Dinner Conversation

The ex and I got invited to the same Thanksgiving dinner this year.  I'm going, and he's not, but it doesn't really matter at this point; we're fine with one another, so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It might even have been fun -- reminiscent, even, of our first Thanksgiving as a married couple -- and not in a romantic way but a hilarious one.  That year, the eccentric old artist we'd bribed into being our elopement witness (bribed with alcohol -- it had been late enough in the morning by his standards) -- had invited us to Thanksgiving dinner.  The dinner was being held at his ex-wife's apartment and included not only her but a bunch of his screaming, yelling batcrap-crazy old friends whom he'd grown up with in Coney Island.  It was an experience.  Political conversations with lots of one person interrupting the other and a loving "shut up" interjected ever so often.

I guess you could say that it was the kind of divorce we would have aspired to.  And, in some ways, the one we got.

When Steven and I had first started splitting up, one thing I found hurtful was the fact that he saw our commonalities -- the things that had, in part, brought us together as friends and eventually more -- as sudden liabilities.  Because I remembered afternoons when my siblings and I would raid the refrigerator for ways of creating new types of condiment sandwiches (with the only "food" that was sometimes left at the end of the month) -- and because he remembered how he and his sister probably could have died of a Flintstone's vitamins overdose after munching down several handfuls of those things to ease a sweet tooth because their stomachs were growling -- we in some ways understood each other. Because each of us had fought our ways all the way to master's degrees but still just couldn't seem to get ahead, we had some common causes, one could say.

But that also meant, he pointed out, that we had the same bitterness and rage, deep down, against the world.  Our bitterness only exacerbated the other's, he told me; we didn't know how to keep each other in check. 

I don't know that I ever came to agree with him on that, but at this point that hardly matters.

I want to tie this up with a clean, neat ending somehow -- with what? "You live and learn" or something of the kind?  But I guess the things we truly learn in life are never so cut-and-dry, are never really simple prescriptions for future choices -- what to do vs. what not to do. Our experiences are all a little bit like that  Thanksgiving table back in 2002:  a mixture of laughter and curse words;  people you'll see again and  people who will just be passing through --  men and women whose names or even faces you won't remember; a table full of potluck dishes we appreciated but forgot to even unwrap.  A carcass all but picked clean.  A feeling of at least having moved beyond desperate hunger.

Passive Agressive

Learning when to say no has made me a kinder person.  I don't know why it took so many years of therapy for me to realize that if you say no calmly, knowing that you are saying it just to be fair, not out of anger -- and hold your ground -- you won't go on to hate both yourself and the person who may end up expecting too much from you.  You won't wake up in the middle of the night angry.  You won't stay up late doing favors for people that you never should have agreed to do.  You'll sleep well.

How had I gotten to be that way in the first place -- to such a point that I had to unlearn my anger? Was it just my temperament, my personality? Was it just the social contract of a woman to "help" other people at a great cost to herself?

When my brother started college and I was still in high school (both he and my parents had started college at some point, but I was the first one in my family to finish it), I somehow had agreed to wake him up in the morning for class before I left to catch the school bus.  He would never get up the first or second time, and, after being completely unresponsive, would finally yell, angrily, things like "Yeah, I HEARD you! Shut up!"


I mean, I know we were poor, but what -- we couldn't afford an alarm clock?  Why in the world did I agree to keep doing that for him?

My mother's limited interactions with other people probably had a lot to do with my passive-aggressive tendencies too, though.  She has mostly -- in all the years I can remember -- really kept to herself.  Never really made friends.  Occasionally she would develop some kind of odd friendship with someone, and it would always end badly.  And I'd always get to hear all about it and watch it like some kind of slow-motion car crash.

For instance, there was April, a woman who lived down the street from us.  April was married, but I can't remember if her husband didn't have a job or what the deal was; I just know that between our dirt-front-yard, splinter-floored rental and her grimy, bacon-smelling, dirty-diaper inhabited one it was like some kind of poverty smackdown, and April was somehow actually winning:  she didn't have a phone, and we did.

Now, we'd only had a phone for a few years -- starting after the grandmother I'd never met due to the price of airfare died in only her fifties, and her house got sold, leaving my mother with enough to buy a few pieces of furniture she still owns today (what's left of them, anyhow, since the cats got hold of them early on).  So we had a phone.  (And, by the way, in case this sounds like a story of the Great Depression era, let me clarify that I'm only in my 30s.  Yes, we were just poor white trash; that's all).

Anyway, I don't know if something particularly special had happened in April's life that suddenly necessitated her being on the phone all the time -- unless that special event was meeting and befriending my mother, who had a phone -- but suddenly this woman was in our house twelve times a day, sitting on the bare landing of our stairs and just gabbing away on the telephone.  I want to say that my mother was friendly to her at first and smiled a lot and tried to get her to talk in tongues and admit what a lust-filled hussy she was and that she needed to repent -- but I might just be generalizing here, since that's kind of how my mother's brief relationships with other adults just tended to go down.  All I know is, I'm not sure how long this phone-borrowing thing went on (except to say that it felt like forever), but at some point my mother began angrily telling us that April was too much "about the ways of the flesh" and needed to "get right with God."  Usually while she was slicing potatoes or otherwise doing something that made one not want to make too much of a fuss over what she was saying.  Why she felt like this was an appropriate discussion to be having with children ranging in age from eleven down to six, I can't really say.

So I know what my mother said to us, but I don't know what she said to April exactly.  I just know that one day the phone-borrowing thing stopped and that it couldn't have been pretty --  that it must have gone from all smiles and "let's talk about the Lord" to "Don't you set foot in this house ever again" on the turn of a dime.  I suppose one can't be witness to such things without internalizing -- and...normalizing? oh, dear God, literally  -- them just a little.

So anyway, it's been lovely, dear reader, having you sit here and listen with such interest to what I have to say -- but it's 12:30 in the f*g morning now, so what the hell are you doing in my house when  I'm tired and cranky and need you to get the hell out of here so I can go to sleep?

I mean -- ahem -- sweet dreams!

Thanksgiving/Pre-Christmas Post

Being poor wasn't always all deprivation and sadness.  Sometimes we got things other people would never get.   Like the Christmas when my mother, the art school dropout, sewed for each of us, without so much as a pattern, a completely unique stuffed dog puppet --  each one built upon a sock, covered by a realistic body of stuffing and fabric store fur and brown beads for eyes -- and noses molded by clay with two holes for sewing and then painted a shiny black before she'd attached them. The red fabric tongues that would hang out happily when we held them close to us and made them say whatever we wanted them to.

Original Blame and Shame

The man was Adam, the woman was and Eve, and the object was the fruit. 

And the feeling was a  curiosity.  And the mistake was consenting. 

We were in the bathroom -- playing with water, I suppose -- always a temptation.  To me, anyway; I was probably four.  It must have been a hot day.  Maybe my brother was there.  My sister must have been born by then but was too young to speak, too young to walk.  One less person to blame.  But definitely I was there -- and Stevie, the kid down the street, twice my age, whom my mother sometimes babysat. 

I remember the bathtub.  Put this in your hair, Stevie said, holding the tube of white toothpaste.  It'll make it white, he said -- just like Mrs. Santa Claus' hair.  Stevie must've been a good salesperson already at  the age of eight -- given that, looking back, what did that have to do with anything?  Christmas was months away.

Somehow, despite this, I  felt he had a point.  How could I resist?

Why is it, when I think back to this, I feel that  Stevie meant me harm?  Had he stayed back, laughing, while I ran for my mother with those stinging eyes ? I don't think that happened, so why do I envision it that way?

Why do I remember this at all; why do I come back to this over and over again like an anxiety dream that stands in as some kind of shorthand for shame? Was this the first betrayal in memory, the first time I would trust a stranger and end up regretting it? My body's way of remembering a future that hadn't happened but surely would? Was Stevie standing in as the spouse, the tenant, the Devil incarnate  -- all of these, all wrapped up in one?

Stevie didn't look like any of those.  He didn't look like anything.  Stevie was a blur; for me, at that moment, there was only me.  Me, running, yelling for my mother. Me, feeling stupid for what I'd gone along with; that was all. I ran, and my eyes burned.

Untitled Woman No. 5

Eyes, brownish, brownish hair, rooted in the land

of test markets:  ribless rib sandwich, Ohio, the heart of it all, 

that fatless fat that passes, unchanged, through the body, although

you may feel a little sick.  But why not say what happened.

She was exported  (I was) forever:  a one-way ticket, and not for the sole

purpose of finding herself on a map.  You could look for her

but not toward that body of water to the West -- the one bearing

the name of a dead man.  Lower, to the East.  Moving still

farther eastward -- traversing the fastest route from Brooklyn to Queens, far

past where the streets are numbered.  Not the Hudson River, not the Lower

East Side, not the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  Here, they call it

like they see it:  the first avenue and then  the second one, and when you run out

of counting, there's the alphabet.  At the Center of the city, there

is a Park, and at the heart of her body, the heart.