novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- house sitting 1 Dear Dad, I am going to make this letter long, but coherent. Apparently my ramble missive to Grandpa Jack was a little too loose for your taste, but you seem to have admired its length. So I�m going to stick to one topic: women. I am house sitting for a librarian I work with named Lynne. She�s the quintessential hippie; grown past but still firmly entrenched in the beliefs of the sixties. Or so she likes to think. How do we gauge our morals as we grow? Don�t they alter as we do? She flutters about sometimes, almost girlishly, as if she believes she still holds youth in her knobby knees. Her hair is long, long: she wears it braided and then tied up behind her ears for the most part. (When she wears it down, she twirls more as she walks, smiling secret girl smiles, as if the whole world is watching her. I know that girl smile. I have seen it and I have made it.) She is afraid of parts of Oakland, and even Berkeley at night. (When she mentions this to me, I am reminded of her age, and how it brings about a wide-eyed fear that shrouds basic neighborliness in irrationality. She does not drive a Lexus. She does not even drive a new car. She does walk and talk like a target, simply because of the fear her body betrays.) Her boyfriend is another librarian named Randy, a quiet man with coarse, thick gray hair that sticks up in cowlicks. He has just taken up painting. He often tells me about his daughter, about five years younger than me. They are nice people, but they don�t really seem connected to their lives at work. Only at Lynne�s house do I see them comfortable, do their fluttering hands and facial tics come to rest. And then they disappear and I am left with Lynne�s cats, with Lynne�s house. There is something very telling about a house. Her house is the rear portion of a gargantuan restored Victorian in a quiet section of central Berkeley. Two wood floors separated by a wooden staircase that does not creak. Three bedrooms. Muted colors on the walls, furniture clothed in woodsy tones: a pine green squashy couch, a dirt brown easy chair. Musty brown and reddish bedclothes. Copper fixtures, Moroccan tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. The redwood bookshelves hold not only her books, but her parents� library as well. She does not read them: I note a pile of library books on a table in the hallway. Her taste in art is frequently dull to me, and the only photographs Lynne displays are decades-old snapshots of her in other countries, smiling coquettishly. I have house sat for her before. Always I talk to her cats like they are old cranky people. They follow my ankles around the house while I go from room to room opening windows. There is little circulation, and the beautiful antique fireplace looks new. The pillows in the guest bedroom smell like dust. You might start a movie and settle against them, only to find that your eyes turn dry and itching. A cat watches you warily from the doorway before sauntering in, taking its place under the hard bed�s black wrought iron frame. You are watching Revolutionary Road: a movie about a disenfranchised young family in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. She has a BluRay player, which, for some reason, she set up in the guest bedroom and not the living room. I question this. Does she want to seem like she doesn�t ever watch movies? Isn�t watching movies integral to a living room? I am amazed at the picture quality; the movie stars look humane and not at all glamorous, and I wonder if this is the end of a certain mystique, the birth of Tinseltown Realism. I cock my head sideways at a scene, noting humanities as the actors walk through a forest (you can see leaves fall!) or talk in a diner (wrinkles around eyes and in clothes!). Lip liner. Hair askew. Not so glossy, not so coifed. You might become spooked by the movie�s depiction of life then, especially for women. The female lead is chastised as being unrealistic and overly dramatic because she wants to do more with her life than what she can at that time, in that place. Different characters in the movie all seem to be saying the same thing: you don�t want to get trapped. You don�t want to look up one day and realize that you�re stuck and miserable. The male lead, once so in love with his wife, turns on her and attacks her because he has become comfortable. They attack each other. I start to feel the leading lady�s claustrophobia creeping up my body, and the lines around her young worried eyes only enforce this. The hair on my arms stands up. I get halfway through the movie, right up to a scene where she gets drunk and commits adultery, before quaking and ejecting the disk. To you I will admit: it took me a long time to respect Lynne. I thought I sensed a desperation rising off her as if she wanted to go backwards through time, or halt it altogether, simply because of her girlishness. That felt to me like a forced innocence. I didn�t think that anybody nearing their sixties could stay so wide-eyed. I try not to let my discomfort show, because I know she is a good person, and I am probably judging her too harshly. I am probably overly aware of Lynne because I wonder what it feels like to live life mostly alone. I wonder how terrifying it is, and I wonder if I am going to do it too. I walk my dishes downstairs and rinse them in the sink. I pause when I notice several ceramic mugs on her kitchen counter. They are glazed in dripping peals of color, and they look like items I would have picked out for myself at some yard sale or thrift store. I feel a creeping tug not unlike the movie�s claustrophobia, but this is more a rising in my throat. A few moments later, I hop in the car, palpably relieved to be out of her house. I turn on NPR and listen to discussions about the election in the Middle East, driving home barefoot in my pajamas. My pajamas are purple velour pants and a blue and white striped tank top that I also wear during sporadic yoga, so I don�t feel ubiquitous when idling at red lights on Telegraph, Berkeley morphing into Oakland, the Danube gurgling beneath me. A man on a motorcycle speaks to me through my open window: you�ve got a busted taillight. Did you know? No, I didn�t. I poke my head out and turn to look at him: he is behind the car to my left, inching forward a little bit in order to tell me this news. They�ll get you for that. I look him full in the face, at his weathered, informative face, and I say thank you, that I�ll bring the car in to my mechanic immediately. And I will, because this man respectfully gave me this information. He smiles with his eyes. His helmet is not strapped under his chin, and I want to remind him to put it on, but he looks about twenty years my senior so I tamp down my motherly instinct and nod at him seriously, respectfully, before turning back to the light just as it turns green. My feet feel more connected to the car while I am maneuvering it barefoot: the ridges on the foot pedals dig into the soft pads of what I thought were rough callouses. On the freeway the weight of the movie finally lifts off me, and I am relieved that I am single. I am driving and my toes are flexing against the gas pedal and I realize that while I am made to love and nurture, I was not raised to lie. I leave the window down and it whips my hair about. I am conscious of my taillight the whole way home, but of course I don�t see any cops. Cops in Oakland abandon the freeways at night; there are rougher streets to shark. Cassie and Pete are in the kitchen when I get home, talking to Cassie�s dinner guests. It is ten o�clock. The guests are Brent and Melissa, an engaged couple who Cassie and I both know. Their daughter, Mina, has just turned two. When she sees me, she squirms out of her mom�s grasp like a wet noodle and stands at attention, smiling sleepily. She hasn�t seen me in a few weeks so she stands there shyly, and then pulls up her shirt to show me her belly, cocking her chin up at me proudly. I immediately do the same and then we spend a good deal of time playing with a miniature piano, sitting cross-legged side by side on the kitchen floor. Tomorrow I will sit in Lynne�s garden and read. Love, 9:00 pm - 10.16.09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||