Tonight we looked at houses on Sunset Boulevard. We were going to a show, but the cover was eight bucks and we couldn’t stay long. I was jazzed with the anticipation of going somewhere, so we decided to torture ourselves by mansion-watching.
In the car, Chris mentioned California again. Our half-joke. Tonight he said we should put our stuff in storage and go. I considered it, seriously. How would the cat take it? She’d be OK. We’d bring her litter box and stop at parks along the way. Which car we would take? Yours is bigger. Yeah, but you’re still making payments on yours. And where? San Francisco. And live in another tiny apartment? Let’s go up north. Let’s go to Santa Rosa, where I was born.
A few moments pass. I say, I really think we should do it. But Chris says, we don’t have jobs out there. We need a plan. I reply, I know, but everything good that’s happened to me happened because I jumped into it without thinking. He replies, everything good that’s happened to me is because I waited, saved and planned. But I – says me – wouldn’t have come to Minnesota and married you, if I’d planned it.
I think about this. What if I hadn’t come to Minnesota? And I have a different reaction than normal. If I had stayed in Virginia, maybe I would be a kid. Still in my parents’ house under their care. Safe.
A memory: I was sick in elementary school, puking everywhere. The nurse let me sleep in a breezy room behind a curtain on a small cot while I waited for my mom to pick me up. She was a little late, which was unusual. But then I heard her keys jangle and the low murmur of her voice at the front desk. At home, she tucked me in their bed with chicken broth in the blue china cup and an opened 7UP can.
That’s the feeling everyone chases. I know. Nothing different about me. But unlike nearly everyone I know – everyone I know, actually – I’ve stopped my life, searching for the relief of the low voice behind the curtain. I’ve stopped my life so completely and with such a terrifying refusal that the only way to restart is to accept who I am: 26-years-old, married. Mother of cat. No one’s baby anymore. I did not know growing up would feel like this; I thought I would wistfully shrug into it like a new coat. Unfamiliar, but worn in soon enough.
I didn’t know I would lock myself in, birthday after birthday.
After the houses, we drove by the roller rink. And then McDonald’s, contemplating stopping at both. But I wanted a hot bath and Chris was getting tired. I kept thinking about Minnesota, how I hopped on a plane at 19 without fearing how it would turn out. The last brave thing I ever did. I just knew it would turn out, one way or another. I didn’t know what I might be leaving behind.
Talking about California felt closer than anything has in a while. Maybe because I was young there too. I lived there from birth to three years old, but my mom insists I’m a California girl. At home in the hot bath, I hear her saying this, the echo of the statement from different parts of my life. In my head I insist something too, something never said aloud, something I thought as we sat dreaming in front of the mansions: live forever. Please don’t die. Please stop changing. All of you, all of it, me.
Transmission isn’t really a dance party. Four or five people are on the dance floor on busy nights, but it’s mostly an excuse – if you’re a scenester – to check in with other scenesters mid-week. Hosted by DJ Jake, Transmission’s home base has switched over the years, starting (I think) at the Loring Pasta Bar, then to the dressed-down Hexagon (where I had my inaugural Transmission) and now at Clubhouse Jager, a small classy joint in the Warehouse District.
I am not a scenester. Not because I haven’t tried, but because I can’t pull it off. We know this. I only like listening to strangers; I don’t like talking, and even when they’re the same strangers who show up at every function in the city, and even when it’s to the point where I know enough about them to crack their bank passwords, I still can’t do the follow-through.
I hadn’t been to a Transmission in months. Maybe a year. Chris and I are on a kick of leaving the house lately, so we decided to grab a quick drink at Transmission and check out the new digs. I banked on something more like the Hex – quieter, less people, pool in the back. I put on blue eyeshadow and silver bangles because it was 80s night, thinking I might be overdressed. Inside the bar, after we – the introverted gamers – were confronted with strobe lights and ten of the most beautiful women we’d ever seen dancing in a sweaty pack, we found two chairs on an elevated platform in the back.
I am not really an introverted gamer, though 90% of the time this is my role. But suddenly, with the lights and the ladies and the DJ we’re all in love with, I jumped up from my chair. Sparkling a little. I offered to get drinks, leaned up against the bar. Smiled at a dude who was giving me a side-glance. He looked away immediately, employing the typical Minnesotan male mating call. I grabbed the drinks, came back, reapplied red lipstick in the bathroom, sat on the edge of my seat, pointed out people to Chris. There’s the vampire dude who toured with Wilco. That girl with the pink highlights used to be married to him, but now she’s after that soft-looking guy in the corner with the AK-47 tattoo on his left shoulder.
I had not been in this scene in months. Chris said, as a joke, “Who are you?” I knew what he meant. There’s been a different me for a year, the one whose hands shook that morning ordering coffee. Who greeted him at the door after work in a red bathrobe, haven’t not moved from the computer desk for nine hours in an act more reminiscent of paralysis than laziness.
I used to be all three: the introverted gamer, the socialite, the depressive. It was a confusing mix, but I managed. But then one got out of balance.
At Club Jager, I needed one more drink to settle in without phasing out, but I didn’t want one more drink. I just wanted a frame or two to remember; an low dose to ease in. Someone requested an old Elvis Costello song, which the DJ almost played before he mumbled to himself, “Ah, but that’s 70s and then is 80s night, so…” It’s not trivia. He likes to be accurate. He looks like David Byrne if David Byrne looked more like David Byrne.
At the old Transmissions, I would stay all night. Get pretty drunk and then dance into exhaustion. There were nights that were just exhaustion with no dance, but there were not months like that. Certainly not a year. So it’s an uneasy process, snapping my brain back on my brain.
Minneapolis is not a forgiving city for this type of ailment, but it does forget quickly. Transmission is a way to do this; that dude toured with Wilco and I’m the girl with the red lipstick who shows up sometimes. They don’t have to know my in-betweens, though I can’t forget them, not even for a night. Do you feel me, here?
Thought of another age story. 2001. I was 20. I’m notoriously nervous about transportation, so after 9/11, I decided to take a train cross-country to see my parents for Christmas. (I’m in Minnesota; they’re in Virginia.) I didn’t have a sleeper car, but it turned out to be a great experience anyway, with all the old-world romantic appeal you’d expect. On the first leg of the trip, I sat next to 30ish guy who was reading a photography magazine. We didn’t speak for the first few hours, but then he suddenly turned and admitted that he was on the train because 9/11 had scared him. I immediately fell in love – not because we shared a common experience, but because of the abrupt, embarrassed confession. I like shy strangers, especially those who reveal their story in slow, blushing pieces. So I got this guy’s story – and it was a good one – but I promised not to tell anyone.
But after he told me how old he was (32), I felt the old self-consciousness rise. Who’s going to fall in love with a 20-year-old? (It took me until 25 to realize that many 32-year-olds want to fall in love with a 20-year-old. Many 40-year-olds want to fall in love with a 20-year-old.) So I told him I was 26. I thought it sounded old enough to be wise, but not too old to be unbelievable. When it was dinner-time, everyone started wandering to the booze car. My seat-mate didn’t, but then I had a thought. I wanted to know the answer, but I had to throw it out casually.
“I wonder,” I said, “if they card people for alcohol on the train?”
He didn’t know.
“Huh. You would think they would, since federal laws still apply, right? Do you think?”
He shrugged.
An hour later, we reached his stop. He pulled out his wallet to hand me his business card. I pulled out my wallet to find a piece of paper to scribble down my e-mail address. He glanced and saw my ID.
“1981, eh,” and then he laughed.
Mortified, I didn’t look up. But he patted my shoulder and replied, “No worries. I did the same thing when I was your age. But let me give you a tip: asking if the booze car was going to card you was a give-away. And not just because you were actually worried about being carded. You’ll know what I mean when you’re really 26.”
He wasn’t being condescending, but I didn’t know what he meant at the time. I didn’t write down my address and I lost his card, so I never saw him again. His stop was somewhere in Ohio. By 23, I understood and I understood even more at 26. Like I said in yesterday’s post, now the thought isn’t: will they card me? But: do I look old enough to be someone’s mom? No, the thought is something more than that, I know. But let’s not go there yet.
Yesterday, at the Bryant Lake Bowl
I braved the Lake St. construction to stop by Heather Corinna’s book signing. Bryant Lake Bowl is set up like this: cramped-but-cozy restaurant up front, small bowling alley behind and a tiny theater off to the left. The theater’s laid out so you have to maneuver a corner and stand 100% inside the room before you can see anything. Not good for renegade spies such as myself. Unfortunately, I walked in, saw three people sitting in an intimate circle and walked right back out, suddenly shy. Too few people for me to do my blending thing. So I grabbed a table for lunch instead and called Chris to meet me. The guy at the table across from me looked like my next-door neighbor and kept staring at me in a way that indicated that maybe he was my next-door neighbor. Not my neighbor. The waiter looked like Tate Donovan and had a crusty nose. I spilled a carafe of creamer on my menu.
On the walk back to the car, Chris and I discovered a huge flower garden on a hill by the highway. We almost walked down to see it, but there was some dude walking really close behind us and I could sense he was about to say something and whether it was going to be lecherous or come-to-Jesus, I wasn’t in the mood.
This was the first time I’d eaten in a restaurant in months. There’s a story there, but it’s for another time.
Today, at the coffee shop
There was a 3-year-old blonde girl in line behind me and an earthy-looking tan lady in front of me. The earth mother turned and gushed that my daughter and I looked so much alike, and did I have blonde curls like that when I was a kid? I took a step back and said that the kid didn’t belong to me, and then got a sudden weird twinge of, “Shit, do I look like someone’s mom? And am I going to be someone’s mom someday?” And then maybe to save face, the earth mother continued the curls conversation anyway, asking if I had wavy hair as a child. I said, “No, but my hair started getting curly when I hit 30 or so.”
Why do I lie to strangers like that? I mean, my hair did start getting curly when I was 23 or 24, but I’m not 30 yet. It’s an old habit from a teenager, I think. I always felt like a grown-up in a little body, so at 15, I’d throw things out like, “Yeah, it was really great to vote in my first election. Man, I just felt so empowered, you know?” And now I look my age, if not older, so telling someone I’m 30 is stupid and has no effect. But it was out of my mouth before I even thought about it. Will I do this when I’m 75? “Ah, yes, I remember 80 just like it was yesterday. But being 92 is pretty cool.”
Against all odds, Clint loved the musical Cats. At 15, I was already a fairly complete musical theatre buff, but I’d shunned Cats because it seemed stupid. I was cool with its famous torch song, Memory, but had refused to listen to the rest in an act of misplaced elitism. Clint was surprising this way, really. He was sarcastic and pessimistic and so smart he was mean, but he played first-chair viola in the youth orchestra, had a secret stash of Enya sheet music and he loved Cats like nothing else. I don’t remember where we went on our first date, but I do remember I left with a neck full of hickies and a dub of the original cast recording of Cats to listen to in my car.
I must have asked him why at one point – the afternoon we went to Belle Isle and I was too afraid to climb the high rocks? during the countless hours I spent pretending to read magazines at the coffee shop he worked at? in French class, when we got kicked out for talking too much? on the jungle gym in my neighborhood when he, usually stoic and unemotional, revealed a painful childhood secret? maybe that 4th of July when I threw up in his bathroom and he handed me a cold washcloth for my face or maybe the last time I saw him, when we sat awkwardly in his new apartment, drinking the Kool-Aid he forgot to put sugar in, an event that was followed by an embarrassed e-mail (“why did you drink three glasses when it tasted so awful? you don’t have to be polite like that with me”) – somewhere in there, I must have asked him why something as strange and silly as Cats was so important to him, but I don’t remember the answer.
And what to do with this unanswerable question. He’s been dead two years. There must be an overflowing mailbox somewhere filled with questions for the dead. If I believed in hell, I bet it would look something like that.
How insane to think I’ve been writing this site for so long. Here’s the entry where I mention the Kool-Aid with no sugar. The Clint bit’s about halfway down. Feel free to laugh at my 18-year-old self because: yikes. There was also an entry about the 4th of July night, but I can’t find it.
Chris takes forever. This is his thing, really. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich takes ten minutes and maybe twenty if he’s feeling extra exact. The peanut butter must be spread equally from crust-line to crust-line and the jelly must cover the same circumference as the peanut butter. An equal amount of jelly and peanut butter needs to be in every single bite for the sandwich to be worth the digestion.
But if it’s not perfect, it’s no big thing; it’s not an obsessive trait, but just a desire to be good and thorough and neat and of course, he’s constantly teased. We – his friends, his family – give him shit as he puts on a jacket, buttoning each button with a steady precision. As he washes a fork, squinting at each tine. As he measures the cat’s food, making sure the kibble is exactly level and smoothed out at the top of the cup. We’re standing by the car while he’s still in the apartment, switching off lights, locking doors, double-checking for wallets and cellphones.
And don’t get me started on his shoes. This is how I approach shoes: if they require laces, they have to be on my feet within two seconds or not at all. But Chris takes his sneakers and sits on the couch, loosening the laces and then tying them slowly and firmly into complicated Boy Scout knots. The shoes are what gets everyone – we’re in coats, door open and there’s Chris at the top of the stairs, calmly lacing his right shoe. Then, deep into the future, the left.
Sometimes I rush him because I’m so extremely opposite that if I learned how to tie my shoes, the knowledge’s been forgotten. I fly out the door without my wallet, laces trailing, a granola bar I found at the bottom of my purse half in my mouth. My coat has an inkstain on the pocket. My hair has not been brushed in years. I’m usually yelling, come on, COME ON by the time I reach the front door and in severe impatience, I’ll call him from my cellphone. I’ve never made a sandwich that wasn’t destroyed somehow before I even started eating it. Many of the dishes I wash end up breaking or cracking or getting lost under the couch or worn as a hat and then forgotten about. I flap around aimlessly like a muppet bird, breaking limbs, smashing lamps, losing everything I own in bizarre places.
And we fight, though we’re better than we used to be. I want to tear through the universe without anyone questioning what I’m doing; he wants to grab my elbow and talk about it. He wants to sleep it off and I want to punch it out and these fights can be enormous, bigger than we mean them to be and sometimes they end with me questioning what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. How many times have I paced the apartment, tracking firey holes in the wood with my anger and told him we’re too different, who are we kidding with this marriage. But he clears my path of destruction and -
What am I trying to say. The shoes, really. Again with the shoes. When I stand in my coat, holding my keys, watching him stretch the laces and dive into yet another long, shoe-tying journey, there is something in me that sees the old man he’ll be and loves him with a grace and an infinity that I can’t understand yet. There are times now when my brain blows a fuse and I’m down for a week, believing that this is it, the big one, goodbye sanity! and he brings me to life with an assured, silent magic.
I wait by the car and look up into our apartment, watching each light flicker out. I know he’s checking his pockets and then searching the dresser for my wallet which I’ve inevitably left behind. He’s checking to make sure the cat has been fed and the doors are locked and that everything will be neat and safe and warm when we return. And I see into the future, the slow, straight gait of a man who makes unbelievable sandwiches and loves me and this world in a way I will never match or comprehend.
Happy fifth anniversary to you, .c. May you never hurry up.
Technically, our anniversary was last month. But still!
Man, we need to move. We really, really do. Our area’s way too noisy – and JANGLY noise, with the police station across the street and the constant traffic – and our living space is too small. We need to be in a place where we can be loud and over the top because while in public we’re mostly subdued, at home we tend to have a lot of dramatic emotions that involve singing or talking or dancing or running or crying etc etc etc. But where to go?
We’re not city people, but we don’t want to be cut off. We want a house, but can’t afford to buy one. (Well, we almost can. But it would be a stretch.) We just need a year to rent somewhere, gather the funds, get our sanity back and then decide where to go from there. But where? Chris works in Excelsior; I’m not tied down anywhere except to a reliable bus line.
Anyone know of any not-expensive houses to rent in safe neighborhoods? Or any great houses to buy? I want a place to plant vegetables and a neighborhood in which to walk my future dog. I want to feel like I’m home, something I’ve never really felt in Minnesota, though there was brief settling of heart in Duluth. (But we can’t go back to Duluth. Not yet.) What do you think? Suggestions? We’re going bonkers in this bell jar.
It’s not cool, but I like the suburbs. The close suburbs. I don’t want to live in Minneapolis, but I’d consider a cute little neighborhoods in St. Paul, thought that puts Chris a considerable distance from his job. I like Excelsior, but there aren’t reliable buses there. Where, where, where. Out-of-state is the goal, eventually, but not yet for that, either.
What kind of change to make and where to make it, is the question.
There must have been a part of me that believed I could eventually go back, literally and genuinely and actually leave today – blast off, astral projection, reenactment – and settle in any moment I chose. That each year since I left was an interlude – a long, boring break between time travel. Is this schizophrenia? It took me years to realize that the nostalgia I feel isn’t normal; people have their memories, and then I have my memories, and I thought I could go back. How strange. The first grown-up thought, years after legal age: just because you want something, doesn’t mean you get it. And I wanted and want and needed and need to be back in the Duluth of my mind; somehow that’s become the medication. Writing about it hasn’t worked. Dreaming about it constantly has only given me a mental illness in which I experience all moments at once, an amnesia where I regard each new thought and technology and object as foreign and easily dismissed. Wouldn’t it be interesting to discover that the therapists and the doctors and the pills and the books and the herbs missed the source: I once loved a lake, and it loved me. But I left, then it left and you can never go back home. Transmission, I repeat: you can never go back home.