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i like the car. it's small (technically midsize), but it would hold my little family and even the assdog (in the hatchback area) if need be. it will be an adjustment because we've been driving an inherited ford explorer for the past eight years, but i think we can do it. and i think that with the gas savings the car makes good financial sense too. i love the idea that it's low emissions. and you know, it's just, well, cool.
i told J we can go on the waiting list if he decides the car is worth it, but i'm so confident in my abililty to talk him into it that i've already signed us up....
the washer (doesn't spin. a rubber thingy flew off because a plastic thingy broke)
the dryer (won't shut itself off, just dries and dries and dries forever)
the chimney (leaks when it rains)
the toyota (leaky fuel line, bad brake line)
the ford (needs new brakes, power door locks no longer work from inside the car and a zillion other things)
the upstairs bathroom (yes, the whole thing is torn up, although the toilet does work)
HoWeVeR
the girl, it seems, just shy of 9 months, has a word. a very deliberate, calculated, clear word.
DUCK
the girl says DUCK!!!
who cares about all that other crap, right?
i moved to new york city right out of college and shacked up with two friends in a one-bedroom apartment for $1800 a month. we lived on the seventh floor in a building right at the corner of 72nd and columbus. on the first floor was a pizza shop. i rarely went there. i did, however, often visit diane's, just two doors up the block. my friend K and i used to nurse our hangovers there with grilled cheese, tomato, and bacon sandwiches and cheese fries. (how'd we do that?!) sylvia was our direct next door neighbor up there on the seventh floor. in fact, i think she was one of the only neighbors we ever saw. a heavyset older woman who liked to wear her knee highs rolled down around her ankles, sylvia collected bottles and cans from the recycling room so she could claim the deposits. she loved to pick fights with the building manager, george. one day as i was getting on the elevator sylvia was getting off and had just finished beating george about the head with her umbrella. another neighbor there used to play the violin on the opposite corner. he was awful. and then there was the guy who danced his heart out with a mannequin tethered to his hands and feet. anyone who spent time in that part of the park in the early '90s knew who he was. he and violin guy made quite a team.
when i moved to brooklyn heights a couple of years later, my neighbor, dr. stewart, took an interest in me and invited me over to her apartment to look at her pressure cookers. she had to have been in her mid- to late-eighties, and her apartment was stacked high with old newspapers, magazines, the yellow styrofoam bottoms from grocery store chicken packages. though the apartment was quite large there was little room left for moving about. it was like a maze with paths leading to the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, where, i was treated to my very own choice of pressure cooker. there were at least 20 there. she gave me the pressure cooker and sent me home to pressure cook her dinner, which i did, and then she came over and ate in my living room and regaled me with stories of how she was the very first woman ob/gyn in all new york. she also thought i was a baby she'd placed with an adoptive family. she pegged my year and month of birth. it was creepy enough to make me think for a few moments that maybe i had actually been adopted. a few days after our "dinner" i arrived home to find a plastic shopping bag hanging from my doorknob. inside were a couple dozen yellow styrofoam chicken package bottoms. a few days later the bag was back, this time filled with an assortment of plain, utilitarian cotton bras from the 1950s. the note read, "i thought you could use these. i have nothing with which to fill them anymore." she spent her days scrounging around throughout the neighborhood looking for, i assume, chicken package bottoms, newspapers and magazines, and pressure cookers. she refused to use her refrigerator--and in fact, it had long since been turned off--using instead her the fire escape to store her perishables. somewhere along the line she informed me that she'd diagnosed herself with stomach cancer. and not many days later dr. stewart expired.
the greeks, sylvia and thracis (pronounced tracy and short for thracivolos or something like that), were our landlords in upstate new york when we moved back after the cowtown depression. our first morning there they got up at the asscrack of dawn to barbecue us some zucchini slices, which they served us with a garlicky yogurt sauce. and which at 6am we dutifully ate. and actually enjoyed. powder blue was their favorite color. the entire house, including our apartment, was decked out in powder blue. their carpets were covered with plastic runways and their house always smelled like something was cooking--even when it wasn't. at christmas they brought us all sorts of greek goodies to taste and j often disappeared up there only to return smelling like the licorice-y ouzo thracis insisted he sip while eating fresh figs or dried fruits. thracis once owned a diner and his favorite thing to tell us was "good food. clean food. lotta food!"
the other day i was in borders and what did i happen upon but a mr. rogers dvd
we moved to vermont because there were more cows than people there. we had no idea what that meant until we tried living amongst the cows and found ourselves quite lonely for some humanity. J's mom was sick with cancer when we moved up there and the diagnosis hit J harder than i realized. after his parents visited us in cowtown J slipped into a deep and desperate depression. he stopped working and concocted a plan for suicide. he wrote me a final letter and went about planning his own hanging in the damp, dark basement where i did laundry. i suppose that's when all the fear started. slowly at first, because it was just us and i still had the unwavering belief that together we could get through anything. somehow we managed to gather ourselves together and moved back to the equally tiny town in new york where i'd once had that cabin in the woods. J was better.
there weren't many cows there--mostly bears and deer--and we were happier living in a cheap first floor apartment with the greeks overhead. j loved his new job and was quickly making his way up in the ranks. then j's mom died and he held it together until six weeks later when his father killed himself and the downward spiral began again. and my fear resurfaced.
at first it was just the fear of depression that gripped me. later it morphed into a more overriding and constant fear. if a fire engine wailed past our house i was certain the building in which he worked had caught fire and i waited for someone to come tell me he was dead. if he didn't come home when he said he would i knew he'd driven himself off a bridge and waited for someone to come tell me he was dead. if i heard an ambulance flying past i was sure he'd had an accident and waited for someone to come tell me he was dead.
i started therapy and dr. freud said i had post traumatic stress disorder. pah. me? not a chance. i'd be fine. things were looking up. j was doing well and we were trying for a baby. we tried for a year for the boy and then lo, there he was, all fat and squished and J even made buttons with the boy's face on them and passed them out to everyone he knew. we were happy. life was good.
and it stayed that way for a long while. we had our ups and downs, but no real down downs like the one we had in cowtown. then right before the girl was born a cowtown depression surfaced. we worked through it all and J is doing better than ever, but my fear has returned and it looms larger than ever. i fear that something will happen to my babies, my husband, me. i fear that i will not see my babies grow up. i fear that i will not be able to protect my family into my old age the way i am supposed to do. fear, fear, fear. some days it surrounds and suffocates me. at other times it recedes into the vague and fuzzy distance, but it is always there reminding me of the tenuousness of this thread of life.
and crazy though it sometimes seems i will take heed.
i could laugh because i was alone. sans bebes. it was fun floating through the health and beauty aids unfettered by small people. it was fun watching the other moms with small people be annoyed by them. i probably enjoyed that part the most.
today as i was checking out at the self-checkout thingy the boy was constantly underfoot. in the way. up my ass. driving me around the bend.
me: stand right THERE. do not move. you are driving me crazy.
him: alriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
me: stop touching that. move please. GET OUT OF MY WAY!
him: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
and then i got to the part where i was supposed to press OK if the amount was okay and i had this little fantasy about pressing NO over and over again until someone came over to help, at which point i'd tell them that no, the ridiculous amount i'm supposed to pay for these half dozen necessities is NOT OKAY and i want to pay half that.
just to see what they would do.
sheesh. i need a life.
is that not the best jewelry EVER?
my great-grandmother, who was 96 when she died, was still quite capable of chasing a small child with a fly swatter until well into her 80s. she got knocked up by an older man at the age of 17 and immigrated, with him, from portugal, to the east coast of the united states nigh on 90 years ago. that first pregnancy resulted in my grandmother who is now 87 years old. over the span of about a decade my great-grandmother pushed out five other babies, all girls. all that time they kept hoping for a boy, but every time the doctor made the announcement to my great grandfather that he was once again the father of a tiny screaming girl he'd shake his head and smile--the head shaking was more of disbelief than disapproval. by all accounts he was a gentle spirit. a barber. and he adored his six girls. their seventh and final pregnancy ended abrubtly when my great grandmother had an accident at work. that pregnancy would have produced their boy and today that baby probably could have been saved by technology.
part of me wonders what that boy might have been like had he lived because he would certainly have been spoiled beyond reason and sissified to the nth degree. the other part of me knows that the way things turned out was exactly the way they were intended to. any boy child in that household would certainly have gone crazy. unlike the rest of them i don't visualize a cherubic, rosy-cheeked mischief maker in short pants. i have more macabre visions of what might have been.
at any rate, there they all were yesterday. five of them remain--all in their 70s and 80s. one of the sisters died in her 50s of a bad heart. the rest appear to have the genetics of their mother.
in all the years i've known them the conversations are all the same. lucy, traditionally "the fat one" always announces to anyone within earshot that she's the prettiest one. she never married. laurie fancies herself some kind of sexpot and still dyes her hair blonde. clothilde (we call her clo), one of the youngest, has absolutely no filters and says whatever pops into her head, no matter how inappropriate. esther is laurie's best friend. she also never married. my grandmother, alice, ever the martyr, always tells me, "the oldest takes it on the neck!" esther, lucy, laurie, and alice all live together. clo lives down the street with her husband and 38 year old son. that's the way it's been since my grandfather died in his 50s, except that there were three additional people living in the bigger house. they were luiz (married to laurie), my great grandmother, and my uncle luiz's mother, adelaide, or ida, or simply, "the old lady." i always liked ida, but "the girls," as we've come to call them, always thought ida was putting curses on them--elaborate, crazy curses. they also thought she took their stuff. in reality she was a kind, tough old bird whose husband was a runaround and who ended up in a hornet's nest of crazy women through no fault of her own. until she fell and had to moved to a nursing home in her 90s she shared a room with my grandmother. before luiz left laurie for another woman when i was in my teens esther also shared that room. after luiz left esther moved in with laurie and they share the only king sized bed in the house. that's the short version.
yesterday they all arrived in the same car--a 1990s honda accord, which is in pristine condition and probably only has 30,000 miles on it. the girls who share the big house share ownership of that one car. they came in with little fanfare and a lot of noise, and as always, headed straight for my tiny girl. clo yelled at me for not bringing the boy, my grandmother whined that everyone else always gets to the baby before she does, and laurie perched on a couch as if awaiting her audience. esther waddled in a bit later, quietly, with no need to steal the spotlight.
they all talk at once and half of them are quite deaf now. laurie's hearing aids cost a couple thousand dollars, but don't seem to work, and my grandmother always turns her volume down because laurie keeps the tv too loud or the kids are making too much noise, so talking to her is like talking into a black hole most of the time.
while clo berated me for leaving the boy home there was a minor scuffle over who would hold the girl. somehow clo got her. and they fussed and fiddled and insisted that she wear a bib because she was drooling. "ohhhhh, she's so cute! she looks just like me!" lucy said with a twinkle in her eye. ten minutes later clo says, "i find her fatter, don't you?" esther, "jesus christ clo, she's a baby!" laurie, "oh, for godsakes can't you two shut up?"
lucy cackled and flipped her sister off behind her back. my grandmother perched on the edge of a chair looking morose.
later as we were awaiting the arrival of the bride they all complained that they were starving. "who eats this late?!" clo muttered. they eat lunch typically at around 10am. it was nearly two o'clock at that point. lucy chirped on about how she now has "sugar" and can't eat most of what we've prepared anyway, and when the bride did finally arrive we all marched around the table picking up finger sandwiches and hors d'oeuvres. lucy cornered me asking, with a sour look on her face, "what's in this?" "spinach!" i announced, gleefully, knowing full well what her response would be. "take that off my plate! i HATE spinach! i don't like broccoli either, i like my cucumbers." there was no broccoli anywhere in the house yesterday. cucumbers were in the salad. which she wouldn't eat because she doesn't like salad.
the $150 cake was "too sweet." the bride's in-laws were "weird." the shower was "too long," and "why do you need to spend so much money on this?" god forbid they should bring actual gifts off the registry because "what does she need all that junk for anyway?!"
they give money. and it's always a secret how much each of them gives. J likes to joke that they're somehow part of the portuguese mafia because every time i leave there i come home with a wad of cash. they're not rich, not even close. they worked in textile mills as seamstresses for minimum wage most of their lives. they're just good, hardworking people who know how to save a buck or two. and they pool their assets. and they play bingo and love slot machines.
god love 'em, every crazy one.
lord almighty.
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