Shady Lane

Whenever I think about getting pubic hair, I think about Wanda. Granted, I don’t think about getting pubic hair a whole lot, so I don’t think about Wanda a whole lot either. Wanda was a lady my mom knew from work. She, Wanda, had to retire early because she was dying of lung cancer; so she had to pull around a tank of oxygen wherever she went. She wasn’t supposed to smoke, I mean she had lung cancer for Christ’s sake, but also because it is dangerous to have open flame around an oxygen tank. Yeah, Wanda didn’t give a fuck; she was going to smoke her damned cigarettes up until the day she died of them and she said so in her oh so cliche smoker’s voice.

Wanda looked 143 years old, but she was actually only 56. The smoking and the cancer will do that to a person. She wore a wig the color of a faded paper bag; it was too enormous for her head and threatened to swallow up her death mask of a face which was also the color of a paper bag - one that had been used since the QFC closed a million years ago. She always wore the same polyester pantsuit on her 92 pound frame and if you guessed it was beige, you’d be right. Do I even need to tell you what color her shoes were? Yeah. It was like the world was in color, but Wanda had been photoshopped sepia wherever she went.

Her house sat all alone at the end of a dirt road. It isn’t there anymore, they plowed under the whole area to build a thoroughfare so I could get out of town quicker. I’m sure her house wasn’t hard to tear down, it looked like a good windstorm could do the job nicely. And I’m bored to say, her house was tan too. Although one thing stood out about her home: it had an American flag in the upstairs window - completely covering it. This was back when flags in windows didn’t stand for September 11th. In fact, this kinda made her seem hippie to me. I know my mom thought it was counter-culture so I liked it even more.

My mother felt sorry for her. I think that is one of the things my mother did to make herself feel better - she pitied people. She was a professional. She showed her pity by taking food to Wanda and rolling her eyes when she didn’t eat it, deciding instead to smoke another cigarette. I don’t think my mother had the brains to figure out life is a merciless and horrific place for some of us. Or maybe she thought it was her lot in life to suffer through the buckets of bullshit and not be a drunk or a drug addict or a whore or a cigarette smoker. She definitely did love to play the martyr, “After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me?” I would hear variations on that theme hundreds of times up until the day I unceremoniously moved out while she was at work two weeks after my 18th birthday.

“That Wanda. She knows those cigarettes are killing her. She doesn’t care she just keeps on smoking them. She just gave up after Paul died.”  Thanks. There’s my mom - master of the obvious. You’d be safe to assume Paul was Wanda’s deceased husband. Ironically enough he died of lung cancer but he did not smoke. I almost didn’t tell you that because it seems so contrived; sometimes you can’t make this shit up. I never met Paul, but according to how everyone talked, he was awesome. I guess it’s not nice to talk poorly of a dead man, especially when his bride is so close to joining him. 

It was one of those days, probably after church - church always put the spirit of giving in my mother’s heart - when we turned left off the paved street and onto Shady Lane, Wanda’s Shady Lane. My mother driving, my sister next to her holding the hamburger-cabbage casserole and I in the backseat. We passed the huge cottonwood that Philip Baumgartner would hang himself from in three years, passed the little pump house where I would have to fend off Kyle Turner for trying to get his hand down my pants and on to Wanda’s crumbling abode. Sitting in the backseat amplified every bump and pothole, which made my 11 year old breasts remind me of their existence. Everything made them hurt, but they got me thinking about my period. Shouldn’t it be right around the corner? 

“Mom, when will I start my period?” I saw my mother’s eyebrows work double time and her jaw clench slightly. Even though I suspected my mother had had sex at least five times, she hated talking about it or anything to do with it. This is the woman who was perfectly at ease letting me think babies came out of women’s belly buttons. I secretly loved to get her to talk about it; I loved to see her get so uptight and anxious. I figured she owed me after lying to me about where babies come from. By the time she answered my question, “Oh not for a while now. You have to get pubic hair first,” we were sitting in front of Wanda’s bland house; my eyes fixed on the flag. “What’s pubic hair?” I asked even though I knew exactly what it was. “It’s hair that grows on your vagina!” she spat at me. 

That’s another thing my mom did:  whenever she had to say something concerning sex, she coughed it out like one does when someone doesn’t hear you for the fourth or fifth time. But this time I didn’t take it personally like I did the time we were at the coast and she hissed, “It means putting your face between someone’s legs!” 

I could have started this tangent differently so you’d know what the hell she was talking about, but I wanted you to be as confused as I was when I was eight years old sitting in the back seat of our orange Toyota Corolla station wagon at the A&W in Lincoln City. Great way to start a weekend at the coast. 

Her explanation was to get me to stop saying, “I’m going to eat you!” I made it up because I thought it was more entertaining to say than “I’m going to get you,” or “I’m going to rip your head off.” Of course I was eight years old, raised in a Mormon household (!), I did NOT know the sexual connotation of “I’m going to eat you,”  and had I been more savvy, I could have retorted that my mother had an evil dirty mind for going there. But go there she did. For weeks she had been telling me not to say it and I asked her every time what the big deal was. 

So finally, getting ready to feast on hamburgers and root beer floats she drops it on me. I was threatening to devour my sister for getting her seat belt off first. As we pulled into the parking lot, mother whipped her head around, “Julie!  I’ve told you not to say that,” followed by the aforementioned definition. Well, all I could picture was politely placing my head in the middle of someone’s fully clothed legs. My mother huffed out of the car wearing her best long-suffering face.  If she thought I was anymore enlightened than I was 15 seconds prior, she was not only insane but fucking crazy. I looked at my sister, 11 years older but also surely as clueless as to what it meant; she just giggled and shrugged.

“Mom, isn’t the vagina actually the part that goes inside? You get hair up there?” 

“Well, not your vagina but...you know what I mean!”

I did know what she meant because as we were having our loving mother-daughter talk I was peeking down the front of my pants smiling. 

Wanda didn’t answer the door that day, by the way. She had smoked her last cigarette, in honor of my pubic hair.

Claim Jumper

Who am I to look down my nose at the plastic island?
They say it’s as big as Texas. Maybe that was the reference that caused my disdain.

Scarcity - money, time, water, food.

Scarcity of space.

I want to try to walk on the plastic island. I wonder if it would hold my weight?
Is it one layer thick of yogurt cups and soda collars and tennis ball containers? Or is it ready to sustain the weight of a 137 pound woman?
I don’t have the proper equipment to really take a good look at it from the underneath;
So I’ll have to just go for it.

You know when someone is trying to rescue another from the thin ice that has formed on a lake or pond? How they sprawl out; they splay their arms and legs wide to distribute their weight evenly?  That’s how I would approach the plastic island.
That approach could be interpreted as respect. Which is funny because just a while ago I hated that damned island. And now I respect it.
I’ve got no money to buy any land. I don’t think anyone has officially claimed all that space on the plastic island.

No one has officially laid claim to me either.
I think this is the beginning of a mutually respectful relationship.

Remodel

If you’ve got a child that won’t go to sleep at night, you may want to reconsider the choices you’ve made in woodwork and drywall textures. 

There are monsters lurking in there:  hideously deformed faces, anguished and weeping, eye sockets empty but seemingly turned upwards - begging for mercy; long-legged beasts with knobby knees, their gangly fingers dangling beside their striated thighs; cigarette smoking dandies with grotesque thoughts on their minds, their perfect teeth clenching quellazaires with ghoulish malevolence; a perfectly normal looking man - at first - until you notice the one bulging eye looking directly at you; an abnormally fat bear with the face of an eagle, its left claw not a claw at all but the bucket of a backhoe, endlessly scooping, scooping, scooping.

Could you sleep with all this going on?

Back and Forth

I used to think babies came out of women’s belly buttons.  I guess the fact that my mother confirmed this misconception didn’t help my quest for truth at all.  So amazed was I that a baby could make it out of that tiny hole.  “It stretches,” my mother explained.

I also used to think that if you got married, you automatically had a baby.  So I wanted my mom to get married again because I wanted a little brother or sister.  I guess the fact that my dad was an unpredictable and raging alcoholic didn’t pose any obstacles, at least for me.

I used to think that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.  I guess it would make sense that I thought they got married to one another and the girl cats had babies out of their belly buttons, except I couldn’t seem to find a belly button on any of the neighborhood cats.  I didn’t have a cat to examine because my asshole dad didn’t like cats.  He didn’t really like pets at all.  That’s not a good enough reason to call my dad an asshole; I had others.

For a couple of months when I was eight years old, I thought that my eyes were crossing every time I closed them and that they were going to stay that way.  This posed considerable challenges when it was time to close my eyes and go to sleep.  It was painful to close my eyes; I was sure they went instantly crossed.

For a long time I used to want to be a figure skater.  I loved Dorothy Hamill and even got my hair cut like hers.  My sister called it a “wedge” cut.  Dorothy had dark hair and big, straight, white teeth just like me.  I liked her clothes when she skated.  I liked the sparkles.  I liked the way the shoes looked on her feet.  Watching her skate back and forth on the rink was so calming to me.  I was always looking for something to calm me down.  Still am.

Back and Forth.

I got an idea a couple days into my battle with nighttime eye crossing:  I would close my eyes and imagine I was ice skating.  I would watch myself skate back and forth and move my eyes under the lids - back and forth.  Watching would ensure that my eyes weren’t crossing.  I watched myself skate until I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion. 

I used to think I could chop someone’s head off using the paper cutter at school.  That if I could just get someone’s neck under there, I could “pretend” to drop the blade and it would cut straight through; clean.  Such a genius plan, but I could never get my dad to come to my open houses.

Little Battles Children Fight

Summer

Open my eyes; look at the clock.
It's 5:54am; go back to sleep.
Fail; go to the bathroom.
Go back to bed; go back to sleep.
Success.
Dream about a mechanical spider that started out to be a regular spider, but changes as I chase it around the room to kill it.  Try to flush half its body down the toilet.  Why do I think I can flush a robotic spider down the toilet?  Doesn't make sense.  Toilet overflows.  Where's the other half of its body?  Go back into the bedroom.  There it is.  Now it looks like a hermit crab without a shell.  I look away.  I look back.  It is now a mechanical, robot spider again.  But only half of one.  Fear gives way to anger.  Spider starts flexing its big hermit crab-like claws.  I find an acceptable place to pick it up.  I run to the bathroom with it.  It spits a sticky mucousy substance on my fingers that instantly starts to burn my flesh.
I wake up suddenly.
Look at the clock.
5:59am.
Go back to sleep.  Damn spider is still there.
Wake up.  Look at the clock.
8:04am.  Stare at ceiling for seven minutes.
Rub my eyes.  Pull the covers back.
I'm still in my clothes; even my fleece jacket.  Why?
Does it matter?
Take off my clothes and put on another set of clothes.
Head to the bathroom; brush my teeth and pee.
Where are my children?
Oh yeah - they spent the night at their friends' house.
Make it to the couch; my pride and joy; my $2,000 couch.
Grab my laptop; go on Facebook.
Jovie likes my status; so does Dan.
Decide to marathon LOTR trilogy - again.
Update my status with this information.
Get bored with this blog.
I'll finish it later.  Lots of time.
It's summer.