Revenge of the Paste Eaters (4 page)
It is more than wanting to know about the future or wishing I had more information about the present than I have. I want desperately to believe that the earth is one giant living organism bound by rules and interactions of nature both seen and unseen. I was trained to believe in nature as a machine, for every action there being an equal and opposite reaction, cold, bloodless, and utterly devoid of feeling: all of my life I have been drawn to those who believe in fairies or the earth as a sentient being, people who believe that animals, like us, have souls and feelings and significance that is inherent and undeniable. When I look into the eyes of my cat I see more than instincts and blood, I see a being, a thinking, intelligent personality that speaks and thinks in a language different from mine. I want and need to believe that life is about something more than the relentless production of crude oil.
What I find is Mary sitting on one of the many benches in the shade. She is people watching, perhaps. We talk briefly about Nancy, who is our common bond, and we talk about the flutes one of the artisans is selling and how Nancy wants one but will probably never spend the money for something so frivolous. I would spend money that frivolously, but I don’t know enough about flutes or what draws Nancy to them to presume to make the selection for her, and Mary agrees. She would buy the flute: she does not know which flute would be appropriate, and she thinks the decision of which flute she wants may be that place where Nancy herself is undecided.
Susan consults a pet psychic to contact the spirit of her recently deceased horse, but balks when he starts giving her financial advice.
I consult the same psychic to have my dead cat tell me why my living cat is losing weight.
We go to the chapel and listen to a seventy-eight-year-old woman tell us about living with religion and spirituality. (My favorite part: “If you decide to take up meditation and you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to meditate for half an hour every day,’ I can guarantee you you won’t be doing it by the end of the week. You need to set reasonable goals . . .”)
We stayed for a lecture on how to contact our spirit guides. (We all agreed we liked the speaker. So far none of us have contacted our spirit guide.)
I consulted the same speaker to have him tell me my grandfathers both love me, I have a lovely crystal blue aura, and I am on the verge of doing something wonderful and amazing I haven’t even thought of yet. I should open the door by taking a drawing class. I am to “embrace all sorts of opportunities” and keep myself open. I am a woman with a wonderful spirit—very balanced. I need to start looking to the East for inspiration.
Mary spoke to him as well. Ever practical, she summed up his message as, “Oh, you know . . .”
Nancy consulted a psychic who told her not to quit her job, to take kind care of her mother, and to stand up for herself more often.
Susan spoke to a psychic who told her to put her writing away and take out her brushes and start painting. She spoke briefly to the spirit of a lost relationship.
We sat in the pop-free, iceless restaurant and drank tea, compared our fortunes, remembered the lessons of the Midwest, and eventually talked ourselves out of all of it. The one bit of psychic advice we followed was directions to a Chinese restaurant.
Susan is temporarily broke. She came “home” for the summer to heal herself and to touch noses with her family and friends and historical home. I have never been anything but a coward, and I find the idea of being sixty, broke, and unemployed terrifying beyond all reason, and I suspect that fear—which is mine—colors my vision of Susan. Which is ironic: my own life is on the upswing. For the first time in a long time, more than the one same grim possibility shimmers on the horizon. Whether my career as a writer comes to fruition or dies on the vine, at this moment in my life I can entertain the fantasy of leaving my day job and writing full-time. I am inspired by hope, and galvanized by the knowledge that the worst that could happen is that I continue doing what I have been doing all along. The choices I would make would not do for Susan. There is nothing I can do for her but smile, make a fist, and murmur, “Go for it.” And watch her go. My left foot will be planted firmly on the Big Sister instinct that continues to busily solve everyone’s problems with the solutions that would work best for me.
On the way home at ten o’clock at night on the expressways around Fort Wayne we are pulled over by a patrolman for failure to yield right of way to an emergency vehicle. On three lanes of traffic he chose the middle lane to cruise to his next emergency and we failed to notice him and pull off into either of the other empty lanes.
“Didn’t you see me?” the patrolman demands through the window. “I’ve been following you for over a mile. It’s probably good luck for you that I’ve been called to a shooting because I don’t have the time to write you a ticket.”
We murmur apologies—all four of us—and thank him for his patience.
Once he’s back in his patrol car Mary comments, “I don’t think he wants to go to that shooting very bad.”
Later I will learn that our newly elected queen, my cubiclemate, rethought her behavior and called the offending/offended officer’s precinct and offered an apology. “His job is hard enough,” she explained. Manners, which struck me when I was young as time-wasting exercises in the superfluous, have become the grease that helps us all slide through life more comfortably.
I never expected to be fifty. I’m not sure what I thought would happen. I think about my age from time to time much as children must stop and look at their bodies, noticing suddenly how quickly they have grown, how differently they move and follow thoughtless commands than they did the last time they gave it any thought. I keep looking for some logical explanation for my surprise. It’s not as if I’ve been in a coma for the past twenty years . . . It’s just that I’m the same person I’ve always been.
I expected something to change.
I remember when I was about ten or so I might spend a weekend with my grandmother and she and one or two of her friends would take me on one of their outings. They rarely went far—certainly never for overnight—but we would all jump in the car and drive away on some adventure. My grandmother and her friend Gertrude were avid indoor and outdoor gardeners and most of their field trips involved visiting nurseries or private gardeners who sold or swapped plants with friends. While I squirmed impatiently in the backseat they drove and talked about friends of theirs who had cancer, or whose husband had left or whose children were proving troublesome. Their conversations, even their destinations, all seemed so incredibly inconsequential to me. It was as if their lives had gone on and left them behind and they hadn’t even noticed.
Now that I am my grandmother’s age I catch myself wondering what
would
have seemed “interesting” to my childself. I shop for more plants for my garden every spring. I have friends—too many friends—who have stared eye-to-eye with cancer.
Now that I am my grandmother’s age, I can see that there are advantages to aging that come on so gracefully we sometimes forget to stop and weigh their consequences. Aging people—aging women, in particular—vanish around the age of fifty. It’s as if we begin to lose our very substance, as if the younger, allegedly more vibrant people around us can no longer see us as clearly as they see each other. We are like soap bubbles, fine and delicate and shimmering with rainbow colors around our shells until, SNAP, we’re gone. Behavior that was once seen as a social crime, a misdeed that needed commentary and sanction, is now seen as harmless idiosyncrasy. We haven’t gone anywhere, of course, but the young no longer see us as a threat and many of us have gotten over our need to actively police each other.
It is inordinately freeing to be beyond the critical scope of the young. I have no one I have to impress anymore. No one is even looking at me. What I once thought would be a terrifying transition—the loss of my sense of substance as a person—has turned out to be the time of my life.
when we were kids
our parents bought something. I have no idea what—a house, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was
Extremely Important
and it
Affected Us All
, and the three of us—the Wee One, the UnWee, and I myself, the Least Wee—were stacked like stair steps on a bench in some incredibly boring person’s office and told not to make any noise.
For hours.
Heath bars, brussels sprouts, and sharp cheese change over time from stuff guaranteed to make you gag to things that are actually pretty good by the time you grow up—but nothing, absolutely
nothing
changes like time. Elephants walked by, conceived children, carried them full term, and deposited them on the rug in front of us while we waited—not making any noise—for our parents to each sign their names twice. I was kicked eleven times by the UnWee, who complained she was hair-flicked twice and snot-blown seven times by the Wee One. Our butts fell asleep, all feeling left our legs, and the Wee One succumbed to whole-body bonemelt. There was nothing left of her but a small gooey pile in a yellow dress.
The Wee One always wore yellow, like the UnWee always wore blue and I always wore pink. We were color-coded. We could have withered up and died sitting there without making any noise on that bench and our bereaved parents would have identified us by the few remaining strips of faded—but still color-coded—clothing fluttering in the breeze around our dust.
I remember this event quite vividly because I remember small explosions going off in my chest, not unlike Fourth of July fireworks, and banners started running behind my eyes:
CANNOT STAY QUIET ANYMORE
DANGER DANGER
CONTENTS ABOUT TO BURST
“Shut UP,” I hissed to the UnWee, who promptly retaliated by jabbing her pointed little elbow into the pile of goo that once had been the Wee One.
The Wee One screamed as only youngest sisters can scream, an ear-piercing, nerve-shattering, end-of-life-as-we-know-it scream she reserved for kicks, punches, bites, and the occasional ground collisions accidentally incurred from older sisters.
Our mother came stalking out of the inner office (leaving our father to the endless paperwork of ownership), hauled the goo-pile off the bench and into her arms, and, thumping the traitor reassuringly on the back, glared at the UnWee and me. “I can’t take you kids
anywhere
,” she hissed, and stalked off to the car.
We followed, of course, because even though our lives had been utterly ruined by the arrival of the Wee One, they were at least lives we knew.
We all crept silently into the car, each one hiding under our own window.
“I just don’t understand why you can’t watch your sisters for
ten minutes
without some kind of war breaking out,” my mother snarled at me, establishing, of course, that it was all my fault.
In the backseat the Wee One was re-forming her bones and using them to idly kick the UnWee.
“When do you think we’ll be able to go home?” I inquired politely of my mother.
“Please stop
whining
,” my mother snapped. For years I walked around my mother as an attendant might a particularly unpredictable mental patient—one sensed that she was just not emotionally equipped to deal with three children under the age of six, although, I will add, it was not
my
fault that she had us.
Crushed by her constant criticism, I started to cry.
An expression crossed my mother’s face—frustration, aggravation, embarrassment, perhaps even the desire to cry herself—and then she inhaled a deep breath through her nose, fixed her attention on something in the distance, and sat there in the car, idly tapping her fingers on the steering wheel while she stared off into space.
I wanted to hug her, or to apologize, or to snuggle up in her arms and let her gently finger my hair. I wanted us all to be a happy, loving family waiting in the car like movie children while our all-knowing dad bought our house. I wanted a clear, consistent set of directions for how mothers and daughters learn how to talk to each other and families learn how to experience life events as one organic whole. But someone had failed to issue my directions set and I had no idea what made families work together, so I slunk down underneath my window, tried to make as little noise as possible, and waited.
i work in an
office building that has four windows to let in light for two hundred people. We are the Agency of Last Resort and our job is to supplement the welfare of society’s most fragile members, so everything in my building is blue. The walls are blue, the cubicles are blue. When I first started the carpet was blue (it is now a sort of purpley/maroony/speckledy blue). Half of my coworkers are on Prozac. The building where I work has specially piped-in white noise so it always sounds vaguely like the wind is blowing. (This is to drown out the screams of dissatisfied children.) From the time I report to work in the morning to the time I leave in the evening, I have no idea whether it’s snowing, the sun is shining, or the sky has turned green and is full of big, black, angry funnels bearing down on me. I can tell when it’s raining because I can hear it on the roof. The roof is flat and has been known to gather several gallons of cold rainwater and dump them unceremoniously on poorly placed workers.
I do not work in this building solely with people. About two years ago a coworker was driving home from a long day of work when she reached into her bag to get something and a mouse jumped out, landed on the floorboards, and ran up her pant leg. She quickly identified this mouse as an unofficial inhabitant of our work site, and just after she missed the tree and the honking truck in the oncoming lane, she advised our Fearless Leadership of this incident. A few days passed without note. Finally the coworker decided to issue an office-wide mouse alert via our e-mail, describing her driving adventures and her unexpected copilot. She was awarded a reprimand for inappropriate use of e-mail. (The official charge was flagrant disregard of the chain of command.)