domesticated anniversary
Tuesday 22 July 2008 | 5 cookies in the jar
The Brujo and I have now been living together for one year. (NB that if I’m laconic or snappish during the following, it’s due not to any waning of passion but because I somehow threw out my shoulder last week, which makes typing literally a scream.) We’ve not only comingled our pots and pans and our cinnamons, but a couple of months ago, flinging terror to the winds along with mutual cautionary tales of all our romantic financial disasters to date, we combined checking accounts (which after all that hand-wringing hesitation has turned out to simplify the bookkeeping immensely). We share chores, pets, furniture, schedules, meals, utilities, movies, and hot dates at the lavandería; and we brush our teeth together at our pair of matching little oval 1950s-era bathroom sink basins, tiled (appallingly) in maroon and grey. It is all too scary for words. We have had an indecent amount of fun.
Last night, we stood in line at the Vegan Holy Man Market, burdened with expensive menstrual groceries (Spud Puppies, Reed’s Premium Ginger Beer, Late July saltine crackers, Dubliner Irish cheddar, locally made vanilla gelato). I mentioned to the Brujo that if you g••gl• our recently invented word ecorexia™, the Unnarrator is the only hit. [Update: This is sadly no longer true; now my comment on Dooce’s blog shows up, as well as a lot of something in Dutch, and the Un isn’t there at all.]
He quit gazing blankly at the glossy virtue-pushing magazines (who all seem to have Andrew Weil on their covers) and faced me fiercely, wiry arms clutched around bottles of mineral water. “We have to do something! It’s ours! We have to copyright it, or something!”
“What, are you nuts, you can’t own a word. It costs like $400 to trademark a brand name. Besides how do you make money off it? Only if you write a book to go with it.”
“But it’s our word!”
“Well, technically it’s your word. I only came up with envirorexia which isn’t nearly as catchy.” (Here I hesitate, because I rather suspect that Jenzai and Oleoptene in fact devised envirorexia. But the Brujo returned from a hike at the Poker Ranch with ecorexia™ in his pocket, well pleased with his efforts.)
“It’s our word. We’re in this together—see?!” He waggled the debit card at me with mock ferocity.
He frequently feigns being angry with me, and I partly find it detraumatizing, as when he lovingly whacks Finny over the head with a sock, which unusual therapy apparently cured her from being flinchy and head-shy after an abused puppyhood; and I partly find it unnerving. Because I am chronically uncertain about the difference between Playing and For Real. And, good daughter of Freud, have trained myself to be hypervigilant about pieces of others’ unconsciousness flying around and zonking me in the head, which they have in fact on occasion done.
I laughed dutifully at the verbal sock-whanging but privately resolved that I will never pay the US gummint to trademark a word for which we have no use. Other than muttering ecorexia ecorexia ecorexia™ under my breath as I watch myself painstakingly rinsing off the tinfoil tops to yogurts because I firmly believe that by so doing I am Helping Al Gore Save the World.
The seasons roll around, even here in exurbia, and again the B. and I do the things we were doing this time last year. A calendar of household activities. Raking up pods from the bean trees, for example. The long fistfuls ripen on the invasive mesquite trees, turn copper, rattle like snakes’ tails and blow everywhere in pre-monsoon winds, scattering flat shiny little brown seeds. When we’re outside talking, one or the other of us finds herself plucking up the dozens of new bright-green bilobial sprouts from the moist ground; they look temptingly like sunflower sprouts. (But you can’t eat ‘em. I know. I tried. They leave this intensely oily beany flavor in your mouth that persists for hours, despite Topo Chico-swilling and teeth-brushing. Maybe indigenous Tempeans liked the taste; I can’t seem to acquire it.)
So now it’s bean-raking time again. I can only open up the gigantic paper bags (in which we collect them, because with enough brown paper, we can Save the World) by standing up inside each one, which the dog and cat find respectively hilarious and contemptible. We rake beans, we mow, we edge, we eat lunch, we talk, we nap.
I stave off the supposedly inevitable, or fleeting but not-infrequent, thoughts of is-this-all by writing hostile, oppositional proto-poems in my journal. “Stave off” isn’t the right way of putting it—perhaps, “Offer blood-letting sacrifices to.” Sequelae. Selvedge. My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Savage.
There is that which will not be domesticated, which disregards matching pillowcases and is indifferent to the self-inking rubber stamp bearing our names and shared address. Pyewacket would say as much, if she spoke a human tongue. Why the Modernists refuse to use those most rural and Anglo-Saxon of domestic farming terms, husband and wife. Of course you can call it anything, or nothing; the archetypes still automatically seize us in their powerful jaws and do with us what they will. The mythological task of reinventing wildness within a sacred sealed place. Of uncontaining hermeticism. Recognizing virgin goddesses where they sit, legs folded beneath them in apparent contentment, by the flickering hearth.
Do not be deceived. You do not have me. All the Brujo needs to do is pick up his drumsticks for the first knowing to show its teeth.
“You’re such a rebel,” he says sleepily.
“Am I? I’m a rebel to you? (Joe Pesci is your new girlfriend.) How am I a rebel? For example. Give me an example.”
“Well…you rebel against the widely accepted General Theory Concerning the Effects of the Passage of Time upon Romantic Relationships. Which usually goes along with a Special Theory about diminishing or altered sexual desire. I’ve rebelled against these theories myself, in the past, but I’m not sure that refusing to acknowledge their validity as stories has done me that much good.”
I laugh angrily and flip over in bed. “Honey, I not only rebel against your General Theory, but I refuse to concede that such a narrative of entropy even unqualifiedly exists.” Because trust me buster I have plenty of Hegelian bromides about how relationships are supposed to proceed, and if I’d continued to believe most of them I wouldn’t be here in the first place.
He clears his throat, being Reasonable. “See, that’s what I’m talking about: You’re a rebel.” No hot tramp / I love you so.
I stand abruptly, collecting pillow, painkillers, journal, water glass in the dark.
“Hey, where you going? Put all that stuff down. Come back here.” A warm hand, strong despite its owner’s grogginess, detains my thigh.
“I don’t know how to say this, but, um, that’s one heck of a way to tell me that you feel less for me now than you did a year ago.”
A long moment of silence. “I can see why that’s what you heard. But that wasn’t what I was saying.”
Wilderness in a suburban bedroom. Untellable mysteries. Distance nestled within proximity.
“Change of subject, darling!” as Maman loved to announce. But not really.
When I was about twenty-five, I told myself that if I hadn’t met the love of my life by the time I turned thirty, I’d place this ad in the NYRB. Fortunately I married my ex-husband before such drastic measures became necessary.
So how self-important and nutbar and undergrad is this? Would anyone sane have answered it? Would the Brujo have drunkenly pissed himself laughing, especially since the only jazz pianists I knew at the time were Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson?
Don’t answer. Unless you’re (can she say it with a straight face) a true lover.
•
SOULS WITH LONGING. SEEKING SINGLE INDIVIDUAL, RACE, GENDER OR CLASS UNIMPORTANT, AN INVOLUNTARY MEMBER OF GENERATION X (PREFERABLY CLOSER TO THIRTY THAN TWENTY) WHO NEVERTHELESS UNDERSTANDS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONFUCIANISM AND TAOISM, THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY, THE REPUBLIC AND THE DEMOCRACY, PHILOSOPHY AND LYRIC, PLAYFULNESS AND INTENSITY. MUST BE PASSIONATE ABOUT SOMETHING; THE SPECIFICS ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN THE DESIRE ITSELF, ALTHOUGH I MYSELF LOVE READING WRITING THINKING MUSIC AND BEING. MY CARE FOR SEEING HAS BEEN ILLUMINATED PRIMARILY BY DEAD WHITE MALE PHILOSOPHERS AND LIVING LAUGHING DANCING DRUMMING FEMALE SONGWRITERS, WITH A GENEROUS ASSORTMENT OF POETS JAZZ PIANISTS PAINTERS AND MYSTICS THROWN IN. YOU MUST BE TORN BETWEEN THE EAST AND THE WEST, BOTH COASTALLY AND CULTURALLY, BETWEEN ISOLATION AND THE MARKETPLACE. I LOVE PEOPLE SEPARATED FROM THEMSELVES BY CLEFTS AND RIFTS OF IRRECONCILIBLE MAGNITUDE, PEOPLE WHO BECOME WHO THEY ARE ONLY SLOWLY AND AFTER LONG FIERCE LABOR. I AM BY TRADE, EDUCATION, AND AVOCATION A WRITER; I AM A YOUNG WHITE WOMAN RAISED IN RURAL EAST TEXAS WHO HAS FOUGHT HER WAY TO MASSACHUSETTS AND THERE STUBBORNLY REFUSES TO GIVE UP ANY OF HER PAST. I WILL CORRESPOND WITH ANYONE WHO ARTICULATES HER/HIS PASSION AS ONLY TRUE LOVERS CAN.
5 cookies in the jar
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Way to show that bitch, impermanence!
Too tired from solo-parenting while my domesticator does conferences to leave a really coherent and insightful comment, but I am quite sure envirorexia was all yours.
And thinking about how my undergraduate conceit was to be as undiscriminating as possible… that the ad I never placed (or wrote) was probably more like “Will correspond with anyone.”
Would anyone sane have responded? Nah, but who wants sane in a lover anyways?
i too am approaching such an anniversary—one i have never had the opportunity of “celebrating” before (past relationships ended before the year mark, and really, would i have wanted to cohabit with any of them anyways??!! the answer is clearly: NO).
but my dear, sharing a bank account!?! you two are far more daring than i. ;) i congratulate you both.
Your cinnamon bottle/love blog reminded me of a line I think I first heard in the movie adaption of Flowers for Algernon, Charly, where Cliff Robertson asks, “If the plural of mouse is mice, is the plural of spouse spice?” I think my personal might read “Must love turmeric sunsets, midnight strolls of tarragon, saffron, and rosemary, be able to weather the occasional garlic moments, and wake up to the smell of cinnamon in your coffee.”
And here is a nice blogpost from the Dictionary Evangelist (via the Umbrella) about why trademarking a word is a silly idea anyway:
http://www.dictionaryevangelist.com/2008/02/ask-dictionary-evangelist.html