Puerarchy

I turn to my blog because I know better than to turn to you with my unfiltered, raw thoughts—thoughts I probably won’t even believe or agree with tomorrow.

One day.

At 74, you get one day to throw a pity party, watch Charlton Heston movies back to back, and wander around the house quiet, sullen, and not eating. I concede that. But the pity party has to end tomorrow.

You know, if I tried to throw a tantrum all day, you’d read me the riot act. You’d tell me to act like an adult. Bitch, I’m half your age—take your own advice. I’m too nice.

Everyone who has ever said they were in love with me eventually treated me as a burden. I’m so sick of it, because you are actually getting the best version of me anyone has ever seen. I hold down a job. I don’t fight you. I don’t demean you. I do laundry and change the sheets every week. I make dinner almost every night. I clean. Yet it is still not enough. It has never been enough. It wasn’t enough for my first husband, who I did even less for, and it isn’t enough for you.

I’m so sick of the double standard—how the men in my life get to be ~ depressed ~ get to wallow in their own shit for a day or two or a week or a month, but me? Oh, jeez, if I shed one tear over something hurtful said to me, it must be my time of the month, because God forbid I have a stupid, measly, fucking human emotion like hurt.

You don’t love me like you used to. Then again, I don’t love you like I used to. I don’t know which is worse: people who give up, or people who won’t.

Oh, by tomorrow, after I’ve written it all out, taken a shower, slept, and started a new day, I’ll be all sympathetic. We all get down. We all are flawed. We are all human. We are all trying our best.

I probably will apologize again, even though I apologized multiple times today, and for what exactly, I couldn’t say.

Tomorrow morning, you’ll feel foolish. You’ll see how you went to bed at 4:30 p.m. and threw away a whole day we could have had together. You’ll see how I made dog food, did laundry, changed the sheets, cleaned the kitchen floor, and watered the garden while you were feeling sorry for yourself—for what?

And I’ll be grateful you made me mad enough to get that much done in one day.

It will continue—some grand pattern, some horrific tango—in which you feel more inferior and, each time you show it, I prove it.

Tomorrow, I will see you pilling the cat and crooning sweet things to her, and I’ll remember why I stay. I will think one bad day is nothing against months of good ones. I will realize that, deep down inside, I wanted to be a little shit all day too—I just channeled it into a shitty blog and stupid chores. I’ll see you sleeping with the innocent face of a baby. I’ll recall that you were not even eighteen when they handed you a gun and made you kill someone. I’ll catch the flicker of a boyish grin as you describe a motorcycle you once owned. Use the garage door I broke and you fixed.

I’ll somehow find a way. And so will you.

In Loving Mockery

If I cannot make fun of a dead man, then who, exactly, is left for me to mock?

If ridicule is reserved only for the living, for the warm and oxygenated, then what are we to do with those who once laughed, once sulked, once slammed cabinet doors, cried in on the shower floor, and said ridiculous things in the kitchen at 8:14 p.m.?

What special immunity does death confer, that life did not?

Perhaps you worry he will haunt me for it.

I can only hope.

There are days I think I would welcome a haunting—some small, petulant disturbance in the night, some evidence that he is still, in some infuriating way, available to me. A door shifting on its hinge. A lamp flickering. The sudden feeling of being watched while I say, to an empty room, You always were a drama queen.

If I am honest, there are moments I miss him in precisely this register.

Not in the grand, cinematic ways grief is supposed to announce itself, but in the stupid, ordinary way of missing his annoying habits, his predictable indignations, the particular shape his face took when he was offended by something that was, almost always, true.

I miss making fun of him to his face.

I miss making fun of him behind his back.

I miss the way he would pretend not to enjoy the attention of being known that well.

And if your objection is that the dead cannot defend themselves, I would gently remind you that he was never especially gifted at defense in the first place.

Besides, what is haunting if not rebuttal?

What is a ghost, if not someone still refusing to let the conversation end?

Because this, too, is how love works.

Not only in tenderness, not only in reverence, but in teasing, in laughter, in the exquisite familiarity of knowing exactly where another person is soft. We learn each other’s weak seams, the little unguarded places beneath the armor, and—if we are lucky, if we are close enough—we press there gently, sometimes not so gently, just to feel the proof of life beneath it.

To love someone is, in part, to know where they are ridiculous.

To love someone well is to know it with and without cruelty.

To be loved well is to be seen in your absurdity and missed anyway.

So why should death make saints of the people who never were?

Why should it sand down all their foolish edges,

bleach them into solemnity,

make them too sacred to laugh at?

If I loved him in life by joking with him, by needling him, by rolling my eyes and laughing at the exact same flaws I once secretly found endearing, then perhaps the truest way to keep loving him now is not silence, but continuation.

Not canonization.

Not polite grief.

Not the false dignity of pretending he was better, smoother, kinder, or less ridiculous than he really was.

No—let me love him as he was.

Annoying. Stupid. Defenseless. Awful. Rude. Selfish. Pouting.
A man I would marry and divorce, and possibly be stupid enough to do it again.

Shouldn’t death, if it means anything at all, at least permit us the mercy of honesty?

And shouldn’t love, if it is real, survive even that?

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Buddha had three temptations under the Bo tree.
Satan tried to entice Jesus in the wilderness.
And we, modern people, have the false shine of Instagram.

A variable buffet perfectly curated by artificial intelligence,
which I’m beginning to think might actually be smarter than us—
or at least smarter than me,
who did not know these desires were in me
until someone, partnered, sponsored,
showed me what I was missing.

And somehow I am seeing thousands of people a day
without ever leaving my house, and they are all different,
yet not. They all greet me—“Hi guys!” “Hey turnips!”—
or whatever pet name they’ve given us,
we the lonely, we are together and apart,
while they all wear the same cheeks
and lips and makeup
and hair.

Perhaps, I tell you—just between us—
for months I have been wondering
if maybe any of it is real,
or maybe all of it is, maybe this
motioning, motioning, motioning
all around me
is what real looks like now.

Ugh, shut the fuck up.
Real, real, real—
relative.

I am listening to two boys argue over how real
pro wrestling is. We are in grade school.
Those are the same people now,
only debating A.I.

I’m so fucking tired.
I do not want to keep pretending
this is a meaningful distinction.

Not Like in Diagrams

Don't share this with the rest of the class—
I woke up five minutes before my alarm,
envisioned the uterus—not like in books,
not like in diagrams with the ovaries raised
like victorious, celebrating arms, but how
it really is: tucked and balled in the guts,
like a scared child hiding in a closet.
Then a cat started chewing on my hair.

She doesn’t normally sleep with us, but
an X-ray showed a moth-eaten jaw—
bone infection or cancer, too much
for her little body to say for sure.
So we give her a strong antibiotic
while she fights us, then invite her
into the bedroom like a Make-A-Wish kid.

We lavish more on her because she might
be dying. Maybe that’s all any of us are—
curled into tight balls, denying ourselves
what we want until we’re lined up on death row,
finally requesting the last meal
we’ve been craving
most of our lives.

Masculinity in 1980 Film

In Superman II, with Christopher Reeve—
you know, the one where Lois Lane
finally figures out Clark Kent is Superman
and he takes her to his Fortress of Solitude,
where they fuck in the largest metallic
beanbag chair ever committed to film—but first,
he gives up his powers,
partly so he won’t split her in half,
partly because she’s already made it clear
no woman is meant to love a man in halves.

The second he becomes ordinary,
he gets his face beaten in at an Alaskan diner
while General Zod walks into the White House
like management.
The world immediately goes to hell
because one guy wanted, for once,
to come as himself.
That’s the plot.

So of course he gets the powers back.
Of course he saves the country.
Of course he flies the flag back to the President
like the empire’s house pet.
And of course he wipes Lois Lane clean—
memory, consequence, evidence, all of it.
That’s the ending. That’s the lesson.

Never let them see you powerless.
Not for love, not for sex, not for honesty,
not even for a night.
The second you stop being invincible,
your face gets smashed in,
the country panics,
and the woman has to be punished
for having known you at all.

come to the grocery with me

I don’t like when my husband
smokes cigars in my car,
but I let him. If AI is just data
collected from people
all over the world,
is befriending ChatGPT
like being friends with everyone?
The question I ask,
reaching into a box
below the bananas
for the green ones
I like best. I have to touch
every grapefruit, make sure
I get the most perfect one.
I assert dominance
by taking produce bags
closer to someone else.

We are accosted by a persistent
employee from some other Walmart
who follows us for ten minutes.
We find the gravy anyway.

I like things like cookie dough ice cream
and birthday cake muffins—
two desserts in one.

I suggest we get two packs of ramen,
but my husband slips six in the cart
as a man negotiates with a small
terrorist he calls Boo Boo
in a princess dress. I don’t mind.
At my best, I am a highchair tyrant too.
I want what I want when I want it.

See, I broke my jar
of everything bagel seasoning.
It will be five more weeks before I put
a replacement on the grocery list.

My husband and I wage a small
battle of wills over grape jelly.
He says the squeeze bottle is easier;
I say the big jar is cheaper.
We get both because that resolves the issue,
which does not make sense,
but we are both happy.

People think my husband is my father
so often that even I start to see it.

As the cashier bags the groceries
and I put them in the cart,
I always open the next bag
to save her one little step.

When my husband’s finger
hits three out of five stars
when the tiny screen asks,
he thinks that’s average,
but I would never mark
less than four.

We go home and I put away the groceries.
At eleven in the morning, it will be
the hardest part of my day. Then I’ll make
biscuits and gravy from scratch, eat,
and take a nap in the chair
while a rerun of Jeopardy! plays.

The Second House in Four Years

Tomorrow, I am going to a neighbor’s house to hang out.

Aside from my own, I’ve only ever been inside one other house in this neighborhood, and every minute of those ten minutes, I was praying to leave.

Easter last year, the wife next door asked if we wanted some of the Easter dinner leftovers. I had assumed Paul would decline, but instead, I found myself tasked with getting Tupperware from the kitchen. I brought three containers. Few enough not to seem greedy, and few enough not to commit to too much time in the house, but enough to seem earnest.

Luckily, the kitchen was near the door, so at the time, I considered myself lucky. She showed me items and asked if I wanted some. I said sure to everything, but knew deep down I didn’t want any of it. 

But what do you do in this situation? Say, no, I don’t want your baked beans that are a special recipe and have been a family favorite for decades, because if I know one thing about myself, it’s that I secretly prefer baked beans straight out of the can, bland, room temperature, and scooped out with chips. Potato or tortilla, depending on my mood. Sometimes I can get a little wild.

I saw sweet release in sight as she snapped a lid on the third container with macaroni and cheese inside. Which, perhaps this is bragging and not the right time to mention, but I make very, very, very good macaroni and cheese. I hand-shred extra sharp cheddar from a block. I freshly grate Parmesan off a fragrant, hard hunk. I slowly stir the bits of cheese into evaporated milk and macaroni over low heat and watch them melt into a beautiful, decadent blend. I didn’t want her mac and cheese. I wanted the third dish filled so I could leave.

But alas, friends, perhaps you see by the mass of words that follow this sentence that there is much more to this story. I was not free. Freedom remained elusive and cold, for she then pulled out paper plates and aluminum foil and insisted I take half of a chocolate cake, which she was already cutting and placing on a flimsy paper plate.

Then, after she had forced upon me a little bit of everything, she did the most dreaded thing one could do.

“Would you like a tour?”

“Oh no, no, Paul’s waiting for me and I probably need to get this in the fridge,” I said, gesturing to a mass of food I didn’t want.

“But this is the first time you’ve been to my house.”

Now, I will be honest, I have no idea what exactly that means. I guess somewhere deep in some Southern etiquette book, you are supposed to guide your first-time guest from room to room and show them everything, from the shitter to the bed you fuck in. Maybe I’d be more inclined if I wanted to be her friend, but I didn’t. Just to be clear, it wasn’t because she was elderly. I’ve had and will have senior citizen friends. It’s because she’s a proven, grade-A, top-tier bitch and gossip.

And so I finally was able to leave and carry the unwanted loot home, where I, not being one to completely close myself off, tried a bit of each and then tenderly tipped each container into the trash, disappointed that I suddenly had enough dirty dishes to run the dishwasher after only ten minutes.

But that was a year ago, and now, tomorrow, I am going to a different neighbor’s house. I actually think I could like her. She seems exactly as neurotic as me.

Her husband will be at “group,” which from context clues I have gathered is some version of AA or NA for people who want to not drink or use drugs but refuse AA or NA to do it. Whether “group” is some intellectualized or religiousized or medicalized version remains unknown to me. I’ve seen both. Get sober through science! Get sober through Jesus! Get sober through a pill! I don’t really have strong opinions. I just got sober the same way people have done it since the ’40's and wasn’t too worried about some fandangled new way. AA was just fine for me.

But enough of that! Get this, friends.

When she invited me, she said we could meet at her house or “go out for a charcuterie.” Can you imagine? Anyone who knows me — and of course this woman doesn’t know me — should know that I, of all people, will not be buying cold cuts, crackers, and cheese dried up on a wood board at a 10x markup, right now in Trump’s economy!

Yes, I was forged and quenched like a sword in practicality. Watch now as I, at the age of thirty-eight, mysteriously turn into my mother when I was a child. I am peering down at my own round, youthful, hopeful face, two Lunchables — the ’90s charcuterie predecessor — clutched in my two tiny hands. I can hear my mother’s voice and my voice mashed in garbled synchrony:

“For that price, I could buy a whole box of crackers, a whole pack of bologna, a whole thing of cheese singles.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Just as I wasn’t wrong to text back, “Your house is fine,” when in reality, I am choosing the lesser of two evils. Apparently there is something worse than a neighbor's house and it's spending $25 on $5 of meat cheese, and crackers.

I offer to bake cookies and bring them.

Because, again I am bragging, I am very good at making cookies. People rave about how soft and perfect they are. The trick, you see, is to pull them out of the oven before they seem done.  The key step, then, is to carefully remove them from the pan onto a cooling rack, let the room air circulate around the cookie so it cools slightly and the heat never tips too far.

That’s the main issue, people with hard cookies or overdone cookies — they wait for it to look like the perfect cookie in the oven, or leave them on the pan, forgetting the pan and the heat inside the dough will continue to bake.

I'm sorry. 

So what the fuck is the point of all this you may ask.

Jesus, I don’t know. It’s all kind of meaningless.

The distance between how I understand the world and how others do, how I find myself going to someone else’s house for the second time in two years four years of living in this neighborhood. It’s strange to be me, and probably ten times stranger for these people to meet me.