Inevitably some of them are pedophiles, disappointed to discover that you are a crone of forty and have no intention of bringing your stepdaughters to meet them in a coffee shop at 7 a.m. To them, I’m Lolita’s mother.
My, we have drifted far from our original topic. Because people who write to newspapers to complain about something pointless and daft (if it has a point and makes sense, they rarely write, why would they. Their world is rational and filled with productive activities) are a tiny subset of our original target: People I Cannot Stand.
SUBSET: PLEASURE VAMPIRES, OR PEOPLE WHO BLOODSUCK THE JOY OUT OF LIFE
It starts with parents and teachers, of course. The thing about the U.S. TV show Malcolm in the Middle is that eleven-year-old Malcolm, who turns to the camera with a horrified, bewildered, appalled expression every time an adult says anything adult, has it right when he says the only good thing about childhood is that it ends.
After I finished childhood, I went through years of eating a joy sandwich, mashing and slurping away, not even wasting time on whoever was staring at the juice running down my chin and the lumps of avocado on my lips. (Avocados are made out of fruit fat. Coconuts are crunchy fruit fat. Macadamia nuts are kernel fat. Eat them and see if I’m right.) What was staring at me was my own face in the mirror, inevitably growing older and disapproving of my own pleasure. Other people’s pleasure, fine. But my own? For several years, I became my own mother. Oh, I was hard hard hard on myself.
I still am, but I can brush it off more easily now. That’s thanks to my new thing. I now notice other people’s tight, pursed little mouths and take enormous joy in that. When you hit forty, you increasingly cease to care what other people think. And when someone tells you about their upcoming colonoscopy and the process one has to go through to make it possible for the clinic staff not to simultaneously vomit and faint, and on which they are now embarking and not sparing you any details, you encourage them.
They’re such good copy, see?
Someone will be babbling about internal sluices and dousings, and how the worst thing is seeds because the clinic literature emphasizes that it can ruin, just ruin, expensive snaky machinery, apparently. Instead of saying, “You are sucking all the joy out of my life,” you take notes. You can make leading remarks like, “I take it you shouldn’t eat corn. Them kernels is big. Would you have to buy them a new $178,000 machine or do they just accidentally perforate you in revenge?”
What I’m saying is, turn the tables. In the course of a day, you will meet one or seventeen or 220 joy vampires. And when you were in your twenties, mashing your face into your joy sandwich (yes, since you ask, in university I once got high, hopped in the bath and ate a huge plate of spaghetti; it was massively enjoyable), you didn’t notice them. In your thirties, these people brought you down. Hit forty and you’ll be using a mental tape recorder.
Thank God I’m not like them, you’ll be saying. (This is intended to comfort younger readers. Hope it helps.)
My mother, who loves me and whom I love, each in our own profound and unsaid way, used to crush me with a remark. She does it to this day, and with great skill, I must salute her for that. It is always intended to be helpful. It always hurts. My husband says this “nurturing” skill is in fact natural and comes strung in the blood with motherhood. I then make taut remarks about a different version of disconnection between fathers and daughters. Fathers don’t attend their daughters sufficiently to note exactly which spot between the ribs is best for the slipping of the knife and if you want to take pride in that, go right ahead. This debate continues into the evening.
My husband is a carnivore, as am I, but we both like our meat rare. Sometimes we’ll be in the midst of one of these discussions—he had a sunlit childhood; I did not—and I’ll look at the platter on which rests the roast and the thing will be leaking blood. I like my meat bleu. It’s a bowl of blood. (Often there’s a crazy salad too.) And the discussion of daughters and mothers and men and what is done to girls and women goes on, and then my husband cuts me another piece of bleeding protein.
To this day, family dinner and the depiction of family dinners leaves me in a state of delight and horror. When the camera drew back and gave us the still life of the family eating together in the great 2006 comedy Little Miss Sunshine, I noticed people in the theatre wincing and moving back in their seats along with the lens. See, there was a time when this would have appalled me. All family dinners are appalling to all who were once children.
But now I suck it up. My dinner mirrors the subject under discussion, as well as my feelings. When I was a child, my father, who loved hunting, would come home with a chopped-up moose or deer which he would then cut into smaller pieces which my mother would bag and label for the freezer. I saw none of this. But I remember the house reeking of blood for a week. I imagine the Dick Cheney household being very much like this.
Blood memories. A glass of Jackson-Triggs Merlot—am I the only one who thinks red wine is blood by the glass?—and we have a merry time of it. I knew from a young age, or whatever age it is when you figure out that women have children, that I was not going to do the womanly thing. Other women complain that there is intense social pressure on them to have children, and since I have never felt this pressure, I wonder—is it me? Perhaps people have been pressuring me for years by asking me if I have children and if not yet, then when, and I am so nest-rested in my childhood decision that it has all sailed right past me. When people ask me a personal question, I just assume it’s related to some neurosis of their own.
The first reason I never had children is that they hurt coming out. I remember my father, an obstetrician/gynecologist, having been out delivering a baby all night and complaining the next day that he had injured his hand pulling the baby out. He complained. Imagine what the mother felt. And no, I don’t expect it helps one bit to have your vagina switch identities and suddenly become a “birth canal.”
My father’s complaint made me think of that British TV show about a vet in Yorkshire, Trooble at ’Cow it was called—no, All Creatures Great and Small, and Robert Hardy always had his hand up to the elbow in a cow’s back passage. I remember being puzzled when I heard for the first time about gay men fisting in New York and then remembering when the calving went wrong.
Second, I’d be a dreadful mother. Overprotective, yet not admiring myself enough to allow the child to resemble me, I can imagine my poor kid crawling away from me, refusing to wear the clothes I selected, learning to conceal her feelings, growing up to be, like me, an appalling combination of socialist and snob and in other words, never winning. I would love to be that relaxed, casual, oblivious type of mother but think of what you’ve read of me so far. I can’t be that.
Third, I had a miserable childhood. I never remember being hugged by my mother. Being a weirdly self-confident young person, I neither noticed nor cared. But after forty, it struck me as truly odd that I am so physically affectionate with other humans without having had any training as a child. Perhaps I had seen people embracing on TV. Ah, so that’s a bear hug.
So what does my mother do? In a casual phone conversation this year, she said, “You know I’ve been thinking and I can’t remember ever hugging you when you were little. I must have been a bad mother.” You can see why I love her. She said this unprompted. She’s nice.
I was completely sucker-punched, left holding a non-anecdote. “You’re right,” I said. “You never hugged or kissed me,” and then I fell over myself saying that she’d had a tough time as a mother. She was stressed beyond belief and was very ill most of the time, often hospitalized and in great pain. “You did the best you could,” I said. “God, you were so sick. It terrified me. Don’t worry about it. You were fine.”
So the grievance of decades was settled. Done. She did her best. What more can you ask? I was entirely sympathetic, especially since my mother did have a hard time in the early part of her marriage, always stuck in some godforsaken part of the world and I mean places that could o
nly be reached in summer by paddle steamer. She prefers older children and I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in a house with me as a baby either. I bet I was a high-maintenance infant, and since I know I was a nightmare teenager, the in-between years can’t have been grins and giggles. Americans spend billions in therapy over the question of a legacy of being loved or unloved. My mother, who has never sought therapy—she does not know what it is—figured out that she had never led me to believe I was loved. So she apologized, I was charmed silly, and that was it: one grievance down and maybe one more to go.
She then mailed me a large cheque.
I’m an acceptable stepmother. I threw myself into it from the first time I saw those two girls, and when they come over for dinner now, I get maudlin over the elaborate dinners their father cooks them and remember what chubby little cuties they were in Grade One. Not surprisingly, they don’t come over much. Imagine how much worse it would be if they’d come out through my “birth canal.” Man, they’d owe me. As it is, they owe me nothing and yet I cling to an invisible debt.
Their side of the family is yelly. Mine is not. I prefer yellers. It seems more honest. Isn’t it better to be sixteen and scream at your mother that she never hugged you as a toddler than to wait for forty resentful years for her to mention it over the phone, casually collapsing your house of resentment cards?
Now, rather than seeing an argument as a bloodletting, I see it as artwork and therein lies pleasure. I love still lifes. That’s some nice crockery, I’ll say admiringly of Giorgio Morandi who basically paints white jugs. But the still lifes I really love are the Northern Flemish painters of the sixteenth century, who really go at it. They painted slaughtered birds and serpents—Metsys was the best—and these things were splattered all over the table. Still life is not an adequate phrase; still bleeding would be more like it.
I’m all for vegetarianism. It sounds terribly fine. But not being a cook, and since left to my own devices I will eat cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I’m a vegetarian by default. Someone in my house keeps roasting bleeding haunches for me—I mean, roast oxtail—for dinner. Seriously. You don’t know where it’s been. But you can imagine. It was the tail of an ox. Or is this a euphemism? I can just see the fly-ridden thing flapping in the pasture. But now it’s skinned and doubtless marinated and I am sitting with my husband, eating the swatter from a cow’s ass and talking about people who suck the joy out of life.
I bet you thought I couldn’t find my way home.
When I was a young girl, I developed starter breasts. I remember a girlfriend at school suggesting I should be wearing a bra and then literally biting her tongue, as someone as hopelessly uncool as me could not manage such a thing. So I summoned up the blood and asked my mother for a bra.
She looked at me and said in her coldwater Glaswegian accent and a note of what I accept thirty years later was indeed genuine, not faked, puzzlement, “What good would that do?”
How do you answer that? I’ll get practice? All the other girls wear one and I’ll fit in? Oh, go on, be a sport?
Instead, I melted into a small puddle. A year later, I developed breasts out of nowhere—indeed I have them to this day and take them with me everywhere I go—and I dealt with it somehow. Girls need an adviser. The straps on the bra I eventually obtained used to keep falling off my shoulders. It took me years, I swear, to figure out that the little buckle on the strap means it’s adjustable … oh never mind.
I won’t tell you the story of my mother’s reaction when I got my first period. I mean, you can guess. But I always envied Carly Simon, the singer who is the love of my life and a big hunk of my personal soundtrack, because when she got her period, her mother took her up to the deck at the top of the house and together they saluted the moon with a glass of wine and a toast to men. (Simon’s mother was a real piece of work, by the way, a mother-lode, so to speak.)
Whereas my initiation involved paper grocery bags and bulk purchases of menstrual pads (in the early seventies, they still came with belts you could buy in grocery stores) that my mother collected from a catalogue delivery outlet.
Talk about sucking the joy out of things, I have a Great-Aunt Mavis who is a maestro, a Tenszing, an Olympic champion Mark Spitz (who’s a dentist now) at it. She is fantastically unkind to my mother, and that I cannot forgive. She’s a Razorblades Heidi, a holder of grudges, a hater of small children, the wettest blanket in my family, which is saying something dire indeed. Her grown-up children are the dullest people I know. Even their toddlers are dull. Is that even possible?
She’ll discuss her approaching vacation. Japan? Norway? Dare I suggest India? “Well, if it’s as hot as it was in 1952, they can keep it,” she’ll say, dismissing the entire Indian subcontinent with a wave of her hand. All you can do is gobble silently to yourself—I imagine it is. I imagine they have kept it. And will continue to keep it. It’s not like they’ve been waiting agog for forty years for you to come pay another visit. But I don’t say this. I just stare at her like Malcolm in the Middle. She’s a big mannish woman with cruel hair and a slice for a tongue and frankly I’m frightened.
She’s the kind of person who makes fun of retarded children, borderline tormenting them when their parents are looking. She won’t let you read the newspaper in her living room because you might get ink on the chesterfield. I would normally sympathize with this, having a touch of cleaning disorder, but in her case, it just means she’s too cheap to get her upholstery cleaned. She has one of those houses that are furnished, beyond question they are furnished, but you sit down and think, What now?
There are no bookcases, no snacks or televisual devices or even a magazine or a pet. She’s the most discomfort-making woman.
SUBSET: NUTTERS
I have a stalker. She used to be my best friend, a loyal, gentle person then, if prone to inexplicable rages that we used to puzzle over. Later, she grew more like a sharpened knife twanging unnervingly, and some years later I dropped her. It gives you no grace to drop someone, but she was too cruel by then to have in the room. It made no difference that she was later diagnosed with a particularly harsh mental disorder. I could no longer cope with her.
The weird thing is that despite the things she did to me (and they were things girlfriends don’t do; ask a girlfriend and she’ll tell you), the greatest grudge I held against her had to do with gabled roofs. Gables are the upside-down V you see on the roofline of a house. They’re there because they repel rain and snow, they look good, and they give you an attic if an attic is what you want. The alternative to gables is flat roofs, brought into fashion by a little shit named Le Corbusier. What ensued was a century of leaking roofs.
I and my nutter gal-pal were riding on a train and I noticed a roofline. I then said something about it being odd that they still clung to flat rooflines in Canada, even when gables were so much more attractive and practical in a snowstorm.
My off-centre friend lost it. Why do you even notice things like that? she hissed. And this is what they mean when they say something takes the cake. I was disgusted. I managed to get through high school without anyone noticing I was brainy (I wasn’t that smart in university, so no problems there), but she seemed to think I had made what verged on an intellectual remark. Girls aren’t supposed to know about the deterioration of architecture between the two world wars.
Okay, I’m saying it. I dumped a friend over a remark about rooflines. You’d think it couldn’t be done, but it can. The fact is, I’m irresistible to nutcases, always have been. And generally, they’re women. It’s not flattering. They’re always damaged people, in some way. What is there in me that calls out to them? I’m sending out “Oh bugger off” thought waves but perhaps Peasblossom (Titania and Oberon’s most annoying sprite) has mischievously translated them into “Let us be bosom friends. Literally. Here’s some serious glue.”
SUBSET: BOOK-HATERS
I used to take great joy in watching the Buffalo, New York real estate channel (until they took it off b
ecause no one in their right mind was buying a house in Buffalo, New York, where there are no jobs and nothing to do except self-harm on a Sunday afternoon) because I had a running bet with myself that I would never see a house with a bookcase. And I never did.
If the problem were illiteracy, I wouldn’t mention it. But it’s not, because what are the odds? I grew up in small northern towns all over Canada and every single one of them had an excellent library even if it was housed in an abandoned gas station. No, the problem is a suspicion of books and people who read them.
I used to be book review editor at a tabloid. They were the happiest working days of my life (and my working life has been a tattered flag of misery; I hate newsrooms) because no editor at the paper had ever read a book and they were much too intimidated to approach or, I imagine, ever read anything I wrote about books. This was not surprising. But I used to get calls from readers who’d say, “That sounds like a great book! Where can I buy that?” And I’d say gently and slowly, “At … a … bookstore.” I’m ashamed that I tell this story as if it were funny.
There was something in those years that felt masturbatory in reading books at the rate I read them, and I read even more of them now. I read so much that I get a federal tax break on my reading glasses. I take great joy in my reading, propping books up on a small pillow on my belly as I lie at 120 degrees on the couch, as though I were feeding the words into my body as well as my eyeballs. I feel like Malcolm. I don’t want to be in the gifted program, the Krelboynes, as they were called in the show. I’m not gifted. I’m normal. I wanna be with the other kids. I just have this trick in my brain—I was born smart and I’m ambivalent about it—that only adults are comfortable with. And I secretly think it’s worthy, if misery-making.
But the nice thing about adult life is that at some point, it ends.
SUBSET: PEOPLE I CAN’T STAND IN A GENERAL SCATTERSHOT SENSE
Cake or Death Page 10