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May 31, 2005
I was up above it
We are in the Hallmark card store when the lights go out. "Oh!" says the woman standing next to me. "They close at nine?" Apparently.
We are in the card store because Thursday is The Husband's birthday and his progeny and I need to buy him cards, having only had six months to prepare ourselves and having naturally waited until the last minute to start thinking about it. Herself has already picked out a card at least, so she is in luck and I pay for it as the clerks shoo the customers out the door. Her brother and I trudge off to Borders Books to see if we'll do better there.
Hardly. A problem with having a husband who no longer fits the title is that I can never figure out what the hell kind of card to get him. I look at the "I love you" cards, thinking maybe I'll get one of those, since I do, but as my hand reaches for it I imagine that The Other One has probably got that angle covered. And it's all over after that. By the time I dither down the entire aisle, past the "you're my reason for living" cards and the "to my favorite guy" cards and the "gosh aren't we both old" cards and the "Hey, friend..." cards and the fill-in-your-own-saying cards and to the end of the row, in front of the "best wishes for a pleasant year" end-of-the-line cards, I've given up.
Moo comes up behind me. "Maybe I'll just make him a card," he mutters. He's bought a Nine Inch Nails cd. Herself drags up the aisle. "Mah-um, I'm tired," she moans at me. I think Yeah, I could make him a card, too. I imagine in scrolly writing, beautiful calligraphy, Happy Birthday, Dammit. I snort. "What?" says Moo. Nothing. Time to go home. Maybe I'll just buy him a balloon instead.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
in memoriam
So MrDrAF came to visit us for the holiday weekend; he just left, in fact: Herself and I have only recently got back from the train station, where we waved like mad while the train pulled out so maybe he could see us and wave back, though we don't know if he did. His train was more than two hours late and we had gotten to the station a half-hour early just in case. At first every time we heard a train whistle herself started getting watery and saying "Oh, I don't want you to go" until it became pretty damn obvious MrDrAF wasn't going anywhere, and then we found out we had some time to kill and stoppped saying good-bye for a while.
We wandered up and down Main Street Quantico looking at all the closed stores and open barber shops and eventually ended up in a Marine Corps bar. The grown-ups had martinis, the child had a cup of coffee. At some point there was a plate of very, very sauced-up buffalo wings that neither participant seemed to enjoy much, though they disappeared nonetheless. And we talked about nothing at all, we just talked, and it was so, so great to talk about nothing in an unfamiliar place on Memorial Day while waiting for the train. I had a good time.
Now MrDrAF is on a train back to New York and the clarity he brought with him that was like cold water in my face has gone back to New York as well, and what's left is the muddied-up, constricted feeling in my chest that returned on the drive home. Everybody's quiet, now. Back to work, school tomorrow. The clouds have come in and it looks like rain. Herself is watching cartoons, sad-eyed; Moo is on the computer; I'm here, right here as usual. As usual. Just me, the keyboard, three months to go and the memory of the voice of reason in my ear.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2005
they say the meek shall inherit the earth
Have a good trip, jjm.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2005
'til death
I went to a wedding on Saturday evening.
It rained Friday and after it stopped raining the sky stayed gray, the clouds so low that if I stood on tiptoe and reached, I probably could have touched them. But Saturday. The late afternoon was beautiful, sunny, the sky filled with huge cumulus clouds, a warm breeze. I was early at the church and so passed some time looking at the gravestones in the churchyard, all too new to be very interesting. There was the stretch limousine in the church driveway. Then my friend C. and her friend S. arrived: the girls in their summer dresses.
The interior of the church was white and spare, also beautiful. C. and S. and I sat in the back and made desultory conversation about whether or not the groom would cry. The processional began. The bridesmaids; the maid of honor, hugely pregnant; the three ring bearers; and at last the bride, shining radiant in white, her blonde hair shining, her skin milk white, shining.
Once everyone was gathered at the altar, the minister launched into a sermon about how much better it is to be married than not be, one being the loneliest number and all. He took special emphasis with the pitfalls of singlehood: for example, did you know that if you are single and you fall down, there's no one there to catch you? (I guess the unmarried state also confers a certain amount of clumsiness.) He waxed so rhapsodical and for so long, in fact, that I started to wonder if he had a gaggle of bachelors hidden behind the vestibule door and was about to cue them to pop out and offer to marry all the single women, women who naturally would be thrilled to leave their lonely, accident-prone spinsterhood for the state of marital bliss.
As someone who sold the farm and is just leaving that state to venture on down the road as a Woman Alone, I didn't appreciate being reminded how much better the weather is back in the town I just came from. "I'm not liking this sermon so much," I whispered to C., who whispered back that hadn't heard a word since she automatically stops listening to "religious talk" once it starts, preferring instead to take in the scenery.
Well anyway, no prospective bridegrooms jumped out of Door Number One and the minister finally shut up, and then there was some singing and reading from the scriptures. And then the reason we were there (well, besides wanting to see The Dress)--the vows, and R. and MB. said to each other, in essence: Forever.
Forever. And I'll bet that every single person in that church believed them when they said it, even those of us who know better, those of us for whom Forever as a concept has been relegated to the time between when we lie down and the time when, still awake, we hear the first bird of the morning start to sing. I will love you forever. Forever.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2005
like sands through the hourglass,
Think of me
Any way you want
I can be
The problem if that's easier
In your head
Move the pieces around
Things I said
Turn the memory upside down
And it makes it better I know
But sometimes it's hard to swallow
And in time I will fade away
In time I won't hear what you're saying
In time
But time takes time you know
Ben Folds, Time
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
Billie Jean is not my lover
The first time around, the end of the first marriage, it was lyrics. Even though my whole life I'd always been able to learn the words to songs right away, and effortlessly (my one talent), suddenly I couldn't do it any more. It took almost two years for that to come back. I had moved across the country, had gotten divorced, had started another life, and I was driving down Fell Street in San Francisco one afternoon when turned on the radio and started singing along.
This time around, the end but not quite the end; the end but something else, maybe; the end and nothing else, maybe, I can't seem to read any more. Doesn't matter what: novels, short stories--they're never short enough--newspaper articles, even the comics page, it's all just too involved, the words just make me nervous and anxious. My eyes ... I don't know. I can't make them stay where I want them. They skitter across the words, skip sentences, paragraphs, from the top of the page to the middle to the bottom and back again.
I love to read, and now I can't read. Well, I can't read for pleasure. Since I read for a living I can force myself to pay attention, and somehow language about practitioners and providers and MCOs and MBHOs and PPOs sticks on the page instead of blurring out and flying off in all directions. Or I stick to it, anyway.
But even though I've lost--for a while anyway--a great love, this time around song lyrics play a part as well; now it's all lyrics, all the time. I can't read, but I can listen. And I do. The three or four minutes it takes to hear a song is a world of time: enough to tell somebody's life story or all about the end of a love affair or how much I want you, baby, and I can't get enough. Now I not only hear the words, I hear them, I listen fervently, fervidly, avidly, to song lyrics, honing in on the meaning, the message; it must be how people feel when they pray, listening for the distant voice of God.
I dive brain first into songs and let myself float around in them, let the words seep in. I don't even need to sing along. I get in the car, put a cd on and turn it up, up, up, turn it up until there isn't anything else in the world but me the music and the beat and the stories.
And this: I found that if I concentrate a little now I see the lyrics as well as hear them. Drifting past my mind's eye in endless variation: baroque, modern, curlicued italics, scribbles ... and all the words seem to speak directly to me and inform my life, all of them.
Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I can hear a song playing in the background of my thoughts, like a soundtrack. Some songs get stuck in my head and play for days--Criminal, by Fiona Apple; Crown of Love, by Arcade Fire; 23, by Jimmy Eat World; Peter Pan, by Patti Griffin--but I'm not especially faithful to any of them; I love whatever loves me. And everything I hear loves me these days. It's perfect, the perfect relationship: just me and the floating, soaring, searing lyrics, it's just us for just as long as it takes. Just to the end of the street. Just into the city. Just to the grocery store. Just until the next track. Just until reading comes back. Just until life starts again.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
He said "I'm on the Japanese team."
Moo and his friends A. and C. are in the other room; Moo and C. are playing Medal of Honor. Through the noise of--gunfire?--I can hear them talking, trying to figure out who farted. I think they've decided it was Jack, poor thing, he always gets blamed, and C. laughs. A. is reading out loud to them, the New Yorker, maybe. He is the only other person I know who's read The Manchurian Candidate.
Moo gets up and opens the basement door, says to no one in particular, "Spike's been stuck in the basement the whole time!" We wondered where he was all evening, and Herself had to go to bed without him. Spike's been in the basement with Them, I think. Ugh. He makes a beeline up the stairs.
A. and C. are brother and sister, twins, staying at our house until Saturday, when their parents will be back home. It's interesting having three fourteen-year-olds in the house. They all tower over me, which makes me feel Lilliputian and fragile. And they are mostly not the best conversationalists--especially in the mornings when they trudge sullenly, all in black, out the front door to the bus stop--unless I enjoy a steady stream of one-liners. (Which I do, actually.) But they don't make a lot of noise and they pick up after themselves, and they are fun to watch The OC with, and they don't actually make me do anything for them, so in my book they are good house guests.
I'm trying to talk myself into going to bed instead of sitting here yawning at the screen, but I keep thinking there's something I need to say. Oh, yes, this is it: good night.
Posted by JudyLa at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2005
We all fall down.
I wake up this morning at 3:55. I go downstairs with Spike, who gets up when I do because he likes to go outside with me and get the paper. It's still dark. Spike cranes his neck to look up at the trees as we go under them. So do I. The first bird of the morning sings, right over us.
I throw my cards for today: Take A Look At Yourself; Attraction; Lucky. Lucky!
I sat with Herself on my lap yesterday in the early evening and held her while she cried. I had to be prodded to do this; my physical response to my children these days is to tighten up and hold back rather than to give in and let go--is it because I have no one to hold and comfort me that I deny them? But they want me to touch them anyway. I guess they can't see that I have nothing to give them; or being instinctively practical they realize I'm what they've got so they make the best of it.
She has had a Very Bad Day, as have I. "And the worst thing about today was," she whispers into my chest, "that Brian broke up with me." Brian is the boy she's had a crush on since kindergarten. They have been a couple, as far as it goes in grade school, since last fall. He gave her her first I Love You valentine in February.
"He did?" I ask her. "How?" I'm curious to see how little boys do it, already having had ample experience with the big boys.
"He said to me at recess 'You'd better sit down.' "
And?
"And I sat down but I had a bad feeling. And then he said 'I don't want to be your boyfriend any more.' "
And?
"And I stood up and just turned around and walked away. And I hid behind the slide so he wouldn't see me and I watched him run off to his new girlfriend, who is a girl I don't even like."
She sighs. "He was the perfect boyfriend."
I want to ask her how perfect could he have been, since he broke up with her--but I recognize myself in those words. It's not them, it's me. My fault. From the first husband the first time around: "Maybe I do want a house and children, I just don't want them with you," he said, exasperated with me for not getting that I am inherently Not Worth The Effort; to this time around, The Husband explaining why he won't sleep with me--the gist of his argument being that he can't cheat on his lover with his wife, since he is now trying to be A Better Person. I can't ask him to compromise this new moral baseline, can I? Because infidelity is where The Other One draws the line (though not, apparently, at adultery), and it's apparent to both of us that I draw the line nowhere. There is no line, in fact. And besides, he continues, I should know that This Has Nothing To Do With Me.
But doesn't it? I guess it does, actually. Because The Husband is Up North and here I am on the front line, sitting with a sobbing child on my lap. Here I am. And here she is, learning the lesson at nine: It's Not Him, It's Me. Don't do that, I want to say. Don't be me, you don't have to be me.
But then I realize that I have no idea how to teach her to be anyone else.
Posted by JudyLa at 05:44 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
Note to self
And it's a sad, sad world
When a girl will break a boy
Just because she can.
Don't tell me to deny it--
I've done wrong and I want to suffer for my sins.*
*Fiona Apple
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2005
Them
I was working down here in the office yesterday evening when I felt a tickle on my arm, and looked down to discover that I had an ant on me. It was a big ant, not one of the little sugar ants you find in the kitchen in the middle of a long, hot summer; no, this one was a body builder--a quarter-inch long and armor plated. Ack! I flicked it off and then realized that he was just a scout: all around me on the floor were more of them. A dozen or more. Shit! I got up from my chair and fled.
Ughhhhhhhhhh, I hate ants. They freak me out, to be honest. I can stand spiders and cockroaches and silverfish (well, not so much silverfish), but there is something about ants. Maybe it's that they seem smarter than I prefer to think of insects as, maybe it's that I know if I see one, there are probably thousands more where I can't see them. Just waiting.
Every Sunday afternoon when I was a kid living in Albuquerque I would sneak off to watch Science Fiction Theater on TV. Oh, I loved Science Fiction Theater, and I will be forever grateful to the nameless program director responsible for me seeing The Monolith Monsters, and Attack of the Crab People, and Kaltiki the Immortal Monster, and The Beast With No Name, and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, and Tarantula, and The Thing That Wouldn't Die, and The Day The Earth Stood Still, and Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Crawling Eye, and X the Unknown, and From Hell It Came ... and Them.
Them was about giant ants living out in the desert near Los Angeles--and when I was a kid there really was a desert outside Los Angeles; I mean a desert where nobody lived. Nobody but the giant ants, that is, and maybe a giant tarantula or two, although you probably wouldn't run into those because everybody knew giant spiders lived in caves like Carlsbad Cavern and left the desert to whatever else atomic-bomb radiation happened to create.
In fact the desert was where most of the giant monsters and weird things seemed to crop up on a regular basis. Miles and miles of nothing much: the perfect place for 40-foot ants to hide out in. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that as soon as you were out of sight of the last MacDonald's there was a pretty good chance you'd run into something that was supposed to be tiny--like an ant--but which had mutated into a creature the size of a ... a ... well, a really, really big ant. A huge ant. Huge and bloodthirsty.
And here I am 40 years later and still terrified of the things, as if they'd followed me from New Mexico and are just biding their time until I let down my guard. I ran upstairs and got my gallon-sized bottle of ant killer, ran back downstairs and let them have it. (Might I add that during all the shrieking and flailing around Moo sat placidly at the computer playing Diablo, mostly oblivious to the swarm at his feet.)
This morning when I came down to work it was like a battlefield, dead everywhere. There were a couple of wounded soldiers staggering valiantly toward wherever they had come from but most of the invading army had been annihilated. I cleared the fallen troops with the vaccuum cleaner, their little armor plates making chinking sounds as they were sucked up. But I know there are more somewhere. Somewhere I can't see them. Yet.
And right now Jack is standing at the basement door--just standing, head down, looking. Or ...listening? Listening to the pitter-patter of tiny feet?
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
let's be social.
Last night was the elementary school's Spring Scoop and open house. Spring Scoop is an ice cream social except with frozen custard instead of ice cream, which is even better. The three of us walked the half-mile or so up to the school; the late afternoon air was muggy, and Moo and Herself complained about it every step they took. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
I handed over my check at the door and discovered I'd written it for the wrong amount and I was short a dollar. So I guess only two of us would be having sundaes. In true Montclair fashion, the mommy at the table didn't ask me if I wanted a pen to adjust the amount or suggest that I could send in 100 cents tomorrow with Herself, she just sat there with the usual Stepford-wife expression on her face: We Don't Care. How I love living here. I said to the kids "You'll share with me, right?" They looked at each other.
They ran off to get their frozen custard and I went outside, away from the sour-milk ice cream smell of the cafeteria, away from the throng of normal parents and children and women I recognized from the gym who kept apologizing to me for eating dessert like the only reason I was there was to catch them in the act of enjoying themselves. I sat on the grass outside the school and watched a touch football game. Forty kids--yes, really--and two footballs. Mostly the players were teenaged boys, the brothers of littler kids who were still inside the cafeteria getting hopped up on sugar.
After a time Moo and Herself strolled over; Moo showed me a cup that held absolutely nothing and she handed me hers and said "it's mostly melted" before she ran away to play with her friends on the jungle gym. I ate it anyway: vanilla soup with M&Ms and cookies and maraschino cherries and sprinkles, with two lactaid tablets I added to the mix for good measure. Yum.
Moo and some friends wandered into the middle of the football game and stood talking, followed the players up and down the field but otherwise behaved like rocks in the middle of a stream do: serving no other purpose than to break up the flow and get in the way. Just-minted teenaged girls swarmed around the edges of the game trying out their new status as objects of interest.
The sun went down. The early-evening air didn't move. "You have fourteen minutes left, and go find your sister," called an overweight man in shorts to his whip-thin daughter. Time to go. I retrieved Herself from the group of shrieking girls on the playground and plucked Moo from the football game, and we walked home. They complained every step of the way back, and leaned on me for support during the trek. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. "You ate my ice cream?" Herself suddenly demanded. "I didn't get any. This was the worst Spring Scoop ever."
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2005
in other words:
i love u like a candy rapper g-dawg loves his money and pot
Posted by JudyLa at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
don't take this personally
This text message on my phone yesterday afternoon as I leave work: "I could walk and talk with you 4ever."
Unexpected, a surprise, and happiness as fragile as a soap bubble surrounds me in an instant--I don't breathe too deeply or think or make any sudden movements because soap bubbles are beautiful and iridescent and doomed--even a hard look could pop them--and I want stay in this in this one, just until the sharp edges in the world have their way, and pretend that its translucent walls will hold me up.
How is it that this feeling is so rare, so tentative, so frail? W.'s voice in my ear, "Because it doesn't have anything to do with you." I know it, but God, it's still so beautiful while it lasts.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2005
and the world seems so strange, so common and wondrous at once,*
Exactly.
I've been trying to write about Sunday and I'm having trouble getting at how... how--see? That's where I have to stop. I don't know a word or words that can make you see; sum it up. How it was.
How I woke up to birdsong after a not-very-good sleep at 6:00 a.m., with Herself huddled against me breathing quietly. How the sky was a brilliant blue, and cloudless, when I went downstairs for paper and coffee, with Spike curling around my ankles and meowing for company. How the trees sounded as the breeze came up with the sun, the air yellow with pollen, everything blue and green and yellow.
How I found everything I needed at the grocery store for a change, and how when I got home to Herself and Moo they helped me bring in the bags without being asked and didn't fight. How surprised I was to get flowers from D., who arrived with her son and bearing hot dishes of eggs and cheese and sausage, which we added to the bagels and fruit salad on our plates before we went downstairs out onto the deck under the trees to have our Mother's Day brunch.
How we talked and ate and and then after we finished still sat outside and talked some more and watched the wind on the lake and listened to the birds through the late morning and into the late afternoon. How for the first time in a very long time the day went by without me having to think it through. I sat in the sun, the shadows moved, the breeze sounded through the trees and I was just there, in it all.
How after everybody left, Moo and Herself and I went to the beach. How she swam in the still-frigid lake and her brother and I lay on the grassy banks and talked and watched her and watched the other families and kids and the couple flying kites, and then how the three of us tossed a ball back and forth until it went into the water and was gone and it was time to go home and have dinner. How the sky looked as the sun went down and the world turned orange and the day ended, and it was perfect, and how long had it been since I had felt so there. So right there, and so happy to be, there with them and it was enough, and the best thing was that we all knew it.
*Ruth L. Schwartz, Grass
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2005
the story of moo
I was driving to work on a gloriously sunny morning in early spring in northern California, in the far left lane of the 101, when I suddenly broke out into a sweat and everything around me--including all the other traffic--seemed to shudder. My hands on the steering wheel looked very far away and tiny. The edges of my vision went dim. I had enough presence of mind to realize that I was probably about to pass out, and I managed to get my car across the lanes of traffic to the shoulder, where I sat for a while until I felt normal again. What was that all about?
When I was certain that I could drive I continued on my way to work, continued on with my life, ignoring all the (other) obvious signs: the constant nausea, tender breasts, cramps but no blood. The only thing I did pay attention to was the crying. I cried all the time, and I mean all the time. Weeks went by, I kept on crying. The Husband (not The Husband yet) knew what was up after a while, though. "You're pregnant," he pronounced, and then every day when I got home from work he'd say "get your period yet?" and I'd reply, lovingly, "fuck you." And then I'd cry some more.
Finally, on Mother's Day 1990, I broke down and let him buy me a pregnancy test. Wait five minutes for a response, the instructions said, but it took about five seconds for the white stick to turn a lovely blue. I stalked to the bed. "What does that look like?" I said to The Husband. "It looks like you're having a baby," he replied, and smiled.
Having a baby? No. No. No. No. No. It wasn't that I did not want to have a baby, it was that with all my heart and soul and every fiber of my being I did not want to have a baby. Ever. Ever. I didn't want to get married again. I didn't want to be anybody's mother. I couldn't be. I wasn't up to the task. No.
I went to an obstetrician, hoping he'd laugh me out of his office. "You're about eight weeks," he told me instead, and had me set up a series of appointments. Panic set in. I prayed for a miscarriage, prayed for the strength to get an abortion. Neither occurred. The weeks went by. I was going to have a baby. The Husband and I got married in Tahoe, in the very small window of the day when I didn't want to vomit on something, and then he really was The Husband.
"Gosh," somebody at work said to me, "most pregnant women have this ... kind of glow ... but you don't have that." Right. I hated feeling sick all the time; hated not being able to sleep on my stomach; hated The Husband, who had wanted this all along; hated that at 34 I still wasn't ready to stop being selfish.
I had amniocentesis and found out I that the baby was a boy. The months went by. I just pretended that he was never going to arrive, even when I went into labor three days after Christmas. While I lay on the table fighting every contraction as if my life depended on it a nurse asked me "would you like a mirror so you can see him being born?" Was she kidding?
Then Moo was out, and that awful driving pain lessened, and the nurse said "do you want to hold your baby?" "No," I snarled back, shivering, "I want a blanket and a shot." The nurse got a Look on her face but immediately I was given a warmed blanket and a needle in the butt of some blessed drug that made me woozy. The Husband--who had been on a flight from Los Angeles while I was delivering Moo--rushed in. "You didn't wait?" he said.
We took him home and I waited to love him. He cried a lot, nursed a lot, cried some more. I cried, too. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. The Gulf War began; the Husband went back to Los Angeles; and it was just me and Moo, together. When I wasn't in the room with him I couldn't even remember what he looked like. He was a baby; he could have been anybody. Anybody's baby.
And then when he was about two weeks old and I was nursing Moo one morning, I looked at him. And Moo looked back at me, and saw me. And oh, my God, I was somebody's mother. And as easy as that, I fell in love, right that second. I still remember the surprise of it, the letting go. I fell in love, right into it and head first. Fell in love and joined the human race.
Sometimes miracles do happen.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2005
Friday night; Moo and Herself and Spike and I in the office. I'm ... well... doing this; Moo is playing Diablo; Herself is drawing pictures of cats. "Spike, you're my inspiration!"
On Monday morning when I woke up I thought it was Friday morning, which made the week seem to stretch out to infinity, but here we are at last at the end of it and we're all okay. It's 10:30 and we should all be in bed, but here we are anyway, and it's been about fifteen minutes and Herself is still talking to me. It's a nice interlude.
I went to the dentist yesterday and don't have any cavities, and that's nice, too.
On Wednesday I went out for a sushi lunch with my friends T. and C., the Birthday Princess. We sat on the third floor of the Singapore Bistro, where it is usually either too hot or too cold, but that day it was just right. We ordered edamame and spicy tuna rolls and tuna with avocado and eel and crunchy shrimp.
A woman was seated at the same time we were, at a table by the window. She was of indeterminate age; thin, black sweater, a hat. Or a cap. She looked tired. Or ...sick. Sick, I think, maybe. And maybe the cap was because she was losing her hair, since it wasn't cold out. She was so pale. And sad. She had a book with her but she didn't read; she sat and looked out the window and looked sad. Ordered and didn't eat. A bowl of soup sat on her table, getting cold. She looked out the window.
Afer about ten minutes or so, a man--not so tall, gray hair but a boyish face still--walked by us and went to her table; she looked up and didn't smile--he must have been late. I watched them. She said something, sternly. He looked at her, and then he leaned across the table, cupped the side of her face gently in his palm, and gave her--oh, the most tender kiss. Oh. It actually brought tears to my eyes to see it, and I pretended it was the wasabi. The most tender kiss. He sat down next to her and she put her head on his shoulder. Her face was transformed.
So people still love each other, I guess.
Posted by JudyLa at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2005
No one to blame but
In the front yard of our other, “old” house was a plum tree. I didn't especially care for it; there was something about the branches that looked like fingers to me, pointing to the sky. But it had nice red leaves, and tiny, hard plums in the summer. The Husband liked it, which was why we bought it. The Japanese beetles liked it, too. They liked it so much, in fact, that they wanted to spend their summers in it and have their babies under our lawn.
Every year for the five years we lived there my spring ritual was dig up the lawn to uncover all the grubs, kill them, then reseed. I probably went through gallons of diazenon. The year I was pregnant with Herself I laid 800 pounds of topsoil and replaced all the grass. I still didn’t get rid of them, ever, and after we sold the house the new owners cut down the tree after they found out why the grass kept dying.
Moo was a little thing when we lived in that house and in the way of all children, kept his universe in strict order. When he helped me dig up the lawn to get at the grubs he said happily “Oh, look! It’s a mommy worm! And there’s the daddy and the baby.” He didn’t seem to mind, or even notice, that the worm family was being massacred. When I uncovered a piece of plastic hidden in the soil, he said "And there’s their couch!” Oh, right. For the livingroom under the lawn.
Even the worms had a mommy, a daddy, a baby, a couch and a home to put them all in. Mommies, daddies, babies. The natural order of things.
I am annoyed to find that at this stage in my life I have gotten no farther than Moo's blithe insistence of mother, father, child, home. I do the same thing, now. Even though I know better, even though evidence to the contrary is right in front of me, part of me still insists that it can have, does have, what it wants: husband, wife, children, home. And it will not be dissuaded.
I know this irritates my friends and my family--that I stubbornly cling to what even I know is surely not true: that these things are mine. Oh, well, I have the children, yes; and the home, falling down around my head though it might be, yes. And I am a wife.
I have lived for almost a half-century, and I have seen what the world does, and I have expected the worst and have sometimes gotten it--but even so, even now, even though I want to believe that what I want is wrong, I can't do it. Even though I know a lie when I hear it, and I know a lie when I see it, even though, I cannot bring myself to accept that the dream is over. As the saying goes. Most days I feel that everybody--else--in the world lives in the real, and their mission is to bring me into the fold.
Stop this. Protect yourself. Give up. Give in. Don't see him. Don't talk to him. See a lawyer. Get a divorce.
Jesus, no offense to everybody, but if I have to hear one more fucking time what a great person I am, how smart and funny and blah blah blah and I could meet somebody better and how much I have to offer, I'm going to puke. If I have so much to offer, why aren't there any takers?
But that's not the point, it's not. The point is that I hear you, okay? I hear you. I get the message. It's just that I don't want to listen to it.
What I had, what I have, what I want, what I will get: each is its own galaxy, light years away from the other. They have nothing in common.
But what I want, though pointless--yes, I know it is pointless; I'm not stupid--is what I want. And how I feel is how I feel. How much of a mistake I'm making, will make, have made, is my mistake. Do you think I can't see it? I can see it. I know that the piece of plastic under the lawn isn't a couch, I really do.
But what if it was.
Posted by JudyLa at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)