you already know
Monday 13 November 2006 | I like a cookie
Lemon verbena tisane.
So I order, pour through the pretty silver strainer and sip, hoping it will be cooling, steadying; also, at $4 a pot, it’s all I can afford on the Hotel St. Francis menu. I’ve saved $5 especially for this afternoon date with my godmother—my other, second godmother—nous appellerons sa, Gail—
Whom I have not seen since the night last summer when I told the Monk I was running an errand, slipped out and drove over to her house and, us both leaning on her kitchen counter, told her I was physically afraid and needed somewhere safe to stay, and she told me, honestly, that she was very sorry but she didn’t like him, didn’t want him coming around her home, and sorry again, but no. [Which was fine; I spent the night across the street with the Zen Priestess and when we woke in the morning, thin black thread twined all round the doorknob and stretched across the gravel road to my own front door. We looked wordlessly at each other, knowing what it meant; and it did.] [Which was fine. So why am I still cherishing a stubbed nub of resentment.]
When I was 19 and a sophomore at the junior college in my hometown, Gail was the campus Methodist minister and my instructor for General Philosophy 101, which had a big blue textbook. We also read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and kept a journal for the class, unprecedentedly. I wrote a term paper on the possibility of extraterrestrial life! (Unnarrator = Big Unreconstructed Geek.) She was possibly the first person I’d met who went gaga over my writing, over me as a student; she encouraged me to enroll at the Great Books College in Santa Fe, she shared books and movies with me like candy, and I was blown away by her spirit of intellectual inquiry, her politics, her feminism, her freedom. She married Carl that summer, 1988, and they’ve been together since, and living in Santa Fe since 1997 or thereabouts. They built a big house in Estancia Primera, they ski, Carl makes gourmet meals using choice cuts of beef and pork from Kaune’s, they drive two Range Rovers and they were impossibly generous to the Physicist and me when we first moved here, taking us out to dinner and buying us sweaters and laughing outrageously at our silly jokes, put up with our aggressive environmentalism. He loved them.
Attached historical poem, which I presented to Gail in the dining room on Watermelon Street whereupon she immediately burst into loud alarming tears, which embarrassed me greatly. I was different then, and I was never prepared for the fact that the subjects of my poems might have some kind of emotional response to them. I tried to soothe her, and she said no, that she’d needed a big cry: “I just feel seen,” she said, sobbing; “I feel so seen.”
And since then—as with my first godmother—water under the bridges—both hers and mine, wettened and in some cases flooded out and undermined entirely. An abortion, an ordination, a divorce, an abusive relationship…. Imperial gallons of fluid, passing steadily under our unsteady feet.
Now I dissolve brown sugar lumps in the lemon verbena and pay a lot of attention to how they crumble under the weight of my spoon. I ask charming questions and do my level best (why?) to listen charmingly to their answers. The leaves I carried inside, marveling at the copper beech’s crimson and the cottonwood’s yellow against the black velvety background of my mitten, wilt on the damask tablecloth, drained of their color. Hello. Here I am. Why do I feel completely invisible. Is it, for she might say it is, my own trip, some Gen X affectedness, getting off on being not present. I don’t think I enjoy it, or that I’m deliberately choosing to dissociate. But here it is happening, so apparently I do, am, did—?
There’s a spark at instants in which my face appears, then darts back behind conversational ley-lines again, abeyant, attendant. Scant seconds open in sentences during which I could self-disclose (who I’m seeing, where I’m thinking of applying, what my slight insights and accomplishments); but I don’t. She says, pouring tea, not looking at me, “Do you still live where you did?” I swallow tisane, cough a little, say, “On Cerro Gordo, yeah. I like it there…and the rent’s so good I’m sure I’ll stay until I leave Santa Fe.” Or until I move in with the Brujo. Do you wonder why I said I might be leaving?
“Are you still just freelancing, then?” is her second question. I take a quick breath, answer in the affirmative, share the merest sliver of the copywhore philosophy. Say nothing about inability, disability, ordering and counting and arranging, being fired, suicidal despair. And that’s that.
In the next hour at some point I do mention that I’ve occasionally checked out the job openings at the college where she’s now both campus minister and an assistant professor—that I sometimes briefly entertain the idea of working there as an academic advisor or other administrator; but that I can’t ever bring myself to apply when I really envision that whole day-job thing: Getting up at seven, making lunch, tea in a thermos, clothes laid out the night before…. Does her lip curl the tiniest bit when she says, “Well, that’s just that Generation X thing”—meaning, we Xers don’t like to work, are shirkers. I reply, calmly I hope but probably with some verbena-laced pungency, that I have worked at such jobs before, and very hard, and I am sure I will again, but that is not what I am doing now. She nods judiciously, acknowledging the legitimacy of my amendment.
But her observation was accurate as it stood. I am Generation X. I do not like day jobs. She’s got my number there—why don’t I just shrug and laugh and say, as the witch does when she weighs the same as a duck, “Fair cop”? Gail would laugh too and then we would stand on the same ground.
I begin to feel as translucent as my straw-pale tisane.
Her students this semester, she says with enthusiasm (and it would read rhapsodizes or gushes but we’re trying hard to stick with observe-describe here), are “real millennials”: such team players, they love to participate, they’re engaged, they’re involved, at any given point there are five hands raised waiting to be called on! I express envy and admiration; this does sound wonderful, there can be no doubt that apathetic students make teaching about as much fun as shoving mud uphill. I wonder aloud if the college’s admissions standards have gone up. She says she thinks that’s not the difference, that it’s generational. Now it is I who utter the equivocating head nod.
Nonexistent. Invisible. I remind myself that this is hormonal, this conviction on my part—that as estrogen deserts my bloodstream by the tablespoonful, I tend to believe increasingly, even with the people in my life to whom I am closest, that they don’t get me at all. That they’re completely self-involved; that I listen all the time to the Brujo’s musical politics and the enlightenment insights of Zen women; that they all just use me as a receptacle and I’m nothing to them et cetera ad nauseam. “Maddie—run outside, get me some dirt, get me some worms.” [Does anyone else remember Maddie Hayes and David Addison, or is it too squee.] Get me some words. For such thinking only leads me first to dire melancholic poetry and journal entries and then inevitably to lying underneath my desk waiting to starve. It is Not Effective. Besides I can imagine only all too well the dim opinion Gail would take of that last bit, especially considering she gave me the desk, which is made of cherrywood and belonged to Carl’s mother and is probably the most expensive object I inadvertently own.
Then, of course, there are situations that genuinely scream for me to believe I’m being invalidated. E.g. as when, at the Brujo’s show, people turn their backs on me and walk away while I am speaking….or my second godmother evinces no visible interest in me. Which I already knew would happen. So it was no surprise. Then why do I nurture the petulant belief, She was supposed to see me.
Intead we carry on companionably in our newly established vein: I ask, she tells. Even in my mind I can’t help but use scare quotes. How, three weeks ago, the young “hoodlum” father of her granddaughter’s expected baby committed suicide. How horriblly “inappropriate” was the funeral/rosary for same young man (white ministers, brown congregation, many hoodlum friends present and behaving badly). How she and Carl and nine of their friends will spend New Year’s in Paris. How her rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis has led to her experiencing transformative energy and body work from a pair of Chinese medicine practictioners, two men both aged 31, an acupuncturist and chi gong masseuse who are “less attached to their ideas about what they know” than anyone she has ever met. How her classes are going, what she plans to teach next semester and next year, when she plans to retire. How she and her friend had their astrological charts done by brilliant local seer Tom Brady (no link, cos he doesn’t seem to have a webpage), and he predicted many things already taking place, but also that she would retire soon. Another place for me to mention that I love an astrologer…and I don’t.
Instead I hazard a guess that she’s really been able to get next to Barack Obama and she admits this is so. We agree that Hillary 2008 has a lot more potential than the talking heads are willing to concede. [I find this somewhat odd since, in one of our last conversations, I remember stating this opinion— that American women, even self-labeled conservative women, would surprise themselves with the alacrity with which they’d line up behind our first female presidential candidate—and Gail had firmly disagreed, saying that women who hate Rodham Clinton really hate her and would never vote for her in a squillion years…eh bien.]
I make noises about parking meters and we stand, winding scarves and pulling on gloves. She asks about my parents, I tell of their musical miracle—that they gig constantly, my newfangled bluegrass, country, gospel-singing ma and pa, are happy now in a way they could not allow themselves to be, younger. So think of me next week, I say wryly, singing with Mom at the Opry—she laughs jubilantly, as the news deserves—this was fun, we should do it again—and is gone.
And I walk back to my car on Alameda in the dusking gloam trying to decide, as if it were up to me to decide, how to feel. Slide in, turn the key, and, abrupt and soaring and yearning and thoroughly millennial, DeVotchKa:
forever’s not so long
and in your soul
they poked a million holes
but you never let them show
come on it’s time to goand you already know
yet you already know
how this will end
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