Revenge of the Paste Eaters (19 page)

What happened was the woman came in to work this morning to tell her boss her four-year-old daughter had been killed in a car accident the night before, and she had to get to Kentucky, where the child lived with her mother (the child’s grandmother). She didn’t have any money. Being a kind and caring man, he gave her bus fare and some spending money and put her on a bus to Kentucky. Then—instead of celebrating his fiftieth birthday, which was also today—he started taking up a collection from people in the building to help out this woman who had to go home to bury her daughter.

The grief-stricken mother called her boss from the bus station in Detroit to tell him she’d called her mother in Kentucky and learned that her child had died, but they had revived her; they had not told her (the mother) this because they did not expect the child to live. So she was very likely still going home to bury her child.

He felt terrible, because if he had known that, he would have given her airfare and flown her down, rather than have her rattle to Kentucky for the twelve-plus hours it must take to get there on a bus.

Nonetheless, the train passed and—properly chastened—I had an excellent lunch.

I don’t know where she was when she called him again to tell him she had called the hospital and the child had “mumbled something” to her before the nurse took the phone and told her—the distraught, bus-riding mother—that the hospital would need $200 immediately to keep the child in the intensive care unit another day . . .

He experienced a moment of doubt. Perhaps he’s been in a hospital at some time in his life. Perhaps he’s actually seen a bill for one day of intensive care. But he assured her he would wire her the $200, and she could pick it up at the window of the bus terminal in Kentucky.

And then he called her mother, to ask how the little girl was doing. The grandmother answered, “She’s fine—she’s playing outside, right now . . .”

And then he called the police.

But he feels terrible. He’s out whatever he gave her for the bus ticket, plus whatever he gave her for expenses for the trip. He feels like a fool because he told everyone in the building this heartwrenching story about a dying child who isn’t dying. And he’s embarrassed because he believed her. Felt sorry for her. Did more for one person in one day than I have ever done for anyone not immediately related to me in my lifetime. And it was a scam.

He did nothing he should feel badly about.

I would have been willing to assume that—whatever it was—she had
some
pressing need for a bus ticket to Kentucky. I was not raised that way, but then, I have never been desperate and without resources, either. Sometimes people just have to take what they need. In a perfect world sometime they’ll be the taker, and another time they’ll be the giver. Or, in a perfect world, there will be enough givers with enough to give to meet the needs of the needy.

And in the balance of life, I would rather get taken for doing something I thought was good than live with knowing I refused to help someone who needed me because I had lost the ability to care.

mine

as i was standing
in the break room today one of my coworkers was rifling through our silverware drawer and she pulled out some sort of eating/cooking implement and said, in mild amazement, “That’s mine.” And she dug a little more and found something else that belonged to her, and yet one more thing, and, amazed at this unexpected booty, she said, “My daughter and I were just talking about this last night—all of our silverware is disappearing.”

Being truly my mother’s child, I said, “I can just hear this conversation—you blamed it all on your daughter, didn’t you?” And I told her the saga of the rollers.

My mother—who, I presume, in the beginning may have been an actual sane woman—had three girls in five years, and all of us had hair. Furthermore, we grew up in an era when merely having hair was not sufficient: the goal for the women of the sixties was BIG HAIR. It had to stand up three inches above your head and stretch out three inches beyond each ear and it had to be LONG. Long and fat and, not curly, not corkscrewed, not tangled, but thick and uniform and just ever so slightly
bent.

Whatever gene causes that kind of hair has never fallen anywhere near our family tree. I have a great many strands of hair on my head but each individual strand is very fine and all of them pulled together still don’t amount to much. My hair curls on whim, but the only whim it has ever recognized is its own. I could roll it up and tease it and spray it and tease it and spray it until my arms fell off and I could step back, gaze critically into the mirror, and watch my handiwork split down the center into an apparently divinely decreed part, and fall. Flat. Lifeless. As unstyled as string, hugging desperately to my skull and frizzing without mercy on the ends.

My next younger sister, the UnWee, a strawberry blond, wrapped her hair every night around orange juice concentrate cans, and while she managed to have big, fat, uniform, slightly bent hair, she also had a disposition that would have frightened a grizzly bear. All through the big hair era she was a walking study in sleep deprivation.

Our youngest sister, the Wee One, had thick, dark, straight hair—beautiful hair. As a child she was often compared to an Indian baby. Her hair grows easily, and she grew it long. And rolled it on giant rollers. And watched the curl fall out faster than it fell out of mine.

My mother wore her hair short. It was brown, naturally, but the exact shade of brown changed with her mood, slightly less frequently than the hide of a chameleon. She cut it herself, she colored it, she styled it, she permed it, she rolled it and styled it again. My mother was so familiar with hair and its grooming needs that whenever she grabbed a brush and looked at us, we girls all ran for the back forty in rank terror. Our mother could yank out snarls like burrs from a horsetail, and those of us who had not had our skulls snatched senseless lived in terror of her deft hand. One of my earliest memories is of being smacked on the bare leg with a hairbrush for squirming too much while she ripped all of the hair off the nape of my neck.

So there were three aspiring, and one accomplished, women in a one-bathroom house. My father got up early in the morning, before any of us had stirred, and snuck out the back, preferring to stalk down and kill his breakfast in the relative anonymity of public restaurants to being anywhere near that bathroom when the women woke. Our little brothers slept in as if their shorter lives depended on it. That left the four of us to fight for hot water and jockey for mirror space.

We had two sets of tools to work with: a mismatched, half-broken, half-missing potpourri of stuff, and those crisp, efficient hairstyling weapons our mother labeled “MINE.” She had a number of theories she used to support this decree. We lost everything, she said. None of us, she said, had ever in our lives actually ever put anything away where it belonged, and she could never FIND anything. She had to Go to Work. So she bought this one, and this one—by God—is MINE.

Guided by such a sharing spirit, we of course hoarded every hairstyling implement we could lay our hands on. Once while washing the family dishes I lost my head and tried to throw away what looked to me like a used orange juice can and the UnWee nearly severed my right arm. Nor could our mother herself be trusted: more than once while she was stalking about the house, ripping out drawers, wagging her hairbrush at my sisters and snarling about how “NO one in this family can EVER put anything AWAY,” I snuck into her bedroom to find the missing rollers scattered all over her dresser.

When I was a child these incidents told me a great deal about my mother.

Being her oldest and certainly her most impressionable child, I moved away from home shortly after she recovered from a serious illness and reprimanded me for taking too many liberties with her authority, because, as she explained to me, “This is MY house . . .” I was offended for almost a week. I had moved home to help her recover, I had been doing my saintly best and that was all the thanks I got . . . Four days later, in the comfort of my own house I caught myself midstream in a lecture to my cat about stealing my hairbrush, and I realized that my mother had been extremely ill—she had almost died—and while I of course was destined to be a much more understanding woman than she, it was indeed her house and I was happy enough to have her back in it. It may have been the only sin I forgave her for while she was still alive.

Like my mother, I have only to have owned something once to own it always and forever, no matter how many times I lend it to someone, give it away, or sell it in a garage sale. I had it once, so out there somewhere is at least one that is MINE. This may account for the four identical rakes now leaning against the wall in my basement. I bought one. I remember buying it. You show me a rake—it looks like my rake—it’s MINE.

moats

Those of us who have moats

don’t always recommend them.

They take years to dig

and sometimes a lifetime

to fill in again.

It’s hard to come up with

enough volunteers

to keep the alligators fed.

The castles they surround

are cold and drafty

and sometimes excruciatingly

empty.

I was too young

when I dug mine.

I was frightened.

I didn’t know how much safety

would cost me.

welcome

this morning there was
a black cat lying dead in the road.

My new neighbors moved in about two weeks ago. I have to say “about.” The house has been standing empty for over a year, a silent taunt to my father’s single inflexible rule of conduct:
turn off the lights.
The house changed Realtors twice, and whatever showings occurred must have been during the daytime while I was at work. I knew it had been shown when the configuration of ever-glowing lights changed. The kitchen light would beam for three weeks, utterly unattended by human life, and then one day the kitchen light would be off and the basement and bedroom lights would be on. For someone raised by the electricity police, this was not altogether unlike Chinese water torture. Still, I’m not sure how long they had lived there before I noticed them: I noticed their cat.

Sleek. Beautiful. There is nothing quite as elegant, nor as regal, as a black cat.

And nothing quite as tempting as a red squirrel.

The greatest concentrations of red squirrels live across the road, where the neighbor man feeds them every morning by hand. When I first noticed him he had an old hairy gold dog of some retriever variation and every morning he and the dog would patrol their property, looking for whatever it is that retired men and old dogs look for. But eventually I realized I had not seen the dog for a while, and the man had begun a regular practice of courting squirrels.

This also is not a custom that would endear my neighbor to my father. My father, for as long as I have known him, has carried on a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners war against his mortal enemies, red squirrels and woodchucks. In that order. Red squirrels invade his barn, where they chew on, defecate upon, or store walnuts among all of his prized possessions. They are “messy.” There is, in my father’s eyes, no life form lower than a red squirrel. Woodchucks burrow under the foundations of his outbuildings, not a trait my father admires in an animal, but as far as I know they have never chewed on his collection of
Playboy
magazines. Out of deference to the other animal life in the neighborhood my father bought a live-trap that he sets out in the back yard and waits for woodchucks and red squirrels to walk into. When one does, he picks up the cage, carries it over to an old barrel he keeps for exactly this purpose, dumps the animal in the barrel, and shoots it with a .22.

The black cat appeared next door, picking his or her way carefully through the grass, and I realized I had new neighbors. The configuration of lights had changed again. There were boxes on the front porch and children’s toys in the back yard. In the front yard there was a black cat, tail idly lashing, attention riveted on the red squirrels across the road. I thought to myself,
This is a tragedy in the making.

The road my new neighbors and I live on is deceiving. When I moved there I thought it was a minor side street, a small paved two-lane with a 35 mph speed limit. And it is a two-lane and it does have a 35 mph speed limit. Rarely has one speed limit been so universally ignored. At night, in particular, cars fly down our road like bullets toward a homicide. And while it may be just a little two-lane, it is one of two two-lanes that connect a small community to the southeast to the city where we live, and it carries, therefore, a disproportionate amount of through traffic. Traffic in a hurry. Traffic leaving as quickly as it comes. Traffic not overly concerned with the health and well-being of a small black cat.

Last Sunday I spied my neighbor cat winding his/her way through the hedge across the street, and I lectured my Beloved on the dangers of the road I live on. I volunteered to go next door and tell my new neighbors that the street is deceiving and that if they want their cat to survive, they will learn to keep him/her inside. But I don’t know the new neighbors, and it is my philosophy to avoid getting to be too friendly with people who live too close to me until I have at least a vague sense of what they are like. Also a trait learned from my father. And perhaps delivering a lecture about the proper care of one’s pet is not the best way to become acquainted with one’s neighbors.

Last Sunday my neighbor spied her cat winding his or her way through the hedge across the street, and she walked across the street, picked up her cat, carried it back to the front yard, set it down, petted it twice, and went into the house.

I presume this made her feel better.

The cat stood there in the grass, eyeing the hedge. The cat lashed its tail. The cat cried, twice, a cry I have come to associate with personal dissatisfaction. The cat spied something worth stalking in the grass, and the stalk, while unproductive, led the cat closer to the road, and then, as luck would have it, right on across the road . . . The whole round trip, from hedge base to front yard to hedge base again, took less than five minutes.