trying again (the rest of the story)
Sunday 10 February 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
I hit “Publish” and get up and go outside. It’s a gorgeous day, nearly eighty degrees in the front yard. Yes, that’s what I said; try not to hate me. In sunglasses the Brujo is huffing and puffing, raking and muttering, and I feel guilt, not shame, and decide to help.
Together we fill several enormous faux-environmental paper bags with gray, crunched-up leaves from last fall. To open a new bag, I stick my whole body inside it and punch wildly, which makes me giggle despite what a terrible human being I am. What do the neighbors think, if they look outside and see a giant paper bag with legs? Pyewacket rolls luxuriantly in the soft, raked dirt, getting covered in the process with tiny bits of mulch.
A wee sample-sized bar of basmati soap comes in the post, along with angry tax documents and crappy credit offers ($50 annual fee, $100 application fee, 24% interest—it’s probably ten bucks just to open the envelope). I clutch my soap and sniff it and think, tomorrow. Tomorrow I will shower with this.
Unfortunately I get a little too energetic with the helping and the raking and the bagging, and after half an hour I go inside with the Brujo to eat some lunch and instead double over with cramps. Fall more or less face-down into “my” bed (the guest bed, in my office), which is the closest one, 
panting with the hurt of it, wrenched, still covered with little twigs and dead grass clippings, which are now mingled among the sheets. Pye follows me in, crouches nearby gazing at me, probably wondering why I’m making those funny sounds. Eventually I catch my breath enough to holler down the hallway for Tylenol and water, which the Brujo brings me, worried, still chewing his tuna sandwich; I swallow them and somehow immediately fall hard asleep. Wake two hours later, disoriented, with the cat sitting on top of my pelvis purring and washing her fur. Sit up cautiously, turn on the iron and press crumpled fabric, sprinkling it with lavender starch and feeling almost cheerful.
The Brujo wakes from his own nap, takes a shower and then reads my post.
“Does this mean you’re not going with me tomorrow?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s extremely, ah, self-deprecating.”
“If a girl can’t be self-deprecating on her own blog….” By this point we’re sitting at the kitchen table while he eats penne pasta and I trim threads off, yes, vintage Barbie clothes. (Reasoning that I can sell them on eBay and at 39 I am never going to have a daughter, much less a daughter who would have any interest whatsoever in vintage Barbie clothes. I need to stop stockpiling children’s toys and invest in, I don’t know, those natural yam creams for incipient vaginal dryness and hot flashes.) “Anyway, I’m better, right? I do it a lot less often than I used to do.”
“It’s a symptom of severe depression.”
“I’m not severely depressed. I’m spoiled, and lazy, and have bad habits. Besides, severely depressed people….” Severely depressed people what? Can’t work, eat, take showers? I wisely discontinue this line of thought, the pursuit of which could possibly invalidate my own argument.
“And I get so angry when you reference the Librarian.” The Brujo is suddenly furious, and pounds the table emphatically. “I don’t give a shit what he thinks and neither should you!”
I freeze and the Brujo softens. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Yes you are. You’re jealous.”
“No, I’m very protective of your aesthetic life. He has no business getting his hooks into you like that. Who cares what he thinks about your work.”
“But I’m better about that too, right? I stopped having dreams about him in Baja. Remember how in the fall, I was having nightmares every night?”
The Brujo starts washing the dinner dishes. I’ve had about ten pieces of penne with maybe a tablespoon of marinara, which is ridiculous. While the B. sudses, I hold up some of Barbie’s more absurdly diaphanous outfits to make him laugh. “Why does Barbie have so much lounge wear? Negligees, nightgowns, robes….it’s like all she does is hang out all day reading magazines. Why doesn’t she get a job?”
“She gives hand jobs.”
“What, to Ken? He doesn’t have anything down there—there’s nothing to give a hand job to!” I display some of Ken’s clothes. “Could these be more gay?” Little super-tight polo shirts, red and white; a tuxedo dickey and pink lamé dinner jacket; a minute yellow terry-cloth robe with a blue monogram on the pocket. “All these doll clothes from the sixties and seventies are so campy. This looks like something Dennis Quaid would have worn in Far from Heaven.“
He does laugh at this, despite himself. “‘Hey, I’m not gay! I just happen to like this robe, is all….’”
“Even when I was little I knew Ken was gay. I mean, he and Barbie hang around with Skipper all day and try on clothes! He’s all into fashion.”
“Um, I think he’s into fashion? because he’s a doll.“
“Right, well, I disagree. I think Barbie and Ken’s relationship trains heterosexual girls to be fag hags.”
“Why don’t you write about that on your blog?”
“You mean, instead of how I don’t deserve to live? Oh come now.”
3 cookies in the jar
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My lord I go from brow-furrowed concern to pee myself laughter in the course of one post.
And I just happen to like that robe too.
Ok, also? No little girl ever has as many Kens as Barbies, so if you’re looking at nascent human sexuality, and Ken is gay, all of those Barbies have no one to look to but each other, right? Actually, I was the kid who didn’t get clothes, and often wore them inside out and my mom worked so my dad was responsible for my hair which was never parted straight, and this may be why my Barbies were more often pirates or space explorers or space pirates, and Ken was left out entirely, all of them scandalously bare.
Please inform the photog that he caught a gorgeous vision of this sad and beautiful world, and I have saved it to my hard drive for future uses presently unknown.