Final Vinyl Days (15 page)

I maxed out at a size ten when I was a senior in high
school. There they are, full-grown pups, and honey, there isn't a single shoe on the market that I don't order and wear. Sometimes I have to order a ten and a half (I firmly believe that this is the result of the Asian influence in this country). I finally got to an age where I could look out at the world and say, “Fine—I am of good solid peasant stock; I am earth woman, working the fields, turning the soil.” I can dig with my hands, and I can dig with my feet. My folks aren't sitting out on the veranda as much as they'd like to be. They are picking cotton and tobacco leaves, and when they get their tired hot bodies back to the shanties at the edge of the field, then here comes The Mister from the Big House. I know that might sound stupid to you, but the size of my feet made me both tough and subservient. I thought long ago that it could all turn around with me meeting the right person at the right time, but that has yet to happen.

You know when I first met Mr. Big, though, I thought it might be happening. Part of the reason I liked him so much that first time is because he talked a lot about you and your son, and he really did seem to care. I even asked him the first time we met in a more personal way, you know, didn't it bother him that he was cheating on you. He said at the time that it was okay because you were cheating on him; I let it be an excuse because he did look
pretty cute back then, but I think I knew that you weren't really having an affair. I mean, you had a one-year-old. Now, I've never had a one-year-old but I sure do read enough, and know enough folks who do, that I know the odds of you having time to run around were out of the question. You were probably lucky to get a shower, am I right?

He showed me a picture of your son the first night I ever met him—a cute little thing, plump and grinning—but after we started sleeping together he never showed me any more pictures of your boy. Or you for that matter, other than Mr. Big's Holier Than Thou Church Photo. I should have known to leave him alone right then. I should have said
kiss off
and disappeared. And I'm still not entirely sure why I stayed, except that I was very lonely and I knew that he was safe.

I'm still lonely. I know you might think I'm putting too much stock on the size of my feet, but in my mind it is a physical symbol of my difference in my family. They are all over there in the nice warm room lit by firelight, and I'm way off yonder by the barbed-wire fence with snow on my boots while I shiver and peep in. I've always felt that way, and therefore I'm comfortable with it. I used to get hopeful every now and then, but I got over it.

And this woman! She is much younger than you are, honey. And she has got boobs such that you could place a cafeteria tray there (man-made, I'm sure). Short skirts. Over the knee boots, I mean, really. Everybody says I have awful taste in clothes, and I do much better than she does. I mean to tell you Mr. Big has hit bottom. Here he had us, two perfectly good-hearted, good-looking women, and he falls for
that
? If I were you, I might even take precautions against disease. She might be packaged to look clean, but that is one sordid thing. Check her out some time. I have her working schedule at Blockbuster's, and I know her address and phone number. As a matter of fact I've already started in harassing her for you. Don't thank me. I'm doing it for me, too.

So, I say we bump him off. Real easy. Slip him the poison. Start in small doses and then up it and up it until he's so sick with what seems to be the flu or some awful stomach problem and then we either choke or smother him, say he did it while trying to be a pig and eat while you weren't around. If you carry it through, you know, fall completely apart—grieve, rage, mention that hussy whore girlfriend down at Blockbuster, don't tamper with the will (a document that does not make a single mention of me!), then they'll believe you. Then just say that you feel
you've got to get that man in the ground as quickly as possible.

Done. Then you go on about your business and I go on about mine and they might put Miss Blockbuster in the slammer. Truth is that I don't have much business and never have.

I almost had a baby one time. The daddy was nowhere to be found. Get up and shake the sheets, and he'd blown clean out the window and down the road, never to be heard from again. Well, here came a baby. Everybody kept telling me to get rid of it, but when have I
ever
done what anybody said to me? Never. So I plodded along, planning. I had lots and lots of plans. But it was a bad joke—a fake baby. No breath, no heartbeat. I looked at it and realized that was my life. No breath, no heartbeat. No life for me. I'm a slave girl—a servant. I'm one rung lower than a dog.

Mr. Big is too low to be called a dog; that would be an insult to canines everywhere. He didn't call you back that time. He was never there for me, not that I ever expected it; but what if just once he had been? What if just once somebody had taken better care of me, taken me to a real doctor, gotten some help. And Mr. Big knows that you've been feeling down lately, but does Mr. Big care? No. I say we kill him.

Oh, but I see doubt in your eyes. I see love, and for
that I sure am sorry for you. You better lose that light, honey.

Bring him down. Think of Delilah. Cut off his strength and watch him go blind and pull a building down on himself. Sap him while you can.

Oh, my, stop crying. Lord. I didn't come over here for this. You are not the woman I thought you were from that photo in the church book. You looked to me in that picture like a woman who could enlist in a complicated plot, but you are a bundle of jumpy weepy nerves. I know that we'd no sooner put Mr. Big down under, but what you'd be confessing and giving out my name. You are a tattletale. You were probably one in school and you're still one. I still call and hang up on the tattletale from my school, that's how much I hate a tattletale.

Oh, yeah, I can see it all, now. You're sitting there thinking about how you could nail
me
. The wife would get it easy. A woman under stress conned by the mistress. You're crazy if you think I'd fall for that one. I may not have any children to worry over, but I have pride. I have dignity. I have the child I almost had and lots of times that keeps me in line. I imagine where he'd be right now, twelve years old—my son waiting for me to get home so he can complain about what I don't have in the refrigerator. I tell people, maybe men I might've just met, “Oh no,
I don't stay out late. My son will be waiting for me.” Don't think I don't know what it feels like. I was pregnant. I had mood swings. I studied all those wonderful little pictures of the fishy-looking baby growing legs like a tadpole—moving from water to land, just that easily.

But you have everything for real. You have Mr. Big legally.

You are hopeless, woman. I'm the one that ought to be crying! Snap to. Listen to some good advice, because in a minute I'll be out of here. You tell him that you know all about that little bitch he's been seeing (she works at Blockbuster Video and wears way too much eye makeup). Tell him he better shape his butt up or you are out of here, sister. Make him sweat. I mean I don't want a thing to do with him, you know? So use me. Call me by name. Tell him I'll come to your divorce hearing and help you clean up. Get him back if you want him, and make him behave. But don't let him off easy. Pitch a blue blazing fit. Scream, curse, throw things. Let him have it, honey. Your husband is cheating on us. Let him have it. And when all is said and done, please just forget that I was ever here; that I ever walked the earth. After all, I'm Big Foot. Who knows if I even exist.

I have spent my life looking for the right occupation and have finally found it: I throw funerals. My husband, James, now has a good answer for all those people who ask what his wife does.
Well, she used to throw pots, and now she throws funerals
. That's true. Every phase of our marriage is neatly catalogued by my quest. Early on, I hand painted china figurines to mark life's special occasions (those were the pregnant years, and it felt good to sit on a pillow with my legs splayed and a fan blowing full in my face while I moved a teeny-tiny ox-bristle brush). When my children (a set of twin boys with a baby sister right on their heels) threatened my whole career every time they ran through the dining room, where I kept the
several hundred figurines, they prompted me to design and build sandboxes and little frog ponds. That led me to a full-blown landscaping business, which, from time to time, included a sideline—a tree house–building service. All of that ended one hot summer of black thumbnails and complaining children (they had the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in mind and found my prefab four-by-six with loft to be seriously lacking). I realized I liked tending my own garden but had no real interest in anybody else's. Then I started catering, given that I was always in the kitchen anyway.

“So what now?” James asked at dinner the night of the baby's first day of kindergarten. I was left at home all by myself for the first time in eons. It was so quiet the first year I got two little Yorkies to keep me company. They yapped in stereo all day long; sometimes their yapping took the shape and rhythm of old hymns and I'd swing around believing they had just done two stanzas of “Softly and Tenderly.” Now, when I look back, I think I was getting a signal, a sign. I did
not
tell James this, of course; he is a brain surgeon (yes, and don't laugh even if it is funny, and don't ask if I was a patient, as many do); we do not see eye to eye on the theory of thought process.

For me, the brain is a great big filing cabinet with memories packed into every crease and crevice. And every
single memory is a key that unlocks the heart, a door that swings forward and lets in a rush of passion.
Without the heart that brain is worth nothing
, I like to say, and James nods, though I know from the look in his eyes that he is somewhere else, not really at our Queen Anne mahogany dining table that my son painted a yellow line (in oil paint) down the middle of to play race car the first day I got it. What is true, of course, is that James's profession has always paid for mine, until, of course, this last one, which is bigger than anybody ever dreamed it would be. I call it my “career of a life
and
a death time.”

I speak of salvation and James speaks of sutures. He says a lot of men have asked him over the years how he can be married to a woman who runs around doing whatever she damn well pleases at all hours of the day. I knew
which
man said this. The same one who keeps his wife in little outfits from Neiman Marcus so she thinks she's getting a good deal while he bosses her butt around all day long. He once asked me at a dinner party what made me think I could do everything. This was right after he had just worn my ear to a nub talking about the tree house he built his sons, the oil painting he sold while still a mere college student, the poetry that he's sure would be printed in the
New Yorker
if he could just find time to send it out. It was clear as a bell to me that I was engaged in an arm-
wrestling event I had not signed up for. I answered that I was proud for him. And I mentioned that I give myself a pap smear every now and again, and that I am frequently called in to estimate dilation of the cervix. He made a face at me, and I was then struck by all the garbage in this life. Here was a man not even forty who assumed he could do whatever anybody else was doing, but God forbid they attempt to do
his
business.

“I guess she'll be operating soon,” he said to James in passing, and James in his normal completely checked-out way said, “Probably so.” I found a way to get back over near where he was before leaving to say that I had also performed numerous rectal exams, that I had just that minute done one and found him to be the biggest one I'd ever encountered.

I know I'm rambling, but it's important that I lead you to the moment of realization and the reason I do what I do. Like a personal testimony, you know? I was about to turn forty and already many of my very favorite people were dead. I had children, and I wanted them to grow up with a clear vision of hope. A sense of nature and art and all that has walked this earth before them. But what I was getting was life in the nineties—can you do this? can you do that? can you do this? can you do that? Help me! Help me! comes the plea, but when you get there, the person
who needed you so desperately can't decide what shoes go with the purse, can't decide how much lamb to buy. I was sliding to that point where my bones were feeling picked, every bit of flesh stripped away, just as I imagined was happening to my dear ones tucked in beneath the earth. There are people out there who will use you, eat you alive if you let them. They might as well say, “Hey, I'm going to a party, want to get wasted, want to borrow your brains, heart, liver, and lungs just for the occasion!”

I was feeling close to a breakdown. If I'd had time, I might have had one. I've seen that done. I had a greataunt who had three hysterectomies over the course of her later life. The Everready Hysterectomy. It's like the college student with the grandfather who just keeps dying and dying and dying. I told James I might want to have a hysterical pregnancy followed by a complete fake hysterectomy, or, I told him, I could go someplace like Canyon Ranch Spa and take a nice long mud bath. I think I could manage that. I see myself propped up in a satin bedjacket (mineral water/carrot sticks/velvet drapes/classical music at tubside), or hell, let's get real. Send me to the Holiday Inn; Lanz flannel shrunk up to my shins, Diet Coke and sea-salt-and-vinegar chips. I'd eat until my mouth was parched and dry and then chase them down with cola. I'm a Taurus, and we do things like that—
chug, eat huge desserts, hug and kiss perfect strangers who look like they need some attention, seize ourselves by the horns.

I know people who sigh in tiredness at the end of a day of doing nothing. She might have one child that comes with a built-in babysitter, and she sighs, “Oh dear, I'm afraid I really have to leave the house for the cleaning service.” Excuse me, like did I miss some big chunk of evolution? At the same party where Mr. OB talked so much I overheard someone ask, “Who's your girl?” I thought for a nanosecond that I was eavesdropping on a lesbian revolution out in suburbia, but no, it was the female version of who has the biggest penis. For women, it's who is the busiest in this culture-filled world. Does your child speak one language or three? When did he give up reading
Time
for the
New Republic
? An op-ed in crayon? Really? Do you do suzuki? Do you do soccer? Do you do liquor at the end of the day? (That was my line.)