My wife began her story again. God help me, I love this woman but I could see on the face of the vice president of pretzels that he was not understanding and was on the verge of backing away into the inner offices.
I touched his shoulder. “This woman,” I said expansively and gestured toward my wife, “is your oldest customer. She has been eating your pretzels since she was four years old. That’s sixty-seven years. And she says the pretzels have changed. We have come all this way from Arizona to tell you.”
And my wife had him do the taste test. She went out to the RV and retrieved the pretzels—the new kind and the old kind, she had saved a bag of the old to demonstrate the difference to people. He tried them both and looked thoughtful. He admitted that, yes, the pretzels were slightly thicker but he insisted the pretzel formula had not changed and the pretzel manufacturing equipment had not changed. He wondered whether my wife might like some of their new peanut butter pretzels or caramel pretzels, free of charge, and we took them because I like them but my wife was not interested. She wanted only the thinner pretzels. He said if we left our address, he would look into the matter and report back once he was able to determine what had happened. We drove home. After that the vice president of pretzels continued to send pretzels. Every few months he sent another box of butter pretzels or chocolate pretzels and a bigger box on holidays with a card that read, For our oldest customer. I’d say, “Look at these delicious chocolate pretzels,” and she’d say, “Eat them yourself,” and I’d say, “The vice president sent them, just for you,” and she’d say, “Those places are overrun with vice presidents.” After a few years he stopped sending them.
Defects
He is making a list of his defects, he says. He is using a new system to manage his total quality. “Total quality of what?” she says. “Of life,” he says. In this case, his life. It could be other things, too, like a business, but in this case it is his life and his improving the total quality of it by eliminating his defeats.
Defects.
Yes, that’s what he meant to say. Defects, the things he does that compromise his total quality. For example, each time he eats too much, he makes a little mark here. And each time he sees someone he could network with and does not take the opportunity, he makes a little mark there.
What happens if he gets too many defections?
Too many defects and his life is compromised, he says. Then he says, Maybe she could make a list of defects too. Then they would be doing an activity together, which she has often said they don’t do. And she says she doesn’t have any defects, but perhaps she could do benefits. For example, every time she does something good, she could get a mark. That isn’t how this is done, he says. And anyway he likes it this way. And anyway she does have defects. “Such as what?” she says. Such as being late. “That’s not a defect,” she says.
And he says, It doesn’t compromise her total quality of life, being late all the time and making everyone wait? No, she says. She doesn’t mind being late. But maybe, she says, it compromises his total quality because he has to wait for her and that drives him crazy so perhaps she could make it his defect: every time she is late, he gets a mark. That’s another one of her defects, he says, negative attitude. She could keep track of them for him, she offers.
A Crossroads
They come to it every day: eight lanes across, a bewildering system of lights overhead, a tangle of arrows painted along the ground, signs of various sizes posted around with additional directives for the motorist. Every day they wait for the lights to cycle through, the traffic to inch forward, their dashboard clocks marking what has been wasted on this dispiriting square of cement. They can’t be blamed if they are quick to honk and rev their engines.
They are aware that these sounds—their motors and horns—might be heard by the businesses on the four corners, the food mart, the fast food, the dry cleaner. The air itself is so cluttered with wires and posts, drivers may miss the small ranch house on the fourth corner, wedged into the lot before the strip mall begins, a house made of the cheapest beige siding, with large awnings over the windows so that the interior must be dark. When they do spot it from their cars, they think of the unhappy family who lives there.
But in fact the family is not unhappy, a single working mother with two small children. The mother cannot believe her luck, after all she’s been through. Her own house at last, its spacious rooms, modern appliances, its standing in an upstanding suburb where her children are carried to school by bus for free. How those new windows slide closed with a smooth thwack! Even a small backyard for them all to sit on a summer afternoon, the younger child in a kiddie pool, the girl in the grass, the mother with a bowl of pretzels on her stomach (where a deadly cancer grows). If only the woman’s mother could see her now, how proud she’d be.
An Opera Season
1. Tosca by Giacomo Puccini
Tosca is so jealous that she stirs up trouble for her boyfriend. He and his comrades wind up jailed, tortured, shot, dead. She, too, is soon dead, tossing herself off a roof. The highlight: the chief of police takes off his shirt and walks around on the stage in a circle. Others come on and join him, but do not remove their shirts. People outside die one at a time.
2. The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini
He’s a man-about-town. He dresses up in costumes. He pretends to be first poor, then drunk, then sober. He breaks in through the window and sings. His reasons are strange but simple, and he sings about them. The woman he loves figures none of it out until he explains it to her very carefully over and over. Finally she understands and sings about it. Everyone sings about it. They all take turns singing about it, and then they all sing together about it.
3. Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček
In this opera, all the characters are relations. Jenůfa is related to all the men, and the men are all related to each other, and the mother is a relation in two ways—as a stepmother and in the usual biological way.
Jenůfa doesn’t end up with the one she loved forever in act one, but with the one who, about halfway through, stabbed her in the face. Neither one wants to marry Jenůfa. She isn’t likable, for one. She has a stabbed face. And now an awkward baby.
4. Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi
A father does not wish his daughter to receive visitors, and the boys are off their heads about it.
5. Aida by Giuseppe Verdi
The pharaoh’s daughter loves a man who doesn’t love her. This is the story: how he doesn’t love her back and how she loves him anyway.
She’s entirely nice. Anyone would love her—she’s pretty, she’s got money—but other events make it impossible: natural disaster, parental privilege, another woman, war. But she shows a little steadiness, a little loyalty. Even when the man doesn’t want her, she just goes on wanting him.
Finally she has him buried alive. That’s the point—you want the thing you can’t have and you don’t get it, so you kill it. Meanwhile some other people run around, clutter up the stage. No one knows who they are or why they won’t shut up. They sing about their business. The gossips. The reprobates. Get them out of here.
6. Susannah by Carlisle Floyd
Susannah is kicked out of the church and her fiancé is unfaithful. Men from the military step out, do a ballet dance. There is foreboding. There is noise in the distance. Women shriek and the enemy dies.
7. Alcina by George Frideric Handel
Performed by only women this time. There were enough male singers but we decided to let the women play all the parts. Some of the women are supposed to be men, and others are supposed to be women dressed as men for duplicitous purposes involving love. With so many women, the opera is about five hours long. The women fall in love with each other over and over. They enter and exit, always in love and singing about it. One woman who is dressed as a man wants to be with another woman who is dressed as a man. But the second woman wants to be with a third. This is act one. In act two, the matches disintegrate and recombine into new c
onfigurations.
The end? The singers stagger onto the stage, one by one confessing what they once were: neither men nor wiomen. I was a rock, I a tree, I a wave in the ocean …
How to Dispel Your Illusions
First you need to not know what you want. This can go on for years—and for many of us it already has and you may be past this step—so that when you finally do settle on an ambition of some sort you are so grateful to feel desire that you want to hold on to it at all costs, and the thought of heading back to that earlier, more hopeless space is enough to drive you forward.
Be sure the ambition is lofty—why would you settle? And then strive for it. Say, for example, your goal is to be a writer. Set all sorts of mini-goals along the way and celebrate each post as you pass, though use it only to propel you on to the next one. At first the posts are fairly easy to pass and you run by them with glee, but before long the years are going by and the posts seem farther apart, take much longer to get to, and, in fact, there’s just a random splattering of them out there, not in a line, maybe some of them hidden or not on your plane of field at all but on some other plane you can’t get to, and you are sick of trying. After all, what is the point?
More years pass and you are wandering the desert alone, picking up rocks, your guide is lost or was never there, your gratitude for feeling desire is waning. What is so great about wanting when what you want is so elusive and in any case why did you want it to begin with? You forget what it was like to not know what you want, and you find yourself drifting back to that space again, although you have come so far out, have passed so many posts that you don’t know where you are now, have no courage to go back and take another direction entirely—why should you if this is what it comes to? Besides, you are so old and tired.
It was nice to have once wanted, you think (though you were fooled), maybe you could just sit down in a grassy field (if you can find one out here, unlikely, maybe some gravel) and reflect on what a fine job you once did, and look up at the sky. Were they illusions? You hadn’t thought so. You could have sworn they were more rugged than that. But it turned out not to be so. A few heavy rains washed them away. A few earthquakes came along and swallowed them.
Granted
Two historians received a grant to go to a certain country. They had to spend all of the money inside the country, have itemized receipts (a credit card slip alone did not count), and they couldn’t come home until they did. They paid for their plane tickets, their rent-a-car. They bought their travel apps, their phrase book and recordings, but that wasn’t nearly enough. They had drinks on the plane, a meal at the airport. But there were still thousands to spend, and the hotels in the country were so cheap and there were no restaurants. Even the bologna sandwiches the hotel lady made them (because at last they were hungry) were free. The two historians tried to spend it all, really, but it was impossible. They walked through the town, holding out their pesos—“someone, please, take these”—while the citizens looked on, confused. The two historians drove through the mountains but each town held less: no gas stations, no shops, no hotels. They slept under the stars in the breeze. Finally, when the car broke down and their bodies were thin skeletons and the sun was low in the sky, they picked up their satchels and wandered into the hills. “Un recibo por favor, por favor.” That was the last night they were seen.
My Daughter Debbie
She doesn’t have any skills. While she was growing up, I always encouraged her to learn how to do something. I told her she should become an X-ray technician. Then she would always have work and she could pursue her hobbies on the weekend. She did philosophy in college and I said she could be an X-ray technician and still read her philosophy books and have a good paycheck and a skill she could move around with, because she likes to move. I never saw anyone move so much. Then that gave me the idea that she could be a flight attendant. She could travel and get paid for it and still read her philosophy books. By this time she was doing graduate classes in philosophy, and I told her not to come looking to me or her father for a handout. She needed to have a job with a paycheck, I said, and—see this?—she dropped out of the graduate classes, wasted all that time and money.
Years went by and she seemed to be doing nothing.
I told her she should be a social worker, like I was, because she loves people and is so good with them, especially men. One night, when she was four years old, we had a handsome man over for dinner, friend of her father’s from school, and she came walking down the stairs like a movie star and said, “Who is that?” A little flirt. She’s still like that, always has a boyfriend. Never had much of an interest in children—which she will regret one day, as I always tell her and as her grandmother does too. A woman without children will never be fulfilled. But she does seem to get a lot of boyfriends who are all entirely inappropriate, too old for her, brooding, and you can’t understand what they do for a living, can’t understand a word of what they write in magazines or say on the radio, and she always leaves them, every time, she’s always packing up and moving out, cannot make a commitment.
She had a strange brother, that’s why she likes these strange men.
So she decided not to go on with the philosophy (one smart choice) and then she did nothing (but was too busy to answer the phone) and then she had that bad breakup with a strange man we all thought she’d marry but frankly were grateful she did not. Then she moved in with a woman who I’m sure was unbalanced (I don’t know what was going on there) and I pleaded with her to get therapy.
“Now, look,” I said. “There are perfectly good, well-trained therapists. There is some discount therapy downtown and they are very selective about who they’ll take. You are ideal for it.”
They took her right away.
She quit going, of course, and wouldn’t say why, so who knows. Then I helped her get a perfectly good job. I flew out to see her. I went through the want ads for her because she wouldn’t leave the apartment. I uploaded her résumé for her because she wouldn’t get out of bed. Finally she got a job—not a lot of money but at least a job—at a lead-detection clinic, but after a few months, she quit, just walked out one day. Then she quit another job she had after that, I don’t even remember what that one was, at a homeless shelter. Then she had another at a day camp. And another as a secretary for the rabbi. She just kept quitting. It was sad. We all said so. “She just quits everything she does,” we said. “Remember piano,” we said. “Remember ballet.” Then she met some entirely inappropriate man and I heard nothing from her for months and then her phone was disconnected.
The next thing we knew she was calling herself a writer.
Now somehow she has managed to get this good job—I don’t know how, I don’t know how she does anything, but she did, and we all breathed a sigh of relief because we were thinking, It is just sad how Debbie turned out, it is just really sad, with all her potential, she was such a beautiful child and now look at her. That’s what we were saying, my sister especially (well, we’ll just see how hers turn out). Now we’re all holding our breath. First we were all holding our breath because honestly I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, you never can tell with her. Then her sister found her name on the school website and we all sighed with relief.
Then we were saying, “Will she stay at the job?” Because sometimes she just runs off. And she seemed to stay. Now we’re saying, “Will they fire her?” Because she can’t get a book published, a real one, with a real publisher, not a publisher no one’s ever heard of with a weird name, and that’s why I always ask her about it. I tell her, “Look, you are not moving back in with me and your father for us to support you, so you can forget it. You better just write that book.” If she’s a writer, like she says, why won’t she write it? Either she’s a writer or she isn’t, I tell her. And she better say she’s a writer because otherwise, well, the job is out. Her first real job, I might add.
We went to visit her a few months ago, her father and I. She wouldn’t do one thing that I
asked and wouldn’t tell me anything either. First I asked her did she know she was throwing money in the toilet, just flushing it down, and she said, No, she did not know that. I said, “So what do you think paying rent is?” Perfectly good houses standing all around her and she rents the worst one in town. Then I asked her, “How is that book coming along? Because if you don’t write one, aren’t you going to lose your job?”
The fact is I know something about jobs. I was a social worker from the time Debbie was a year old until her sister was born—then I had to stop because I had three little ones at home. But I was good at being a social worker. I helped young girls who had problems. The girls I helped liked me and gave me gifts like candles and cards. After I left, one missed me and came by the house. I always planned to go back. But then we moved for my husband’s job and I needed a new certificate for the state and then my mother was sick and I had to fly back and forth. Now, well, I’ve got my alumni club and book group. No one wants to hire someone my age.
My daughter Debbie is a writer and it is such a relief to have her be something, because she was always something to me. She was my favorite, secretly, dancing around the house. She drew me pictures, sang about her dolls. I used to use her name as my password at work. She was just a tiny thing—so was I back then, I was a child when I married, a child when I had her—and she was happy, not this silent sullen mop she is now. Somehow she got away from me. I don’t know how it happened. She’s the one I know the least.
Once, when she was very small, she decided to run away. I don’t remember what it was about but there she was. She had her toy suitcase and she was taking a few slices of cheese from the fridge. I said to her, “Where are you going?” And she said, “I’m running away.” She was sniffly and furious. I did not laugh. I said to her, “Why do you want to do that?” And she said, “Because Dad’s mean.” So it must have been something her father did. Her sister was always her father’s friend and Debbie was mine. I used to tell her jokes and read her books. She used to play fairy tale under my desk. I do like to encourage her.
Wait Till You See Me Dance Page 6