Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  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.)

  My Beloved works for a tiny private company out on the edge of town. She sits next to a window that opens. Beyond her window she maintains a bird feeder and all day long she is regaled with the music of happy, grateful birds.

  A few years ago her printer stopped working. It just quit. It refused to go forwards, it refused to go backwards. It just sat there, making antisocial printer noises. Curious, my Beloved lifted the top of the printer to see what the problem might be. Every square millimeter inside her printer had been stuffed with oyster crackers. Some industrious mouse, determined to salvage as many oyster crackers as possible, had spent hours stuffing and jamming, poking and cramming oyster crackers into the printer case until nothing inside could move.

  By comparison, the mice in my building are as eager to leave at the end of the day as we are.

  In the back of my Beloved’s work building, in the casement around the back door at the very bottom, is a small hole. This is a vole-sized hole. Actually, this hole is smaller than a vole, causing the vole who uses this hole to scramble and dig and scrunch and scrabble her way through for her daily visit. She comes to visit my Beloved—and my Beloved’s daughter, the Girlchild—to beg food. (She’s a vole on the dole.) My Beloved and the Girlchild have named this vole Velva. Velva the Vole. (Actually, that’s not exactly what they named her, but it’s only one vowel off, and even a vole is entitled to some degree of privacy.)

  I am assuming that Velva was originally shy around people and made more discreet entrances at quieter times, but she has been richly rewarded for her behavior, and as a result, Velva has lost her fear of humans. Her scrambling, scrunching, scrabbling entrances through her own doorway are audible to the human ear. Frequently Velva positions herself near human feet where treasures like Cheetos and bits of bread might drop. If nothing drops, she has even been known to rest her front paws on the nearest shoe and gaze up, nearly blindly and vole-like, toward the source of manna. When she is given a Cheeto, her chewing is loud and not at all shy. Velva has come to enjoy lunch hour at my Beloved’s workplace. She feels she is a warmly welcomed member of the workforce.

  The Girlchild, concerned that Velva be given all of the benefits of an employee, posted a small sign over Velva’s doorway that reads Velva’s House so that Velva can receive her mail. I expect to find Velva listed on the payroll any day now.

  I don’t know what the lesson of this tale is, if in fact there is one. I suppose it would be foolish to compare management styles based solely on the way the staff reacts to small rodents.

  a gathering of porcupines

  the people in my family do not talk.

  You can pick us out at social gatherings: we are the ones huddled behind the Wee One, poking at her with stray elbows and muttering, “Talk to them . . .” I am not sure when or why we appointed the Wee One our spokesperson, but we did and she is. This frees all of us to turn to those impaled on her rapier wit and say, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to her—she gets it from our mom.” My wit is no kinder and my Little Brother’s wit is no less sharp—the UnWee’s wit will slice raw meat—but none of us talk as much. Even our Baby Brother can curdle an ego in a few well-chosen sentences, but we have too many fond memories of beating him to a pulp to expect anyone to be afraid of him. We are like a family of mute porcupines, waddling about the gathering place, hurling quills at people who come too close. All but one of us are married to or otherwise entangled with partners who talk more than we do.

  That one would be the Wee One.

  The Wee One married Mr. Right.

  Mr. Right is a monk. Well, he’s not really a monk, he’s just . . . very clean and serene. Once in my presence he muttered, “Oh, drat.” And then apologized. (I can’t remember the last time I settled for something as benign as “drat.”)

  About once every three or four years in the middle of a clan gathering he will suddenly say something, and we all stop and stare at him, and he shrugs and falls silent again. So far most of what he’s said has had to do with the way houses are constructed.

  He is our idol.

  During gatherings when he is not around, we sit in small clumps and chant, “We want to be like Right.”

  For the first ten years my sister was married to him, Right and I had the same conversation every weekend.

  “Hey, Right.”

  “Hey, Least Wee.”

  At the end of the weekend we had a whole new conversation.

  “Bye, Right.”

  “Bye, Least Wee.”

  From time to time I might smile at my kid sister and say, “So what is it like, marrying your father?” I’m fairly sure that’s more of an impression than I made on Right.

  We have had Right among us for a while now. We’ve almost accepted him. Most of us can remember his name. Some of us—not all of us, but some of us—have accepted the possibility that he is never going to try to trap us into meaningful conversation, that we can just relax and be ourselves around him and nothing Bad will happen. This summer he and the Wee One celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  My Little Brother married for life. His first life was a little short. His second wife—for months I called her Deb—has suffered somewhat under our reign of silence. She feels that it’s not that easy being married to a Peck. She feels we are standoffish, a little, and perhaps not as accepting as we might be. (We only know this because she talks too much.) She has to be carefully watched—there is just no way to tell when she is going to plop down beside you in the middle of a family event and start talking about feelings and emotions and interpersonal relationships and the fact that her name, like the first name of all of her siblings, starts with a P. (“P-a-m,” she pronounces as if speaking to the mentally impaired, “My name is ‘Pam.’”) We have quilled her mercilessly, and while she understands that she’s been quilled . . . she never seems to get it. She’s been much easier to be around, now that she’s taking Prozac.

  Myself, I was dedicatedly single for a long, long time. I spoke warmly and with great enthusiasm about “alone time,” and my definition of a Perfect Weekend was one when I never saw another living soul from Friday night to Monday morning. I had my writing to sustain me. Of course my Beloved, when I met her, had almost never not been in a relationship. We are a match made in heaven. She hates large gatherings of people because it is so much work to make the rounds, talk to everyone, catch up on what everyone has done and may yet do. I love large gatherings. I plop down next to the person I plan to spend my time with and I wait patiently for them to notice that I’m there. My Beloved enjoys small, intimate gatherings of one or two very close friends—sometimes just the two of us, locked in meaningful conversation. I knew meaningful conversations were just traps by the time I was four.

  But you’re a writer, you say. I can see the scowl of confusion on your face from here.

  Although the goal may be similar, talking and writing are two completely different paths to achieve it. If nothing else, writing always includes the ability to edit or erase before the final result is visible to the world. For a child now grown who has never felt all that accepted in her day-to-day life, writing has been a way to reach out to those around her without risking the immediate censure of yet another social faux pas. Talking is a matter of just throwing yourself out there as you come, naked and
unpolished, trusting your soul to the whims of the gods. The world is full of people who are entirely comfortable doing that. None of those people are related to me.

  My family’s amazing unwillingness to talk about anything more personal than rain, the war in Fill-in-the-Blank, or the rising cost of gasoline drove me crazy when I was a kid. I had questions. I ached, body and soul, for a meaningful and intimate conversation. With anyone. About anything.

  Tell me you love me.

  Sit down with me here and tell me all about sex so I can think about something else for a while.

  Tell me why you married him/her.

  Tell me how you really feel when he/she says that to you.

  Is this what you wanted for your life?

  A clever person would anticipate that none of these potential conversational topics ever panned out quite the way I had hoped. My mother, bless her heart, jumped on her bike and pedaled away from the conversations that could be had at her house as soon as she figured out how to balance the bike, and my father was lucky to hear more than six or seven words spoken aloud in the course of a day. Probably what he did hear was womantalk and that held nothing of interest for him. And perhaps it is not fair to judge them, either. What you never learn you cannot teach.

  There is that moment in every adult’s life when a small child looks up at you, her small face trusting and full of love, and asks, “Aunt Cheryl, why are you so fat?” Suddenly in that bolt of sudden comprehension you understand where bad answers come from. I understand my parents much better now than I did when I was a kid. From a whole new perspective you think back (on virtually everything your grandfather ever said to you) and you realize it was nothing you said or did that made him that surly, he just hated you. He wasn’t all that fond of kids to begin with and when he raised his own they turned around and came right back home with a whole new set in tow. Adults forget that something they say once on a bad day when they should have just given up whatever they were doing and taken a nap—and spoke to a small child instead—may be the one thing that child will remember, in full and gloriously unforgiving detail, forever.

  My father was a total stranger to me until one day in my twenty-seventh year when I was riding in his truck over to my grandmother’s—his mother’s—for breakfast and he suddenly began talking to me. This entire human being just burst into full bloom right there in the cab while I was sitting on my own side thinking, What the hell . . . ? The possibility of the invasion of pod-people occurred to me more than once. I’m sorry, alien, but you’ve obviously failed to do your research—my father NEVER talks about feelings, and here you are, blathering on . . . My mother had just recently died and apparently he decided that morning that he had been stoic long enough.

  I discovered that he is a fascinating man. He was nothing like any man or father I had ever known, but he was sensitive, he was in tune to what was going on around him, he was struggling to be fair and right and just in a situation in the form of another woman who had snuck up behind him when he wasn’t looking. He was undeniably attracted to her, and he was undeniably a married (if widowed) man. And while I felt comfortable assuring him that my mother was no longer with us and would want him to go on with his life and be happy, I could see her stalking along the edge of heaven, scowling down at us both with disapproval just as easily as he could.

  This suddenly eloquent stranger, similar in appearance to the man I had typically ridden ten, twelve miles at a time in the cab with in total silence, spoke to me at great length for about six months. Eventually he shifted his conversations from me to the object of his affection—where by then they were more appropriate—and I probably did not have another intimate conversation with him until seven or eight years later, after their divorce. Throughout our post-Mom period I have never been able to tell whether we are going to have a conversation of grunts or he is suddenly going to start discussing some twist in his life path.

  When all is well with my father’s world, an efficient interviewer will quickly switch to yes/no questions. This is not because my father is particularly inarticulate: it is because his oldest daughter does not have the patience to wait ten minutes, fifteen minutes, two hours until he has composed his answer. (He inherited this from his father, who would carry on his snail conversations while the women in his family darted dialogues over and under him like rabbits playing in an empty field.)

  The affirmative answer to a yes/no question is “Unh.”

  The negative answer to a yes/no question is “Nuh.”

  This can be confusing because sometimes “Nuh?” means “What?”which can sound quite a bit like “Hunh,” which is a mischievous answer meaning, “I’m not going to tell.”

  My father speaks very softly when he does speak and he hates having to repeat himself—in fact, often simply refuses to repeat himself—so true communication, while sometimes almost agonizingly slow, can turn on a momentary lapse of attention.

  He is somewhat more difficult to communicate with on the telephone because he doesn’t like to talk on the phone (see “repeating himself”) and because that point when you lean forward, raise both eyebrows, and loudly clear your throat, indicating you expect some sort of reaction, over the phone simply sounds like you have a cold.

  Just as proof that the Goddess truly does have a sense of humor, last fall my father had a stroke. He loses words, from time to time, but in particular he has difficulty remembering names. As a result of the stroke, he has moved to Alabama to live with his girlfriend, so if we want to talk to him, we have to call him on the phone.

  I love my father. I want my father to know I love him. I want him to feel he can talk to me anytime, that nothing in my life could be so important that I could not find the time to talk to him.

  But I am his child. Sometimes I would like to just sit back in a comfortable chair, put my feet up, and say to him, “Everything’s fine. Take your time. We can talk whenever you’re ready.”

  the stick incident and more

  i was a miserably unhappy child. Some children endured a horrendous childhood to emerge as stronger and healthier adults for their experience: I survived the most uneventful Midwestern middle-class upbringing of anyone I know and emerged just pissed off at everybody. It is a skill that requires constant practice—not many children have the discipline to be as relentlessly miserable as I was.

  Every now and then I will commiserate with friends about the horrible scars one acquires during their most vulnerable and formative years and my friend Rae, in particular, will smile at me and muse, “And how many times did your dad hit you, Cheryl?” She loves that story.

  I was about ten, I believe. It was in the dead of summer when daylight extended on halfway through the night and we children would be sent to bed while perfectly good play hours lay wasting in the evening. My bedroom was directly over the family living room, connected umbilically by an open-air register that let up sounds from the television and, for the determined and easily contorted, sometimes even somewhat distorted images. First I was sent to bed hours before I was even sleepy, then I was sent back to bed from the register where I had lain on the floor and watched angled television, and then I was warned of dire consequences if I did not fall asleep immediately.

  Exasperated by the shortsightedness of my parents downstairs, I fashioned my own amusement out of the bottom half of a miniature ginger jar and a red stick that had probably been the handle to something. I don’t remember the point of the game anymore (beyond not sleeping), but it involved twirling the ginger jar on the top of the stick while rolling gracefully across my full-sized bed. Something went horribly wrong with the plan, however, and the ginger jar jumped off my stick and rattled incredibly loudly across the linoleum floor of my room, directly over my parents’ heads.

  I heard my father mutter bad words under his breath downstairs, and then I heard him lunge up the stairs and stalk into my room, where he grabbed the red stick out of my hand AND HIT ME IN THE BUTT WITH IT.

  I was mortified.

/>   My own father HIT ME WITH A STICK!

  I disowned him on the spot, there was no doubt about it—I would hate him forever.

  “How many times did he hit you, Cheryl?” Rae always asks here. A middle child of seven, a child of divorce with multiple remarriages of dubious merit on the sides of both parents, she finds the story of my abuse and misuse . . . funny.

  “Once,” I reply icily, because as far as I’m concerned, once is way more than enough.

  “Once that time,” Rae muses.

  “In her LIFE,” my Beloved corrects her, and off they launch into even greater gales of glee.

  “He used to kick me, too,” I say sullenly in my own defense.

  “Like this?” Rae asks, and kicks at the air as if it were inhabited by a rabid dog.

  “He would sort of . . . propel us along with the side of his foot,” I mutter. “Ask any kid who was ever around him, they’ll tell you.”

  “You had a rough childhood, Cheryl,” Rae commiserates with me, but it’s hard to believe her while she’s laughing.

  Beyond the Stick Incident, our parents rarely used physical violence to make their point. Our mother didn’t need a stick—she had fingernails as thick as carp scales sanded into shape like talons. Anytime she sensed she did not have our full attention, she would grip us by the cheeks and bore holes through our souls with her yellow-green eyes. I was often tormented as a child by nightmares about this oddly maternal monster that howled at the moon and jammed raw meat down my throat whenever I cried.