Nipples of Knowledge

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There are only two bills left that I have to pay by mail: my second mortgage, and then more money to my second mortgage.  This bank likes to drain me the slow way; they won’t lower my interest rate, but they’ll take principal payments…but only if I mail them.  You would think they’d just hook a siphon up to my account, or electrodes to my nipples, and then give me two startling electronic notices that go zzzzzt “we got your first payment” and zzzzzt “we got that second payment you like to make…right in our P.O. box. Feels good.”

The bank that holds my primary mortgage (and the second one, and apparently the imaginary third one called “principal” that I like to throw all my extra cash at) is, I think, run by men.  I started to get the idea that all banking institutions must be run by men when I was on the phone with a representative from my Credit Union last year and he informed me that I was now an “enhanced member”.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“I said that, like, since you’re an enhanced member, you get unlimited transfers.”

“An enhanced member?  When did I become that?”

“Cuz you’ve had your money with us for like twenty years.”

I wondered why he didn’t say “your tiny money”.  I remember driving as fast as I could across Phoenix one day in 2004, trying to get to the only Credit Union branch I knew of—tucked into the bowels of Arizona State University’s campus, well beneath the Nipple of Knowledge that dominates the library’s lawn, a public art project gone wrong—deep down under the desert floor where there are bathrooms that don’t get cleaned as often and arcade games that don’t get played.  This was before my awesome cell phone skills developed, not that the Credit Union had a phone back then, but there was a pay phone around the corner next to a janitor’s closet, and I’d heard it ring before.

I was trying to prevent a $1500 mortgage payment check from clearing because a nice divorce attorney had told me that I didn’t have to pay my husband’s bills anymore.

I wish I had figured that out a couple years earlier.

It was too late for that check that time, and all the technology in the world couldn’t protect me from what a real person was capable of doing anyway.  What a fool I was to get back into my car, sweat standing in puddles on my face, smiling the smile of a woman who thought that a stopped check would save her.

I know a lot better now.

In the Stinkhole

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Exactly 29 hours after the current health crisis began in my parents’ house, I finally found out.  Through flukes of timing and activity—yes, there were messages on the phone, but I thought they were birthday messages, I would get to them later, plus I had a guest: he was real, texting is not—I didn’t hear anything about the fear and chaos until it was nearly over.

That was yesterday and today is today.  I’m on the phone with my dad.  I ask him how he's doing.

“Yesterday, my systems shut down,” my dad rasps to me.  He’s in the hospital again, and my mom has put him on the line while she takes care of something else.  “I went to places I haven’t been in awhile.”

“What kinds of places?” I ask, shouldering the phone, flapping my hands, wondering if anybody on the other end can hear what my dad is saying.

“Oh, the dark ones,” he says, sadly.

“How are your spirits, Dad?”

“My spirits?”

“Yeah.  You know what I mean.”

“Oh, it’s a beautiful sunny Minnesota afternoon and the sun is rippling across the pond across the field from my room.”  My father pauses.  “Today I’m back to fulfilling the role.”  

I hear some activity in the background, and then my dad says, “Here’s your mother back, honey."

I immediately ask if she has heard this conversation.  She hasn’t.  This means that I’ve had yet another phantom down-to-earth, gut-level, revealing, heartfelt and sorrowful conversation with my father that nobody will ever know about.  He will deny ever saying this, I would bet on that.  That’s why we all look like the crazy ones, not him.

My mom gets back on the line; I emphasize the idea of getting Dad’s depression medication upped or changed.  She says the doctor in charge of that is out of touch somehow—unreachable.

I feel like I live in a house of tricks, that old confused feeling.  Betrayal and denial disappear, but they were right here just a second ago.  I’m in the stinkhole again, never to win in a game I can’t even define.

“I can’t take care of him if his legs won’t support him,” my mom says.  Of course that is true.  A truer thing could not be said.

What does this mean?

*

My three cats loll around me, on the carpet and in their beds, on this first day of Super-Sexy’s absence.  I guess I shouldn’t keep calling him that.  His name is Ares, which I think is a beautiful name, and it’s fun to say.  My cats are exhausted from having company, as if they were the ones who cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed and did the dishes and made the yard look so nice.

I want to go forward into the week, but am somehow impeded by a statue of my father.  I felt his mix of resentment, indignation, resignation, anger, desperation and longing when he said at one point today in his familiar irritated-with-me tone, “Kathryn, hold on a minute,” and tried to get the females in his room to quiet down.  But he could not raise his voice high enough to make an impact on the group.  I felt him remembering one of his grandest rules: “There will be no raised voices in this house.”  He can no longer clear his throat loud enough to enforce that rule, and the idea of his house has to be far removed from what he meant back then.  That was a house that we all could touch.

When my dad gave me back to my mom, she asked how the weekend went with Ares.

“It went great,” I said.  And it did, in that super-star way people just dream about.  Super-star.  I wanted to tell my mom that he told me I was untidy, but I knew it was the wrong time.  She and I could go to great lengths talking about that, but right now, it’s about my dad.

*

Untidy?

Three Times Fifteen

I remember picking up who I thought was my best girlfriend in the whole world at the airport one time.  This was in 1997, when times were still good.  We were not 100 feet away from the gate, going merrily along, very happy to see one other and chatting up a storm about my friend’s new apartment that didn’t have a crafts room, but at least it didn’t have a husband either.  Then my friend who I loved said to me, “Oh, that’s right—you’re not into crafts.”

I wasn’t?

It’s true that back then, when we were still young to our best friendness, certain major areas of interest outside of men, money and us weren’t really that important.  We were probably making excited conversation as we hustled through the airport towards my car, hauling her bags, on our way to what would undoubtedly be, and was, a raucously good 29^th birthday for me.

I would be the exact age my friend had been the year we met.  I thought she was old then.  Now she was a billion and 38, an unimaginably high number.  

I looked at her, a beautiful sunny warm open brown-skinned absolute love of a woman, the woman who I would someday describe as the person I would have married if she’d had a penis, wearing an intricately beaded necklace around her neck in her favorite colors, which I knew were her favorite colors because I had asked before I made her the necklace and gave it to her last year.

Something must have clicked in my friend’s mind when we made eye contact, a snapping of her brain’s fingers at the same moment it recognized the look on my face as abhorrence, because she blurted out, “Oh my God!  You made this necklace I’m wearing!”

That’s right.

“I can’t believe I forgot that!  You are crafty!  What was I thinking?” she said.  “You know, I wear this necklace all the time with everything, and it’s such a part of me, I forgot I got it from you.” 

That’s the kind of apology I like.  Just because my choice of crafts differed from her choice didn’t make me less-than.  She spent the whole long weekend wearing the necklace I’d made for her, and I loved seeing it around her tanned neck.  That adds up to another reason I would have married her, if she had been male.

*

Today, I am three times fifteen—quite the handful.  I can only imagine what I’ll be like when I’m three times seventeen; just one of my seventeens almost ruined a lot of young men, back when times were even better, and nothing was yet my fault.

Eighteen was the year that the interesting presents started to appear.  That year, I got $1000 from my Grandma Liz, who had actually passed away a few months before.  All of the older kids had received $1000 from her when they turned eighteen, so my mom made sure it happened for me, too.  I remember sitting in the living room saying, “Thank you, Grandma!” into the camera, holding up two $500 bills.  It was a hot, humid May afternoon in rural Pennsylvania and I felt slimy, which only added to the creepiness of the missing giver of my thousand dollars. 

When I turned thirty, I went to the airport to pick up my parents, who had flown into Phoenix from Minnesota to celebrate with me, and was surprised to turn my head and see one of my sisters sitting in the airport bar.  “Hey!” she called out.  Just then, I turned to look back towards the gate to see not only my mom and my dad emerging but two more sisters, and my brother too.  I was surprised they hadn’t dug up our old dog, Sox, and had him stuffed for the occasion.  

A family reunion on my 30^th birthday, with all of us in the same vehicle for the first time in twenty years—now able to make noise without risk of our father pulling over to spank us.  The last time we had all been in the same vehicle, it was in a Winnebago for two weeks, which at ten I had loved, but the older kids, all in their late teens, somehow had not.  This time we were all packed into a van-cab going to my favorite sushi restaurant, because after all it was MY birthday and I got to pick the place.  That was always the rule.

I cannot recommend taking your entire family fresh from Minnesota, filling them with alcohol, then bringing them to a restaurant where they won’t eat the food because it’s raw.  Can anybody say herring!?  What about the raw hamburger sandwiches with onion and pepper?  What about the ham mousse?  Y’all ate that but you won’t eat a tasty morsel of fresh salmon?  Stop flipping me off!  Quit it…before Mother sees you, I sneered in my brain.

The next year I got a kitten.

Then there was the era of the giftless marriage, and then my 40^th was very nice, spent with my boyfriend at the time, the one with the porn-star hair.  He and his five children under the age of ten just showed up in my life (and on many other occasions) at the wrong time.

Today I am 45, and I find myself wanting a sewing machine.  Why do I suddenly want one of those?  From whence cameth this desire to make little purses out of old jeans for little girls, and crafty little birdfeeders to outsmart the pigeons, with a holey sock to hold the seed.  My craftiness is back.

And Super-Sexy, he’s back too; he came for my birthday.  That’s right.

Super-Sexy is only three times thirteen, so he needs close supervision and a some guidance now and then, which I’m more than happy to provide.  In fact, I can hear him calling now for me to come back inside the house.  He’s not going to like what he sees.  I’m so extraordinarily happy all over my body, inside and out, that I came outside to pinch myself.  However, we Mohlers don’t do that when we check to see if it’s real.

We bite our tongues in half.