor campaign.  My husband went with his dad to the hearing today, and managed to convince the judge of the need for more time to bring someone with a law degree onto the team.

Keeping and Leaving

I'm gone from my apartment.

Dug up a few plants I couldn't bear to have killed by ignorant strangers, gave them to neighbors and friends.  It's an important tradition in my gardening life, this giving of cuttings, most of my darlings came to me this way.  Left the toughies (Monarda, Black Eyed Susans, Yarrow, etc) behind to face negligence perhaps more severe than my own.   I didn't have time to get everything i wanted to save.  Right now three scraggly looking but ultimately healthy (I swear, Michelle) Centuriums sit on a friend's porch awaiting their new beds.  I am feeling a bit uncentered, a bit rushed, and I just couldn't muster the nesting energy to put them in the ground yesterday.  I might not this afternoon, either.  If they don't die, they will be lovely next May and June.

It turns out that everything I need fits in my car.   Especially impressive when you consider that needed items includes a wooden spinning wheel, a viola, a handmade glass kaleidoscope, and the like.  This doesn't even touch on the contents of a large box entitled Useless Pretty Things.  Oh, and a bicycle.  Dont even accuse me of owning a large car, either. 

A 5x 10 storage unit holds most of the rest of our possessions.

I was feeling so overwhelmed by all that we own, but it compacts down very neatly.  We've got some good stuff:  my great grandfathers leather bound 1911 copy of a Midsummer Night's Dream, stainless steal pots and pans, a cast iron pan shiny black with its deep seasoning.   This last has starred in at nearly every meal I've made since college. 

Christmas Eve last year we had a blizzard and Thomas's friend got stuck with us.  They shoveled and I baked.  Jason still rages about that four course dinner.  The cornbread, my own recipe, brought to the table in the pan; my wholesomeness reached heights I didn't know were in me.  I think I even wore an apron.  (not holiday themed)  The great thing about spending the christian high holy day with atheists is that you are not compelled to sing songs, to shellac everything until any real beauty is obscured under layers of shine.  We filled our bellies and revelled in the meteorological chaos that threw us together. 

While packing, I was so proud of us for how much we were throwing away or sending to Goodwill.   We shed our attachments to the material world, only retaining those possessions that either keep us alive or keep us connected to what is essential.  There would be consequences. I steeled myself against the inevitable mourning from parting with things I have kept for so long.

As I pulled away, though, the pile around the trash can looked so small, the futon rolled up and erect, the formless dark plastic bags huddled around it.   We haven't discarded much, after all.

Ode to Rickles: Overture

Thomas and I had been dating for maybe two weeks when he went home to watch his father die.  After forty years of near perpetual inebriation, the old man's liver had finally thrown into the towel.  He was released to the care of his wife, who was assisted by hospice in the grizzlier details of comforting him towards departure: diapers, sponge bathes, the whole deal.

And then he got better.  No one expected him to, after scraping by decades of near death obliviously: the car wrecks, the work injuries; but he stopped drinking and waddya know, the liver pepped right up.

A few years later, when Thomas and I were even more impoverished than we are now, we lived with his parents for 13 months.  In case there are any newlyweds listening: Living with your in laws is a Very Bad Idea.  Make friends with your credit card debt the way the rest of America has.

I always appreciated being asked if we would like any lasagna whenever we attempted spousal lovin.  Oh, and my mother in law lecturing me on the *correct* way to boil an egg- whats not to like about that?   How I enjoyed being reminded of her superior egg boiling techniques anytime anyone ate an egg in our presence.  See how easily he's peeling that?  I bet his wife does it just like me.  Remember how I showed you?

So, Rick would have been my favorite relative even if he didn't star in all the best stories.  Thomas and I are the only ones who see the humor in his sighing audibly during long funeral speeches, the ehem, impolite, asides that he falsely thinks no one else can hear.   Is it wrong that I think its hilarious when a grumpy old man offends or embarrasses everyone around him?

Rick is the sort of swing stater that that strategists across the spectrum salivate over: a cynical union member with a strong sense of class consciousness, a conflict wary patriotic veteran, an atheist gun lover.  He hates Bush and opposed the war before it started.  His opinion on our presence in Iraq is now quite nuanced; mostly he feels sorry for the kids who are there.  He thinks a lot about UFOs but thinks the space program should be eliminated.  And he's very worried about West Nile Virus.

Recently, he's been reborn as a vanguard of the revolution.  More on that later.  Right now, the important thing to know is that he was arrested for tree hugging this weekend.

His Missing Books

You‘d think that in five hours I would have packed more than six boxes of books.  At least all the shelves in the bike room are empty now.  (So named for the six, yes six, bicycles hanging by hooks against one wall.  It might have sounded classier to call it the library, or at least the book room, after the wall perpendicular to the bikes, covered in now abandoned bookshelves.  Even the computer room would have sounded better.  I do most of my typing in here, after all.  I tried, but none of those stuck.  It is the bike room.)  The cookbooks and showoffy literary fiction still sit in the living room.  Those can’t fill more than two small boxes, though. 

When we moved here two years ago, I decided that since we had an extra bedroom, it would be a good time to bring every book I've ever owned from my mother’s house.  I have the entire Little House on the Prairie series, the Redwall series, my favorite I Can Read book called Mouse Soup, everything, right here, anchoring me.  It was pleasurable to sort through all of those today, I took my time, savoring the memories conjured by various covers. 

Somehow the books never quite got organized by subject on the shelves, but the classic fiction is nestled separately from the children’s books now.

I notice, now that I’m done, that I packed very few of my husbands books.  I’m wondering at this moment about specific titles that I know he once owned.  When we first got together he possessed complete collections of his favorite authors: O’Brian, Ford, Carver, Dostoevsky, Bukowski.  My own fiction collection is embarrassingly paltry, heavy on low class books I loved at nine, starring horses or girls wearing bonnets.  I married a working class man better read than myself, with hardcore taste in literature.  I aspire to one day catch up to him in classics read.

And now most of his wonderful books seem to be gone.

It’s possible, I guess, that he’s been packing these and taking them to store in his parents house two hours away when he visits them every few weeks.

I doubt it, though.

I think he’s been selling them.

We have a good used bookstore here that gives us a good rate in store credit for books we bring in.  They give much less in cash.

Our poverty has been chaffing at me lately.  Frugality used to feel like a fun game of outsmarting this consumerist culture.  Living simply was a rebellion against greed.  The last two years though, I’ve been sick of peanut butter and jelly, of thrift bought clothes that only ever almost fit me, of never going anywhere that has a cover charge.  I am hurt when I must get the bike computer that does not tell me my cadence so that we can save $10.  I’m tired of buying a new pair of shoes only once a year.  Next time I break my toe, I want to actually see a doctor.  A cell phone is a luxury I don‘t mind forgoing, but I wish we had long distance instead of having to use phone cards.  For a long time I didn’t mind always having someone else’s hand me down computer, but lately this one has been quirkier than usual, freezing up more often, frequently refusing to open any word processor documents or get online.  Even when the dialup works, there is no use in looking at anything other than text.  Photographs are indecipherable when they do make it across our slow connection.  It is less than pointless trying to access anything that moves or makes noise.

We think of ourselves as an egalitarian couple, in finances as in all things.  His parents are not feminists, though, and in the back of his mind he believes that it is his job to take care of me.  Though I try to hide it, Thomas can tell how weary I am of our perpetual lacking.  He blames himself, though he already makes more than I do. 

It is exhausting to love me.  I’ve always known that I am expensive emotionally, that I demand more attention than most women might.  This is not something I’m proud of.  I try to make up for this my being low maintenance financially.  Our wedding rings are silver, our furniture thrift.

But now I find out that Thomas has been whittling away at the books he’s had since college, the books that brought him out of his parent’s factory town.  He is diminishing his art so he can take me out to dinner.

I never meant to demand such a sacrifice of him.

Why I Hate People in Their Early Twenties

In chemistry class, a girl behind and to the left of me frequently mocks the accents of our professor and lab assistant. Today, he said Spriter instead of Sprite and she repeated his word, laughing. Some friends joined her.

I turned and gave her a disgusted look. I made eye contact, held it while she squirmed and asked her friends why I was looking at her. One of my earliest memories, I must have been two or three, is of an uncle saying: Wow. If looks could kill, those blue eyes, Jesus.

This girl was chatting a few minutes earlier about how her GI Bill gives her more money than she can use for tuition; how she just gets cash to spend on whatever, and I think of all the things we cant afford at the Head Start, all the parents who lost their subsidies. The makeup this girl is wearing, the new mall bought clothes; I am seething even before she begins her xenophobic chortling.

We have the resources for war but not for life; the simplicity of this fact does not keep it from chaffing at me. So many of my fellow students at this large midwestern state school have made peace with the idea that if you are poor and you want to go to college these days, you must to be willing to kill people for money. Usually, though, the fresh from a four year military stint kids are a little more sophisticated than their factory working friends. They’ve seen some of what’s out there, they are not so obtusely racist. But this girl.

She expects to be fawned over. She is used to being one a few of her gender, of her rudeness passing for wit and getting some laughs from the ten undersexed boys trying to get in her pants at all times. I want to tell her: Look, monolinguals don’t get to mock the accents of those better educated. Perhaps we should conduct the class in Mandarin? You’ve never left your comfort zone, what do you know, have you ever been the only person of your race in the room?

I was raging thus to my husband this evening, adding some especially vitriolic obscenities that I hadn’t unleashed on her but planned to at next opportunity. He let it wash over him like a wave, as he does with all of my fits. When the storm has spent itself, I stood there, scowling, and he looked up at me, the picture of serenity.

“So what ethnicity is this guy?”

“He’s from Shanghai. Chinese. The assistant, too.”

“So you just turn to this girl the next time the says something stupid and say, Excuse me, my husband is Chinese, I don’t appreciate your jokes.”

“Oh. Hey, that’s pretty good.” I am suddenly embarrased at how angry I was, glad that I managed to avoid blowing up publicly.

“Course it is. ‘S that whole lie that tells the truth thing. Dya want one of these sandwiches?” He squeezes my hand as he asks this and then stands up and kisses the top of my head.

“Yeah, that sounds good.” I close my eyes when he puts his arms around me. Neither of us moves towards the kitchen.