Revenge of the Paste Eaters (13 page)
I was willing to tolerate the occasional invasion of numbers in my exploration of the alphabet, but somewhere around third grade the teachers began devoting entire classes to the addition, subtraction, and later multiplication and division of numbers. I lost all interest in the project. I knew three numbers: enough, not enough, and too many. Much beyond that numbers were just annoying.
It was at this point that my teacher—a woman I had grown to love and trust—decided to involve my mother in my education. Now, my mother was a wonderful and very funny woman whom I loved with all of my heart, but I was her test child and she believed—or wanted to believe—that I was as close as flesh and bone can come to perfect. I remember being carried out of the hospital in her arms while she nervously listed all of the attributes I should aspire to. “You’re going to be smart,” she lectured, “and beautiful and graceful and—smart—and you’re going to do very well in school and you’re going to grow up to do something that will change the world. And you’ll be smart . . .”
I did not fully comprehend this at the time, but almost all adults are actually better at math than most children. My mother, born, raised, and a full-grown adult before the invention of the calculator, could add, subtract, multiply, and divide in her head. Almost instantly.
I would come home from school, free at last, to find my mother waiting for me in the kitchen with sheets of multiplication problems and the stove timer. “You’ll get this in no time,” she would assure me, “it’s really easy.” And she would shove a page of math problems in front of me and set the timer. And she would sit down at the end of the table. And watch me. While the stove timer clicked off the last remaining seconds in which I might still find favor in my mother’s eyes.
We did 1 through 10 plus 1 through 10 this way.
We did 1 through 10 minus 1 through 10 this way.
We did 1 through 10 times 1 through 10 this way.
By the time we came to 1 through 10 divided by 1 through 10 she had my father construct fencing from the bus stop to the back porch not altogether unlike the runs they build for cows being sent to slaughter. “You just need to
concentrate
,” she would insist, as if I were deliberately being stupid just to make her look bad.
I came to dread going home. I came to hate getting off the bus. I began to see my whole life spreading out ahead of me as one hopeless morass of unsolved and unsolvable math problems ticking away like Armageddon.
“You
know
that 6 times 9 is exactly the same as 9 times 6,” she would remind me as if this were perfectly evident to everyone.
The only thing that was evident to me was that when my mother shoved a pencil in my hand and set loose the timer, my mind turned to mush and the pulse behind my eyes that blurred my vision beat nervously to the same rhythm as the stove clock. All I could hear was noise, all I could see were vague shapes, and all I could think was, “You’re going to fail, you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail . . .” and this mantra would eventually also fall into the rhythm of the timer, “You’regoing tofail, you’regoing tofail, you’regoing tofail . . .”
Inevitably I wound up crying. Sobbing, as if I were enduring some form of child abuse, and my mother, who had sacrificed all of her toys and her future to raising this tragically flawed child, would struggle to keep her composure. “It’s not that
hard
,” she would stress, which I heard as,
Just how stupid can one child be?
My mother died when I was a young adult. There are times in my life when I would like to have a cup of coffee with her somewhere, just my mom and me. I would like to swap stories with her about where we’ve been and what we’ve done with our lives. She was the storyteller of her generation: there are so many things that happened when I wasn’t paying attention that she would remember.
Where were we that day? What were we doing? How did that happen?
I’d like to smile and hand her the bill and watch her divide out our bills and calculate a 15 percent tip.
in the late ’90s
a young woman climbed a California sequoia tree and lived in the branches for over a year to prevent the woodcutters from chopping the tree down. She refers to the tree as Luna.
One has to wonder what Luna thought
with this oversized creature cradled
in her limbs, scurrying squirrel-like
from one branch to another
never leaving their embrace
for over a year.
What is a year to a sequoia?
Those wiser than I am say that
plants move, appearing and disappearing
to and from the places they are needed,
shifting and traversing times and spaces
unknowable to us. They are the healers
of the planet, placing salve on her burns
and laying their complex, ever-shifting hands
on her battered flesh, always moving, always
changing. Some say the planet itself,
every molecule, every germ, is a living, breathing
thing that grows and stretches and
contracts, each species living in an open,
knowing balance with every other.
Except perhaps for us
the upstarts
the rude, self-centered youngsters
who believe we alone can save the earth
who has been saving herself
for hundreds of thousands of years
and who still may find she needs to save
herself from us.
when i was a
small child my mother took care of the babies while—particularly on weekends—my care and amusement often fell to my father. My father liked to fish. I may have set my internal alarm for zero-dark-thirty and planted myself between him and his boat, or he may have dragged me, yawning and muttering about breakfast, out of bed and into the morning air, I don’t remember which. What I do remember is shoving off in the boat so early in the morning that the sounds of wood sliding across water seemed a violation of the quiet. And I remember never knowing for sure whether my father was going to actually jump into the boat at the last second, or just shove the boat and me across the lake and on into a rudderless wilderness. I was a child who always had something to worry about.
My father did not talk much. This is not a trait I inherited, particularly as a child. I was probably about this same age when I went to a movie and sat between my parents while Cyd Charisse slid down some male dancer’s outstretched leg and I said, “Mommy, wouldn’t you like Daddy to do that to you?” I had one of those charming little girls’ voices that carried for miles with crystal clarity and that could sometimes peel paint off metal car doors. For years after that my mother used this story as an example of why I was left home with babysitters whenever my parents went out.
My father particularly did not talk while he was fishing. He told me fish could hear, and the sounds of our voices would frighten them away. (I believed this for years.) So we would reach our spot on the lake, he would throw out the anchor, set up my pole, set up his own pole, and we would sit there on the hard wooden benches of a wooden rowboat while my father went away somewhere in his head.
I believe he meditated. I believe he meditated on exactly how one man who liked to fish by himself for hours on end came to father three children—all girls—in five years. Perhaps not. I have almost never known what my father was thinking because, as I mentioned, he never talked much.
Pole fishing is not an exciting sport when you are four. A variety of things can happen—ideally a fish will bite your hook—but, all things considered, this is relatively rare. The wind can blow against your line, giving you the sense that something is nibbling from the depths below, or waves can float soundlessly across the lake and bob your bobber, giving you the illusion of imminent capture. Whatever it is that floats on the bottom of the lake and makes the water look black will move or stretch from time to time. Frogs will catapult off the shore, often issuing a short croak as they do so—this livens up pole fishing for a second or two. Turtles will slide off old logs and plop into the water, or sometimes they will just float up from the bottom and just hang in liquid suspension, only the tips of their snouts breaking the surface.
On very rare occasions a stately great blue heron will stalk suspiciously along the shoreline, eyeing the water, and freeze when he sees you. Red-winged blackbirds go about their nest-building and family-raising in the bullrushes in spite of your presence. Every now and then one will tip his head back and trill his “oka-lee” for you.
Once in a while a snake will slide into the water and
S
his way across, exactly the same path he swims on land.
On a very good day, a dragonfly will land on the end of your pole.
Dragonflies are flexible sticks with two sets of amazing, translucent wings and one set of big, shiny eyes. They have three sets of feet that they use to continually position themselves. My favorite dragonflies are blue, but they also come in green and in an amazing array of sizes and colors and shapes. I did not know this as a child, but dragonflies are some of the oldest life forms on the planet. They were here before the dinosaurs and they are still here, although it remains to be seen if they can survive mankind. Like everything else that does not thrive in strip malls and landfills, they are losing their habitat to us, which is ironic, given that it is their very adaptability that has allowed them to survive as long as they have. But I didn’t know that as a kid. I knew two facts about dragonflies (although perhaps not when I was five). They only live twenty-four hours and they do nothing but have sex. Neither fact is true. They are voracious eaters and some of them live for months and sometimes years. Nonetheless, I would hardly be the first person to idolize something for reasons that have nothing to do with its real nature.
I loved them because one dragonfly would attach itself to my pole—or even more interesting, to my line—and sit there being exotic and blue and giant-eyed, quivering on the nearly invisible line over the water. They seemed to me to be like fairies, beautiful and exotic and utterly uninterested in me. I could get lost in the study of a dragonfly wing. They were a weightless latticework of black frame and iridescent surface, like the skins of soap bubbles. Sooner or later another dragonfly just like the first would come along and land on top of it. And then they would begin to dance. They would roll themselves into wheels and the letter P and sometimes they would even fly away as my last initial in the wind.
“
Daddy
,” I would whisper, remembering not to wake the fish. “Daddy—what are they
doing
?” I don’t remember that I required an answer. I may have intuitively known, or perhaps just the wonder of it amazed me and I wanted him to see.
The answer was always the same. He would look up, and he would study the dragonflies a moment, and then he would say very Dad-like, “Watch your bobber.”
fat girls and estrogen patches
the three of us
are riding together in the car, our coats shrugged up against the cold, when Rae rolls her eyes, savagely winds down her window, and throws her head into the breeze like the family dog. Of all of the indignities that age has inflicted upon us in our combined 150 years, the inability to maintain a stable body temperature has been for me the most annoying. When they dragged me out of fifth grade to attend a lecture on “Our Changing Bodies” nobody told me that the only process longer and less charming than Becoming a Woman would be the Unbecoming. I have lost my sense of humor more than once.
I was a fairly even-tempered child before my hormones kicked in. No one noticed because I was evenly morose and brooding, but the fact remains that hysteria does not run in my family until, like fine wine, we begin to ferment. I woke up one morning with the incontrovertible knowledge that everyone in the known universe hated me, that both of my parents should probably die of sheer stupidity, that the basic definition of the word “awful” was my personal life. I remember raging at my math teacher because he did not advance me to the “gifted” math class—not because I cared a whit about math or could even add two and two—but because all of my friends were in the gifted math class and he was single-handedly destroying my social life. I almost never slept all through high school because my body was humming like a tuning fork and would not stop. I threw things, I screamed, I said horrible things to my mother, and I spent three days out of every month curled up in the fetal position around a hot water bottle or sprawled out on my back with an ice pack on my head. My entire family came to see these days as blessed relief.
Sherry is having cramps again—she’s gone to her room.
Oh, thank God.
Compared to my friends, I did not have a particularly difficult passage into womanhood. Gradually my life calmed down, my moods leveled out, and my siblings began to lose that
is she Loretta Young or Hannibal Lecter today?
look in their eyes. (Or, since I was the oldest of all of us and three out of five of us were girls, I gradually became the least of their problems.) I had friends who turned pale and passed out on certain days of the month, I had friends who were debilitated by cramps and had to be shot up with muscle relaxers (not unlike aging racehorses) to get through the day. By my early thirties I had become so mellow that I remember listening to my women friends talk about PMS as I had once listened to friends describing the effects of smoking pot—something I had heard a great deal about, but almost never experienced personally.
In my mind I am still in my early thirties. When I say that, some women snort and mutter, “Yeah, right,” but they’re upstarts. Ambitious weeds in a field of old, established daisies. They still imagine that there is some time in their lives when they will feel like “adults,” when the occasional disfavor blessed on them by their parents will no longer faze them, when any situation that presents itself to them will have a clear and apparent solution. We won’t tell them the truth—it would be like telling them the ending of the book they are reading.