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| A gallery visitor met me at the door this morning as I was locking up to drop stuff off in the office. His name is Timmy and he said, "I have to talk to you, Caren. I have a really big favor to ask from you. I don't know if you can do it. But I need to ask you a favor. How long you gonna be? I'll wait for you here." When I got back, he told me his legal troubles with being bi-polar and living in a senior community and being harassed by his landlady and going to court with an "excuse my French--racist white judge" and not being able to find legal counsel, then he asked if I would help him write a letter to Obama because he's no good with "margins and changing the font and that kind of thing," and “some crazy stuff is happening and somebody is giving me some—excuse my French--BS.” I said no. And sorry. "Oh," he said, but not in surprise. "I didn't know if you would."
This guy is only a tiny bit sketchy, mostly just friendly and looking for a chat, which is why I think he comes by a few times a week--to chat about movies and the next event at the gallery and whether or not there'll be food or a DJ. I don't think he likes it when there's a DJ, but he loves the food. At the last reception I should have sneaked him a bowl or something because of the embarrassing way he kept refilling the teensy cocktail plate.
When he visits, Timmy calls me buddy. "Heya, buddy, what's going on? You going to the movies tomorrow? ‘The Avengers’ is coming out!" "Well, you look kinda busy. Don't let me hold you." "You're always typing away. They keep you busy here, huh?" "I just wanted to come and chat and see how you were doing." “Why you typing away all the time?” “Have you seen The Hunger Games?” "When's the next event again? What time is it at? Will there be a nice spread like last time? That was a, [low whistle], a very nice spread last time." “Well I don’t wanna keep you. I’m talkative and I don’t wanna disturb you.”
I've been less genuinely friendly in return, a little less friendly each time he's come back.
Timmy has been consistently nice, and odd. "I'm bipolar. Did I say already that I'm bipolar?" So if one pole is friendly, what’s the other pole? If I don’t help you write your letter to Obama, and nobody else helps you either, will you switch over to the other pole? I hope not. I don’t want to see Timmy go to the other pole. The other pole is like the dark side of the moon. (Isn’t that how bipolarity works?)
He’s gotta have a nephew or brother or somebody else who can help him. Why doesn’t he go to a church or a Salvation Army or some other place where it’s their job to do nice things? Why is he going into art galleries to ask the girl at the front desk to be his secretary? Why do I feel that my opportunities to do nice things for people are tied up in trusting that strange bipolar men won’t decide that I am the next person to follow and murder in the car park? I need more excuses to say no to Timmy. Like, if I were a guy, I could be a better person. A big, burly guy. I could help anybody I wanted and not be afraid that the helpee would decide to add me to his specimen collection. Because then I’d kick his A with my meatball fists. Kickpuncher.
But is there ever an excuse for not helping? Especially when it’s so little, so easy, so not-a-big-deal? What is help, if there is no personal risk? And really, what’s the worst that could happen? The absolute worst? Probably that I’d turn Timmy away and he’d continue to be screwed over by some excuse-my-French judge. And the world would go on and on.
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| Today I am immobile, or relatively so, due to a re-spraining (at the very least, a re-painfully-twisting) of my right ankle at volleyball on Sunday. It doesn't hurt too bad but my foot is definitely pudgier than it was forty-eight hours ago, and even though I'm making lists of things I have to do, like take out the trash and go to the post office and the bank and get that half-pound of coffee beans ground into a form more useful to me, necessity snaps at me to Siddown and chill out, wouldja?
So I sit here, less content than I should be to have another day off from work and all this time to read and write. This is much less awesome than it could be, possibly because I do not have the freedom to get up and wander around the house as I usually do, carrying various objects like pens or a book or my wallet or my chapstick from one room to the other, then back again. And checking my eyebrows in the mirror. And sorting and re-sorting the mail that I sorted yesterday.
It's a pale, gray Tuesday. I like pale, gray Tuesdays. But they are better when I can run errands and then congratulate myself on my productivity by napping on the couch. This afternoon, I languish at the kitchen table, surrounded by evidences of the three meals I've just eaten in as many hours. I will be here for a while. Staring at the bag of whole bean coffee. Sniffing it. And probably, sooner or later, popping coffee beans like wasabi peas.
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| Stella speaks to me. Directly. She chirps and her eyebrows go up and down and they furrow in a strangely familiar way The eyebrows sometimes say, “As we speak, something magical is commencing in my diaper.” When I impart to her the wisdom of the world, her eyebrows may beg the question, “Are you being serious?” At times, but never when addressing me, her eyebrows have been known to declare: "I may be a baby. But you are an idiot." She doesn’t know how to speak with words yet, but when she does, she will say, with perfect clarity, “Auntie Caren rocks the hizzouse.” I know this because I am an excellent reader of body language, and with her eyebrows and the angles at which she holds her pudgy fists, she says that she prefers me to most people and all inanimate objects. | | |
| “It is so easy to be a girl,” says my father. Because of my ongoing, never-quite-accomplished resolve to not utilize sarcasm in my responses to my parents, I say… nothing. Internally, I’m thinking about how much fun I’ve had already with pantyhose and high heels and the issues surrounding that most excellent of feminine needs: to look cute and not be too smart. Or was it, be smart and not need a man? Or have a man, but not one that you like too much? “It’s so easy to be a girl,” says my father. “You have no idea how stressed I was about jobs when I was your age.” Is that my problem? I don’t get stressed about jobs, not really stressed anyway, and I choose to live a sort of piecemeal lifestyle that he attributes to me being female rather than to me getting bored easily. Ever since graduation, he’s been telling me that I need to be less scattered and I ought to find something secure (aka a career). But mid-sentence, he’ll always sort of stop as if he just realized who he’s talking to, and then he’ll continue by saying that it doesn't really matter much because eventually I'm going to find a man who will pay for everything. Like a sponsor. My father appears to believe that I am just killing time until I get married, have kids, and fall neatly into safe female mode. In theory, he believes that it is not impossible for a woman to be single and happy. In practice, it’s one daughter down, one to go. To cope, I regularly tell him that I am not getting married, EVER. It quiets him down a bit on the topic of my work being basically meaningless, but mostly temporary. If I remain husbandless and childless for a long enough time that marriage seems out of reach, maybe I could graduate to the approximate freedom level of a college-aged boy. If I were so lucky, then he could finally accept me wanting to live on my own, opening a can of beans for dinner, throwing my clothes on the floor, paying for my own health insurance, and getting tattoos when I choose to get tattoos. It was a worthy goal, I think. Enter a sudden new development, who, among other things, is sort of messing with my threats. My father sees me in my current goo-goo state, and believes that maybe now, finally, his fears can have a rest. I obviously cannot be serious about the singleness anymore, not if I’m getting flowers and holding hands and grinning at mailboxes as I walk down the street. Having a boyfriend is a philosophical inconvenience I hadn’t considered before it was too late to care. | | |
| "Do you ever think that the American family is suffering a crisis. When you look around you, do you see the family falling apart. I know I do, and I'm sure you do, too. I am here to tell you today that the problem lies in the foundation. If we were only to live by God's standards, the problem could be solved. Now doesn't that sound interesting." That must have been where the text told him to pause and look up at me, because that is what he did. His eyeglasses were horribly outdated. Behind him, at the bottom of the steps, stood an older woman. His mother? Gray hair, red lipstick, hat. He was probably in his thirties. They were both dressed in dark church clothes. He was still looking at me, hesitating, waiting for me to say something. Uhm. Uhmmm. It was kind of a lot to take in: the ring of the doorbell, two black people in Cresskill, his atrocious negligence of the question mark, and the glasses. Those glasses I had seen on my dad in the 90s, when they were already an artifact, and which were now worn with a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude by high school kids and Parisians. Those glasses were bombarding me first thing on a Saturday morning. But he was still looking at me. What had he said? "Doesn't that sound interesting." Well, no, not really. My mind was still working at half speed, drawing leisurely lines from "not really" to "probably shouldn't say that" to "wow, the buttons on his coat are very shiny." I blinked hard a few times, refocusing. He was talking again. The woman at the bottom of the steps was talking, too, but to him, telling him to speak up, talk louder, even though I could hear him fine through the screen door. Each time she said it, he would flinch, clear his throat, and repeat his last line with the volume adjusted. I was still looking at his glasses. Finally I found some words. "Um, thanks, but I don't want to... talk about this?" (dammit, who put the question mark in the teleprompter?) "Well that is fine, but I would like to--" "Speak up! She can't hear you!" "Ahem! I WOULD LIKE TO LEAVE YOU WITH SOME PAMPHLETS." "Ooh, okay, that's fine," I said. Thinking, leave the pamphlets and go. Please. Or we'll be standing here staring at each other all day, volleying improper intonations to and fro. I cracked open the screen door and took the two pamphlets, a Watchtower and something else. He looked uncertain about what to do next, so I seized the opportunity, said "Thank you!" as brightly as I could, and began closing the door. Right before it was closed, he said, "What's your name?" "Caren," I called through the slit, and then shut the door. Yes, I shut the door on his face. I couldn't think of what else to do at the moment. Lacking in conversational dexterity, especially when confronted by pushy people, or rather, people pushed by pushy people to push something onto me. It gives me bad memories of being made to pass out tracts or descend upon witless pedestrians, which I did defiantly and apologetically. What you need is a relationship with Christ. When my own relationship with God is so hard to explain, so confusing, sometimes bizarre, and often mundane... yet I am supposed to sell it like CutCo knives or the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the solution that you never knew you needed. I'm sorry to bother you, but do you know Jesus? Speak up... he can't hear you. | | |
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