Drunken Slugfest

 

Marilyn Horan

Drunken Slugfest

            I spent a lot of money on beer last summer.  At first I started with higher end Sam Adams, but because of the growing expense of my habit, I wound up buying no-name suds in Rite Aid or 40 ounce bottles at the local bodegas.  It got so addictive that I sometimes went for beer runs twice in one day, and even at night when the only places open were 24 hour stores.  My husband Frank was disgusted by my obsession, telling me that our Brooklyn back yard smelled like a brewery. He would see me with a bottle in my hand and shake his head, asking, “You’re not at it again, are you?”  I would not, could not, stop.  Sometimes I’d sneak out around midnight, thinking Frank was asleep, but he always knew where I had been and what I had been doing by the smell of alcohol on me.  Sure I was hurt when he turned his back on me in bed, but as any junkie knows, the monkey on your back often sleeps between you and your loved one. Had my addiction been to drinking alcohol I might have understood, but to catching and killing slugs and snails?

            It began in late May when I put my six spathiphyllum plants, also called peace lilies, in a shady part of the backyard for their annual summer vacation.  About a month later, I noticed that these plants were being ravaged by some voracious critter.  A little research in a couple of garden books revealed that the culprits were, in fact, the slugs and snails that slithered around on my brick and wooden surfaces.  They flourished last year because of the excessive spring and summer rain.  The gardener’s guides mentioned that they also ate basil and hostas, and sure enough, my basil was being decimated and my hostas were holey.  My nature-loving attitude took exception when it came to these gastropods—literally stomachs with feet--and so began my four-month murderous rampage against my plant destroyers.  This new bloodthirsty goal made my heart race, sprang me up from bed each morning, and kept me prowling my front and back yards late at night. A neighbor of mine had her entire garden destroyed by slugs (Limax maximus) and snails (Helix aspersa), and I was determined that it wouldn’t happen to mine.

            Some people suggested pouring salt on the slugs. I thought that cruel.  Watching ugly snake-like animals writhe in pain was not a thrill for me.  I may be a murderer, but I’m not a sadist, and so I followed the most recommended and successful method—sinking plant saucers about 12 inches in diameter and 2 inches deep into the soil and then filling them with beer, the gastropods’ favorite beverage. The first morning I went to check my traps and was delighted in a perverse way when I saw the saucers crowded with huge dead slugs.  They were stuffed in like sardines and were about the size of those fish, if not bigger.  In fact, the traps looked like koi ponds at feeding time.

            I began with three saucers of brewski, but soon increased the traps to about 20, thus the purchases of cases and cases of beer.  I started using pieces from our dinnerware set as snares, to which my husband reacted:  “I hope you don’t think we’re going to be eating out of those again.”  I reminded him that he ate escargot, and pointed out a fine, fat specimen in a saucer.  No response.

            Thanks to the Internet and my gardening books, there is little I now don’t know

 about slugs and snails. Their stomachs release slime so that they can slide toward food, protection, and one another. Watching mollusk mating is like viewing porno, due to the prolonged writhing, the ectoplasm secreted, and the enormous phalluses, sometimes six times the length of the slugs themselves. They are also hermaphroditic and exchange sperm through their male organs. Sometimes during mating, the penises that originate on the sides of their heads right behind a nose-like hole, get too entwined and must be chewed off in a process called apophallation.  This leaves the gastropods only female, reproductively speaking.  In the absence of a mate, a slug can impregnate itself and produce offspring, with, of course, the exception of those who have undergone the apophallation. They will also eat the corpses of their own kind. They can stretch their bodies up to twenty times their length to squeeze through a tiny hole to get to food.  A factoid on a Snapple cap revealed that they also have teeth.

            As with any addiction, I got more involved, and the beer traps were no longer exciting enough.  I needed more. The horticultural books revealed that slugs like to feed at night and one can easily, with the help of a flashlight, pick them off and kill them--mano a mano.  So my habit became nocturnal and personal.  Sometimes I’d even get out of bed in the middle of the night to check my traps and shine a light on my hostas hoping for just one more hit, just one more big, juicy one before I could sleep.

             I perfected the tools needed for this search and destroy mission and experienced stirrings of primitive savagery every time I grasped a munching slug and killed it.

                                                                                                               

Long rubber gloves insured that I wouldn’t be in contact with any of the slug-goo. A good flashlight was necessary to spot the dastards eating a hosta, or sliming its way to a trap. A set of tongs provided distance, and the electric thrill I felt while holding a trembling bugger by these steel pincers is the closest I’ll ever come to blood lust. I also needed a plastic pail filled with hot water and ingredients guaranteed to kill: liquid soap or bleach, or both. One time I made the mistake of skimping on the soap, considering all the money I spent on beer, and, as I was harvesting my ensnared slimers, one climbed out of the bucket and was slipping across the handle, just as I was about to grab it and move it to another trap. I screamed so loud that Frank stuck his head out the upstairs window to ask if I was okay.  Finally, I needed a hat so that, heaven forbid, if a slug fell on me, I would not have to tear off my clothes and run shrieking into the shower.           

            Now that I had a bucket of slugs that had met a sudsy chlorinated death or a beery demise, how should I dispose of the bodies?  At first, I would drain the saucer or pail and throw the slugs into the garbage, but that took a stomach far stronger than mine.  The liquid in the bucket became viscous due to the slime released from the buggers after their bingeing on brew, making the entire liquid gelatinous with little white squiggles from those of the dead who had exploded.  So then I flushed them down the bathroom bowl with the unfortunate result that I could no longer use the toilet without images of an escaped slug seeking shelter on or in me.  The final solution was to tote the sloshing bucket down the street, late at night and dump my catch into the sewer.  One time I counted 156 of the beasts as they slid down the grate on the corner of my block, a number

that I will forever remember, like my top bowling score—testament to my perseverance and skill.

            But slugs and snails die out with the cold weather and their eggs hatch the next year.  The huge ones that I caught at the beginning of my quest were rare in late September and I found that, more often than not, the slugs I was capturing were young and small, some even embryonic--but even they liked a yeasty brew. With the advent of fall, other terrors appeared in the yard after dark and sometimes I would just drop everything and run into the house.  Once I saw possums, pink with hairless tails and that kept me indoors a couple of nights. Fall brought eerie winds and a ghostly presence, and the smell of incipient decay made me tense, and sometimes sent me running to the comfort of the sofa and television.  It was time to move my plants and me inside.

            Since my spathiphyllum served as breeding grounds for the slivey toves, I had to remove the plants from their containers, wash all traces of dirt off them, sterilize the pots, and replant with store bought soil.  They are back in my house and have shown their appreciation for my efforts by growing large and green and often sending up white spikes—flags, not of surrender, but of victory. I intend to protect them and all my other garden plants the same way this summer, but with less beer and more economical and ecological methods to stave off slugs: copper bands around the plants to shock the creatures, diatomaceous earth to dry them out, better yard sanitation, a different type of mulch, and earlier intervention.  I’m sure Frank will be happier, so will my garden, and, whether he admits it or not, I believe Frank will never again order escargot.  But if he ever                                                  does, I will shudder, wait until my revulsion has passed, and remind him later that lips that have tasted gastropods will never taste mine.

                       

Enjoy Yourself--It's Later than You Think

 

Marilyn Horan

Enjoy Yourself: It’s Later than You Think

            The dirty white socks strewn on the floor, and the untied sneakers were the first signs that my roommate at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference was a slob. Her running shorts and panties lying, crotch up, greeted me as I entered what were to be our shared lodgings for two weeks, and solidified my impression of her. Huge black flies were zooming around the dorm room, whose wide-open windows emphasized the lack of air conditioning.  Shabby chenille bedspreads covered, but could not camouflage mattresses that sank in the middle and probably stank all over from years, even decades of absorbing human leakage, confirmed my decision to get the hell out of there.  I had not gone away to college, and unless you count my sister and my husband, I had never had to share a room with anyone, and was not about to start to do so at age 42.

            “I’m going home,” I said to my husband who had driven me to Vermont from our house in Brooklyn, to which he would return after getting me settled.

            “Relax,” he responded, understanding after fifteen years of marriage that I did not do relaxing well.  “We’ll find you a hotel or inn,” he added.  So off we went to the housing desk whose manager found me a peaceful and clean room at a small bed and breakfast about a mile away. On the way to my new digs, we rented a used car. I drove that wreck with a suspension that could only have passed inspection accompanied by a bribe, and whose moist insides reeked of booze, mold, and Lysol, back to The Bide-A-Way Inn.  I relished the solitude and cool air of the bedroom, kissed my husband good-bye, and prepared to spend the next two weeks writing, really writing.  As an English teacher, I spent so much time talking about writing and marking essays, but never had time to do any myself.  This was my chance.

            I drove to the Middlebury cafeteria for lunch where I introduced myself to a few people.  One woman about my age, Kiki, said she had seen me at the B&B where she, too, had rented a room.  We spoke for a while before joining our writing groups and agreed to meet at the evening’s meal.  At dinner we enjoyed the company of a fortyish man, Jackson, who hailed from Texas.  Conversation centered on our backgrounds, jobs, home states, and interests in writing.  After eating, we continued our chitchatting, made more fun and interesting by the addition of the wine we drank with abandon at the “barn” a big, informal space with a bar and music.  So this was what I missed by attending a local university—meeting people from all across the country, having semi-intellectual talks lasting into the early morning hours, laughing it up, and, oh yeah, getting drunk. As I got up to leave the glorious new world I had discovered, my inebriation was obvious to me and everyone else sober enough to notice or care. I almost fell the minute I rose from my seat and Jackson said something like, “Whoa, thar, Murrlin.  You caint be drivin’ in yur kindishin.” 

            “Don’t worry, Jackson,” Kiki said.  “I got her. I’ll drive her home to our place.  She can get her car tomorrow.”  With that I was carefully escorted by Kiki and Jackson to the auto, and I was grateful to my new found buddies, one from either end of our great United States—a country that allows a woman in her forties to experience all the joys and of college away from home.  No husband to cook for, no dogs to walk, no papers to grade.  This was about me, me, and more me, and I loved it.

            I went to my room across the hall from Kiki and got settled into my pajamas when I heard a knock on my door.  It was Kiki, also in night clothes. She invited me into her room to have a nightcap and to look at the four hundred-page memoir she had written about growing up in Alaska.  I guess the clean Vermont air blowing in my face on the drive back had invigorated me, so I accepted, enjoying the idea of a mini pajama party cum biography.  Kiki handed me a huge glass of wine and pointed me to the love seat.  Once I was settled, she handed me the tome about her life in the 49^th state during the 50s.  As she did so, a magazine fell out of her Alaskan tale.  She picked it up, laughed and said, “Oops!  Look at this, will ya?”

            It was a sex toy/lotion/outfits catalog.  She sat next to me on the small sofa and murmured that she didn’t know how that got in her book.  She opened the catalog to the pages of dildos and asked me if I had any of them, or any of the vibrators and gadgets that appeared as she slowly turned the pages. Through the thick fog of alcohol and waning literary exhilaration came the realization that I was being set up for seduction.  I froze in my seat, gulped down the wine, and said it was getting late.

            Kiki asked me what I was so nervous about as she began to massage my neck.  I had never been in a sexual situation with a woman before and didn’t know what to do:  flight or flight.  I chose flight, being the easier of the two, and jumped up as if electrified and headed for the door.  She followed me saying, “What’s the matter?  I didn’t mean anything.  What are you so nervous about?  I was just trying to relax you.”

            “No, no.  It’s okay.  I am relaxed,” I said.  “But I am exhausted and must go to bed now.”

            “Here,” she said, “Let me walk you to your room.”

            Kiki crossed the hallway opened my door and told me to just lie down and go to sleep.  Great, I thought, I’ll just pretend to go to bed and she’ll leave. I got under the blankets and the next thing I know she is sitting on my back, massaging under my shoulder blades with her incredibly spindly fingers, gripping me around the waist with her knobby knees.  “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “How do I get rid of this psycho?”  I could buck up like a bronco and fling her bony body across the room.  I could start snoring and maybe she’d disappear.  I could tell her to get the fuck off of me.  Instead, I just began crying, sobbing really.  That seemed to put an end to her ardor.  She dismounted and I began wailing about how I never should have come for this conference, I missed my husband, I was going to leave the next day, I was not cut out for college away from home, I couldn’t write anyway.

            “Calm down,” she said, looking terrified that I was going to have a nervous breakdown.  The fact is, I might have had one had she not said good night and left the room.  The minute she did, I got up from the bed, secured my door with the tiny latch, and shoved the dresser in front of it, reinforced with the coffee table on top and a chair under the doorknob.  In the middle of the night when I needed to use the bathroom, I had to first do lots of furniture moving.  I unplugged a lamp to be used as a blunt instrument should my would be inamorata need to be further discouraged.

            The next morning I called a taxi and left the inn really early, hangover and all, to avoid meeting Kiki.  Once I got to the cafeteria I saw Jackson and told him the whole story.  He laughed and said, “I knew she was going to try to put the move on you.  She was flirting with you the whole of last night.” 

            “What?  Flirting with me?” I asked.

            “You mean to tell me a sophisticated lady like you from New York City can’t spot a woman in comfortable shoes?”  That description was Jackson’s way of saying lesbian, and he used it often during the rest of the week.

            I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have stayed with my original roommate, the slob.  That situation might not have been so physically comfortable, but at least I wouldn’t have to barricade  myself in my room at night, nor tiptoe through the inn with a weapon always at the ready.

            At the end of this journey into summer institutes I learned two important things:  1.  people go on these conferences not to improve their writing, but to get laid, especially by one of the visiting faculty and  2.  I am glad that I never went away to college

I Remember

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Marilyn Horan

                                                            I Remember

I remember the wonderful smell of tar from the docks and boats that we sailed on during family boat rides leaving from Red Hook.

I remember watching my mother put on her bright red lipstick in the mirror over the sofa and looking like the most beautiful movie star.

I remember asking my mother and father to please bring me home a little brother or sister when they went out on dates to the movies or parties.

I remember the sharp sweet taste of Indian apples, pomegranates, that my mother bought me once a year at the fruit market as a special present for just me.

I remember seeing my brother Bob standing head and shoulders above his classmates at Mass and thinking I had, by far, the handsomest brother in the world.

I remember the smell of my father’s dresser drawer--a combination of cigarettes, cedar, and sweat.

I remember my father buying me rice pudding at the Purity diner after our Sunday visits to the Brooklyn Public library, a treat that would have been considered out of the question by my penny-pinching mother.

I remember the musty smell and excitement of a box of children’s books being given away by a neighbor.  It was a new smell and still a beloved one.

I remember my dog Rinny swinging our cat Tippy around, the cat’s head in the dog’s mouth.

I remember that our back yard seemed like a giant wonderland, each square foot and tree and plant a joyous discovery.

I remember planting carrots and carnations in our backyard with my father, who first got rid of pebbles in the soil by shaking the dirt through a home made screen box.

I remember my mother always browning the tomato paste in the pot before adding the canned tomatoes when making spaghetti sauce.

I remember the comforting sound of buses rumbling by our house on their way to the bus station two blocks away.

I remember painting the staircase every year in preparation for Christmas.

I remember the smell of my Shirley Temple doll and the perfection of her face.

I remember wanting but never getting a Betty Crocker kitchen for little girls.  It could actually bake a tiny cake using a light bulb.

I remember running through fields in Rhode Island between the houses of Cousin Florence and her daughter Flossie.

I remember clam cakes made by my Rhode Island Aunt Mary and eating everything but the clams.

I remember picking blueberries in Rhode Island and the joy of eating them right off the bush.

I remember trying to shave using my father’s razor at age 5 and my mother telling me that that was the most dangerous thing I could do.  Even worse than sharks? I asked.

I remember my bachelor Uncle Alfie coming to our house on either a Monday or Tuesday, parking his big rig outside, watching television with us, protesting that he didn’t want to eat dinner, but always joining us.

I remember sitting in Uncle Alfie’s car and pushing buttons and turning the steering wheel and feeling rich to be in a car.

I remember the acrid taste and sandy consistency of the peanut butter on the brown bread used to make PB&J sandwiches on the Hospital Boat on which we used to take trips.

I remember the huge vats of rainbow colored liquid candy later to be turned into lollipops at the Brach’s manufacturing company.

I remember seeing the process of making Taystee Bread in the factory and receiving a miniature loaf to take home.

I remember singing the girl scout song and feeling like an important part of a larger and caring community.

I remember pulling the flower buds off the Rose of Sharon bush in our backyard.

I remember sun flashing off of cars in the afternoon at the Brooklyn Zoo and thinking that Sunday was named so because the sun always shone on that day.

I remember eating fried squash sandwiches in the house of a new friend in Rhode Island and asking my mother if she would make them.  She became insulted, considering such food beneath us.

I remember taking a small ceramic squirrel to school with me so I could take care of him the whole day.

Blackned

 

                                                          Marilyn Horan

                                                    Blackened

During my thirteen years in Catholic schools I heard nothing about avoiding patent leather shoes or sprinkling baby powder in the bath water to obscure our own bodies as a way to avoid the impure thoughts that our nakedness might engender. The Sisters of Saint Joseph never claimed that the Blessed Virgin cries when a girl whistles or that tweezing eyebrows and shaving legs were signals to boys that you wanted sex. Had the good sisters said such things I could have regarded them as silly and naïve when, in fact, they were cruel taking every opportunity to demean and humiliate through public castigation followed by demerits and detention for any of many violations of petty rules, usually concerning dress code.  Not only fear that shot through me with every encounter with a sister; it was fury as well.  Who were these unfeeling harridans and crones to speak to me like that? Their regimentation and scrutiny made me feel like an incarcerated innocent or marine in bootcamp. Sister Gerard Piccata, in a wilder than usual rage, ripped earrings from a girl’s lobes so that blood ran down both sides of  her neck. One hundred and forty girls arrived at school ten minutes late because of subway delays during a blizzard and we all had got the usual detention, demerit, and dressing-down.  When graffiti, written in blue crayon eye shadow, was found on a bathroom door, the principal, Sister Leticia, screamed over the public address that all activities desist, every girl must empty her purse, schoolbag, and waistcoat pockets, and anyone having a blue crayon was to be sent to her office immediately.  No activity was to resume until the culprit was identified, even if the FBI had to be called in to do handwriting analysis. At the mention of a cherry pie during an assembly honoring George Washington, Sister Leticia barreled down the middle aisle of the auditorium, arms flailing, swishing as only a nun swathed in yards of pleated and starched black fabric could, her huge brown wooden rosary beads clacking furiously.  She shrieked repeatedly, “I will not have our national heroes debunked.”  Of course, these incidents became prime fodder for hooting derision at reunions, but we could only laugh at them from the distance of years.  Privacy, creativity, individualism, humor, and basic civil rights were denied us Bishop Kearney High School girls.

I hated these repressed women of God, these brides of Jesus, or of Frankenstein I said often. I thought myself superior to them.  They were crosses to be borne until I graduated, and developing a good defense by becoming offensive, I passed around satiric poems and caricatures of them to the class.  I learned each nun’s idiosyncrasies and imitated them to my classmates’ screaming laughter.  When we girls were being prodded up or down the stairs to or from lunch, I mooed cow-like keeping my lips sealed and my identity a secret.  My lunch mates picked up on it so that we mooed in unison and sounded like what we were treated as—a herd of cattle, prodded en masse to feed at the trough.  I rolled my eyes, sucked my teeth at the nuns, and make remarks sotto voce that cracked up the rest of the class.  The older I got the more I countered everything the sisters said.  I became contentious and supercilious, so much so, that I like to believe the Josephites became a little afraid of me.  My resentment was evident in everything I did or uttered: I spoke disrespectfully, snorted when the teachers said anything I disagreed with, and shot baleful looks at any of them who dared make extended eye contact with me.  Besides finding me amusing, my classmates admired my bravado and I achieved something of an outlaw status.

            But pride is the mother of humiliation, or at least its aunt,  and the greater the pride the deeper the potential for humiliation.  For all my swagger and seeming impenetrable haughtiness, I was humiliated one day.  A surprise chemistry quiz caught me so unprepared and panicked, that I hugged my stomach, grimaced with phantom pain, and asked if I could go to the nurse’s office.  Surprisingly, Sister Emiliana let me leave.  Once I was in the infirmary, Sister Hyacinth the nurse, barked, “What’s wrong with you, young lady?”  I told her I had horrible cramps.  She ordered me to lie down on the medical table and told me to take off my shoes.  I resisted; she insisted.  When I removed my shoes I lost my pride and dignity and reaped a ton of shame that causes me to cringe still:  the bottoms of my feet were black with dirt I had accumulated while walking barefoot around my house the previous afternoon and night.  My feet were not just a little dirty, they were shiny black with ingrained dirt—dirt that said not only was I a slovenly girl, but that I came from a shabby home and had negligent parents as well.  I lay on the table, paralyzed with meekness and misery, aware that from that moment on, all the despised nuns, who I imagined gossiped about us students, had it over me. Even as I was being carried around the gym on the shoulders of my classmates after my victory in a basketball game, even when I was publicly awarded a New York State Regents Scholarship, even during graduation when the new principal commended me for being both an athlete and a scholar in front of the whole audience of my peers and their parents and guests, I knew in my heart that all the other nuns looking on would only sniff and think to themselves, “That’s the girl with the filthy feet.”

Going Home

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Marilyn Horan

                                                                     Going Home

                        My father’s illness came on suddenly at age 59.  Not one to visit doctors, Dad’s symptoms could have been evident for months, but he did not reveal them until they were hard to ignore:  swollen glands, lumps under his arms, bloated ankles that made it difficult for him to put his shoes on.  He had been admitted to the Brooklyn Veteran’s hospital and I thought he would be out as soon as some tests were completed. I went to see him on each of the first two nights after my part time job at the Dime Savings Bank was over. On his third night there I visited him as usual and I sat in the visitor’s lounge practicing my sales pitch for Avon cosmetics, using my father as the customer prototype.

                         I had him choose a lipstick shade from the color chart holding it up to his pale skin to see if it was flattering to his complexion.  Next, he picked a nail polish to match.  Finally, I went on to describe perfumes he might like, having him sniff the three samples I had in my demo box.  He played my straight man, and I giggled at the mock seriousness that included his nodding his head, saying, “Hmmm…” as though weighing his choices and taking my expert advice to heart. 

                        The silliness of it was heightened by the contrast to the depressing atmosphere of the hospital, and deepened by the underlying fear that my father, who had never missed a day of work in his life, was ill enough to be kept in a hospital.  Just that afternoon, our long-time neighbor Elena took me aside and said, “Marilyn your father is sick.  I mean very sick.”  Ice shot through my veins.  That was not something my mother had told me, and I was denying that Elena knew anything, despite that her sister was a nurse’s aide at the V.A. and knew what was happening.

                        In the lounge that third night my father’s voice was a little hoarse, but otherwise he seemed normal, and was convinced that he would be home soon.  My mother sat with us, preoccupied and worried.  When visiting hours were over, Dad kissed Mom and me as he waited for the elevator doors to open and I promised to see him the next day after my classes at Brooklyn College were finished. 

                        When I got to the hospital the next evening, I was told that my father was very ill, and that he could not have any visitors.  The duty nurse was not available.  Shaken and

            terrified, I went to sit in the visitors’ lounge where I encountered a man wearing rumpled brown and tan striped pajamas and a pale blue bathrobe.  He was agitated and wet with sweat.  His week-old beard and his colorless, sparse hair stood up straight in patches and contributed to his wild look.  He saw me and came over.  His eyes, their whites yellowed, blinked and twitched in his red face as he told me how years ago he had fallen onto a hot radiator and got wedged and could not get off.  He described the smell of his own flesh burning and the unforgettable pain and torment of lying powerless on that radiator.   At 21, I was sympathetic and respectful to the level that I felt unable to leave the lounge,  that listening to this man’s story was a necessary kindness.  He was suffering and I pitied him.

                        After listening to his litany of repeated phrases of torture and pain, I excused myself and asked at the nurses’ station if there was any news about my father.  The head nurse was finally there and responded to my query.

                        “Your father has a temperature of 105 degrees,” she said, avoiding my eyes.

                        “But how could that be?  I was just here with him last night and he was fine,” I said.

                        “You’ll have to talk to the doctor.  I don’t know what happened.  All I can tell you is that he has taken a turn for the worse.  The doctor is with him now and your father is being put on an ice mattress to help bring down his fever,” she said.  “The leukemia has weakened his immune system and he has a serious infection.  Why don’t you go home?”

                        Go home? I felt cold, filled with panic and dread.  In the back of my mind I thought that maybe my father had been used for some medical experiment, or had been mistreated and the hospital was trying to cover something up.  Powerless, so I went to sit again in the smoking lounge.  I noticed with relief that the man in pajamas had left. 

                        After a half hour I sneaked down the hall and looked into my father’s room.  Through the door’s small rectangle of glass I saw him, nude and stretched out on his bed, his arms and legs straining against the grips each of the nurses, orderlies, and a couple of doctors had on him.  He was banging his head into the mattress in a frenzy. I could only see his mouth open but couldn’t hear his screams.  He was bucking up from the mattress, his muscles and tendons strained and taut, white and vulnerable,  I didn’t know if he was having a seizure or if he was consciously fighting off these people who were subduing him.  I didn’t want them to hurt my father, and would have burst into the room to save him if I thought for a minute that I could, but I wasn’t able to stand there for one more second witnessing my father’s desperate battle.

            My dad had a sad, fatherless, poor life.  His mother, an immigrant from Ireland was stranded in New York City in 1921 with four little boys, my father, Charlie, the oldest, Donald, Johnny, and Francis. Grandma was desperate.  Her 31-year-old husband had fallen from a ship while working in New York harbor and drowned, leaving her and her children little hope—no money, no support, no relatives.  She resorted to cleaning houses and offices—a job she continued into her 80’s. Grandma took my father, eight years old, to an orphanage for placement since he was the oldest and least in need of a mother’s care.  Standing at the director’s desk at the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, and ready to sign him over, Grandma noticed his hands shaking badly.  She changed her mind on the spot.  “I’m sorry.  I can’t,” she said and walked out holding my father’s hand.

                        Daddy and Donald went to school and a Mrs. Mundy cared for the younger children while their mother went to work as a washerwoman.  At the age of three, Francis, the youngest died.  After sixth grade, my father dropped out of school and started getting jobs where he could in the midst of the Great Depression. The story of my father’s almost being put in an orphanage haunted me, and no matter his faults or weaknesses, despite his frequent distance and silence, I could always recall that image of his shaking hands, and I could pity and love him.

                        Despite his knocks in life Daddy had a good sense of humor, much of it self-deprecating.  He loved puns and riddles.  He liked to repeat stories such as the one in which a dog urinated on his leg as he waited outside of church, “Minding my own business,” he said, as though if he weren’t minding his own business the dog had a right to pee on him.   He often related the time that his friends’ set him up on a blind date but when he got to the girl’s house, he found her laid out in a coffin.  He was tall and gaunt and at wakes he used to say that he had to stand up and move around or the undertaker would think he was the corpse, escaped from the casket.  All my cousins liked my father because of his amusing,

            easy-going demeanor a direct contrast to their own parents, my mother's people, who spent so much time arguing among themselves that they had little time to entertain us children.

                        In 1969 at 18 I won a local Miss Polonia contest, one I was eligible for since my mother was of Polish origin.  My father, posted a picture of me from The New York Daily News that he glued onto a piece of cardboard with the words:  “Yes, Sir. That’s My Baby” under it.  The men he worked with and for whom he was a maintenance man and a sometimes go-fer, laughed at his posting, refusing to believe the “beauty queen” was his daughter.  He came home with the poster that night and hung it in the furnace room where it remained pinned on the dirty wall.  He also got drunk that night and cried.  We were all so sorry for him, but short of dressing up in my gown, tiara, and sash and going to his job, there was nothing we could do except tell him he worked with a bunch of cruel assholes. 

                        In order to help improve his working situation, I bought him a workbook to prepare him for taking the test for the U.S. Post Office hoping he could change jobs and get one where he made a better salary, and didn’t wear an imaginary “Kick me” sign on his back.  Lest one think that my father was illiterate or uncultured, relatives on both sides of the family often said, “Charlie always had his head buried in a book.”  He loved movies, literature, opera, and even  radio music of 1972, the year that he died, and I can’t hear America’s “A Horse with No Name” or Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” without crying.  He gardened and planted carrots and carnations.  He built me a desk from scrap wood for my portable typewriter that got me through college.  He bought me 45s that I liked.  Because we were so poor, I felt privileged when he brought home Bobby Darin’s “Artificial Flowers” or Patti LaBelle’s “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” When I got to college and had to memorize four major pieces of classical music, Dad went to the library, researched the music, borrowed the records and taped them for me to listen to at my leisure.  We shared coffee and cigarettes in the mornings during the time he had just gotten home from work and before I left for school. 

                        Terrified after the sight of my father’s struggling, I ran down the corridor, back to the lounge, sorry that I had even looked, knowing that I would never be able to erase the vision of my naked, struggling father from my mind. After two hours, I found the courage to go and look again and saw my father sleeping, not knowing for sure,  but suspecting that he had fallen into a coma.  I spent the rest of the night in the grim visitors’ room waiting.

                        At about five in the morning, my brother Bob, then 24, came into the lounge and I filled him in on the details.  He barely said a word, just hunched his shoulders, and dug his hands into his woolen coat.  The man in the brown pajamas and blue robe appeared again.  He was talking out loud to himself and gesticulating.  Bob and I started giggling and that soon turned into convulsive laughter that we could not control so we went out into the corridor to regain our composure.  When we exhausted our laughter and achieved calmness, we resumed our seats.  The burn victim sat across from us. He continued his story of the radiator, repeating many of the same details, not seeming to mind, or notice, that we had left in the middle of his story.  I smiled at him, biting the insides of my cheeks to stem the inevitable snickering.  I tried to look concerned—affected a look of intense interest and sympathy—but it didn’t last long.  As I began to laugh again, I apologized to him saying,

                        “I’m sorry.  We’re really not laughing at you.  I don’t know what’s come over us.  We’ve been up all night drinking coffee and smoking and our father…”

                        “Have you ever smelt human flesh burning?” he said. Can you even imagine what it’s like, how it feels to lay on a radiator for a full half hour with no one around to help you?  To hear you screaming?”

                        “No!” I said.  “No, I’ve never experienced either.”  In an aside to my brother added, “Yet.”  We both laughed, but the old vet in the blue pajamas did not notice.

                        It finally was apparent that this man was stuck in his story and could not get out.  But I was no longer ashamed of my amusement at his expense. I began to resent his trying to pull us into his misery, especially when we had our own looming calamity.

                        I fled to the window.  From where we were on the eleventh floor, I could see the shimmering Narrows, sparkling and beautiful in the early morning light.  The Verrazano Bridge was towering and silver against the clear March sky whose blueness promised warm spring days.  Imagine, I thought, there are people in the cars on that bridge, right now, who are going about Saturday business—shopping, visiting, running errands—as though something terrible was not about to take place.

An Education

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Marilyn Horan

                                                                                   

An Education

            One of my biggest regrets in life was never having never gone away to school.  So in the spring of 1994, I decided to apply to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, thinking it would give me an abbreviated taste of what I had missed by attending Brooklyn College in my home borough.  Lacking confidence as well as the requisite body of work to qualify for admittance, I applied to Middlebury as an auditor.  I could attend workshops and classes, stay in the dormitory, eat in the students’ cafeteria—I just would not have my work discussed and evaluated by fellow students and visiting writers.  It was fine by me.  It would be a short introduction to the work and techniques of others, readings by famous authors such as John Irving, an opportunity to be independent from my husband for a while, and most importantly, to feel what it was like to attend school in another state, to meet with people from all over, to spend 14 days engaged in intellectual discussions and social interactions—all that sorority like, free-wheeling fun I’d missed.  

            My husband, Frank, drove me to the campus and we carried my luggage to my assigned room.  While I never considered myself a clean freak, I did have certain expectations of cleanliness and order beneath which I would not drop. This was the first sign that perhaps, at 42, I was too old for dorm life. The dirty socks strewn on the floor, and the untied sneakers were the first signs that my roommate was a slob. Her running shorts and panties lying, crotch up, greeted me as I entered what were to be our shared lodgings, and solidified my judgment of her. Huge black flies were zooming around the dorm room, whose wide-open windows emphasized the lack of air conditioning.  Shabby chenille bedspreads covered, but could not camouflage mattresses that sank in the middle and probably stank all over from years of absorbing human leakage. I decided to get out of there immediately.  Unless you count my sister and my husband, I had never had to share a room, let alone bathrooms and showers, with anyone and was not about to start at this age. This scene shattered my idealized vision of dorm life.

            “I’m going home with you,” I said clutching my husband’s arm.

            “Relax,” he responded, understanding after fifteen years of marriage that I was sometimes impulsive, and difficult to relax.  “We’ll find you a hotel or inn.”  So off we went to the housing desk whose manager found me a peaceful and clean room at a small bed and breakfast about a mile away. On the way to my new digs, we rented a used car, a wreck, that I drove to the Bide-a-Way Inn with a suspension that could only have passed inspection accompanied by a bribe, and whose moist insides reeked of booze, mold, and floral spray.  I relished the solitude and cool air of the bedroom, kissed my husband good-bye, and prepared to spend the next two weeks writing.  As an English teacher, I spent so much time talking about writing and marking essays, but never had time to do any myself.  This was my time to bloom.

            I drove to the Middlebury cafeteria for lunch where I introduced myself to a few people.  One woman about my age, Kiki from Alaska, said she had seen me at the B&B where she, too, had rented a room.  The best way to describe her was like a mushroom with a long stem.  She was thin and bony with a Beatles’ haircut only much more puffed out.  Her skin was wrinkled like leather that bespoke a life lived outside in nature or inside smoking lots of cigarettes.  The bones of her arms looked like femurs rather that ulnas or fibias—all wide bone and little skin.  Her rough hands were sinewy with knuckles like marbles; hands that had done a lot of hard work. She had a ring full of keys on her jeans and walked like a cowboy.  We talked for a while before joining our writing groups and agreed to meet at the evening’s meal.  At dinner we enjoyed the company of a fortyish man, Jackson, who hailed from Texas.  Conversation centered on our backgrounds, jobs, home states, interests in writing, favorite authors.  After eating, we continued our chitchatting, made more fun and interesting by the addition of the wine we drank with abandon at the “barn,” a big, informal space with a bar and music.  So this was what I missed by attending a local university—meeting people from all across the country, having semi-intellectual talks lasting into the early morning hours, laughing it up, and, oh yeah, getting drunk. As I got up to leave the glorious new world I had discovered, my inebriation was obvious to me and everyone else sober enough to notice or care. I almost fell the minute I rose from my seat and Jackson said something like, “Whoa, thar, Murrlin.  You caint be drivin’ in yur kindishin.” 

            “Don’t worry, Jackson,” Kiki said.  “I got her. I’ll drive her home to our place.  She can get her car tomorrow.”  With that I was carefully escorted by Kiki and Jackson to the auto, and I was grateful to my new found buddies, one from either end of our great United States—a country that allows a woman in her forties to experience all the joys and of college away from home.  No husband to cook for, no dogs to walk, no papers to grade.  This was about me, me, and more me, and I loved it.

            I went to my room across the hall from Kiki and got settled into my pajamas when I heard a knock on my door.  It was Kiki, also in bedclothes. She invited me into her room to have a nightcap and to look at the 400 page memoir she had written about growing up in Alaska. The clean Vermont air blowing in my face on the drive back had invigorated me, so I accepted, enjoying the idea of a mini pajama party.  Kiki handed me a tumbler of wine and pointed me to the love seat.  Once I was settled, she handed me the tome about her life in the 49^th state during the 50s.  As she did so, a magazine fell out of her Alaskan tale.  She picked it up, laughed and said, “Oops!  Look at this, will ya?”

            It was a sex toy/lotion/outfits catalog.  She sat next to me on the small sofa and murmured that she didn’t know how that got in her book.  She opened the catalog to the pages of dildos and asked me if I had any of them, or any of the vibrators and gadgets that appeared as she turned the pages. Through the thick fog of alcohol and waning literary exhilaration came the realization that I was being set up for seduction.  I froze in my seat, gulped down the wine, and said it was getting late.

            Kiki asked me what I was so nervous about as she began to massage my neck.  I had never been in a sexual situation with a woman before and didn’t know what to do:  flight or flight.  I chose flight, and jumped up as if electrified and headed for the door.  She followed me saying, “What’s the matter?  I didn’t mean anything.  What are you so nervous about?  I was just trying to relax you.”  Being insecure I wasn’t sure if she really did just want to give me a massage.  Being polite, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  She was, after all, paying me a compliment in a way, by being either attracted to me or by wanting to take away my stress.

            “No, no.  It’s okay.  I am relaxed,” I said.  “But I am exhausted and must go to bed now.”

            “Here,” she said, “Let me walk you to your room.”

            Kiki crossed the hallway opened my door and told me to just lie down and go to sleep.  Great, I thought, I’ll just pretend to go to bed and she’ll leave. I got under the blankets, lay down on my front, and the next thing I knew she was sitting astride my back, massaging my shoulder blades under my pajama top with her incredibly powerful fingers, gripping me around the waist with her equally powerful knobby knees.  This went beyond a friendly massage.  She had me in a position that more than suggested she was trying to immobilize me.  “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “How do I get rid of this psycho?”  I could buck up like a bronco and fling her sinewy body across the room.  I could start snoring and maybe she’d disappear.  I could tell her to get the fuck off of me.  I started to blame myself for letting it get this far. I should never gone into her room, I should have said the catalog insulted me, I should have told her her behavior was inappropriate, I could have laughed and said thanks but no thanks. Instead, I just began crying, sobbing really.  That seemed to dampen her ardor not a bit. She continued the massage, getting rougher, her voice demanding:   “If you’ll just be quiet and relax, you and I could have some fun.  You never know until you try.”  “Stop!  Stop!” I said.  “I don’t want to do this.”  She dismounted and I began wailing, partly from guilt, partly from rage, and partly because I saw it as the only way out of this situation. I said I never should have come for this conference, I missed my husband, I was going to leave the next day, I was not cut out for college away from home, I couldn’t write anyway.

            “Calm down,” she said, looking annoyed at what she perceived as an overreaction and a complete rejection.  It was incomprehensible to me how a person, practically a stranger, had the nerve to try to seduce me by showing me pictures of dildoes.  It was ridiculous. The minute she left, I got up from the bed, secured my door with the tiny latch, and shoved the dresser in front of it, and wedged a chair under the doorknob.  In the middle of the night when I needed to use the bathroom, I had to first do lots of furniture moving.  I unplugged a lamp to be used as a blunt instrument should my would-be inamorata need to be further discouraged.

            The next morning I called a taxi and left the inn really early, hangover and all, to avoid meeting Kiki.  Once I got to the cafeteria I saw Jackson and told him the whole story.  He laughed and said, “I knew she was going to try to put the move on you.  She was flirting with you the whole of last night.” 

            “What?  Flirting with me?” I asked.

            “You mean to tell me a sophisticated lady like you from New York City can’t spot a woman in comfortable shoes?”  That description was Jackson’s way of saying lesbian, and he used it often during the rest of the week.

            I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have stayed with my original roommate, the messy girl.  That situation might not have been so physically comfortable, but at least I wouldn’t have to barricade myself in my room at night.  The longer I stayed on the campus, the more obvious it became to me that casual sex between the attendees was part of the experience taken for granted.  And the truth is that once Kiki knew that I was not interested in sex with her, we gradually became dinner buddies, although always accompanied by Jackson, who, himself tried his luck with me, but failing that, took on a challenge to change one of the ladies who wear comfortable shoes into a heterosexual.  He swore he was successful

Dinnerexia Nervosa

 

Marilyn Horan                                                 

Dinnerexia Nervosa

            Last Sunday night my husband and I were invited to go to a “Help Us Clean out the Refrigerator” dinner hosted by neighbors who were leaving their Brooklyn home for their winter residence in Florida.  The concept was not the most appetizing idea for a meal and reminded me of the time our next-door neighbors volunteered to give us the contents of their refrigerator that they needed to clean in preparation for the Jewish holidays.  That “present” consisted of plastic bags filled with a variety of vegetables and fruits in all stages of decomposition and decay, papery onion skins attached to the whole mess.  It was obvious they had simply dumped the crisper drawers and left it to us to decide what, if anything, was salvageable.

            This clearing out the icebox party turned out to be much better than I expected. We had butternut squash soup, roast pork, sliced steak, stuffed cabbage, oven-browned sweet and white potatoes.  The defrosted and stale bread was the only disappointment. Dessert consisted of fat-free vanilla pudding topped off with almond ice cream.  The only dissonant notes at the event came from the other women there, one forty-five years old and one in her seventies, anorexics, friends and cohorts in their mutual disease.  As the three men and I ate heartily, both women ate like sparrows.  The only utterances from the younger woman involved food:  “Oh, I can’t possibly eat that much.”  “I’m stuffed already.”  “I have to go to the gym tomorrow and work this off.”  I guess by “this” she meant the one-eighth of a cabbage roll, one inch piece of steak, and a slice of sweet potato.  All the while she was running her hands down her sides of her tight green sweater.  She was the color of and as flat as Gumby. “I’m down to ninety-six pounds,” she said mischievously, looking right at her husband.  The older woman, thin to the point of skeletal and painful to look at, remarked at some point that she had been a Playboy Bunny years ago.  She simply went about preparing the food, a slight almost beatific smile on her face. Bunny ate as little as she could privately, in contrast to Gumby who beamed with delight at the tiny amount of food on her plate. Bunny remarked that she was considering going back to eating meat soon, but would have to start with a little piece of chicken so she wouldn’t choke in disgust.  Bunny’s husband chortled, “That’ll be the day.”

            Gumby’s husband, our much beloved friend, pleaded with his wife to eat a little more.  “Marilyn,” he said addressing me, “don’t you think she should eat more?  Tell her how skinny she looks.” 

            “Gumby,” I replied, “has a mirror and knows what she looks like. Obviously that’s how she wants to look.  “Gumby,” I asked, you weigh 96 pounds now at 5’4”.  How much would you be happy weighing?”  She just put her hands together on her chest and tittered like a child, smiled shyly over at her husband, and said she didn’t know.

            I was not going down that road with Mr. Gumby.  He knew I liked him and always took his side in every one of their marital disagreements:  having children, going back to college, spending money, whose family to spend Christmas with, and so on.  This time I would not bite.  I would not become the object of their arguing, a distraction when her not eating herself to the grave was the real issue.

            “I must tell you, Bunny,” Gumby enthused, “you are my role model.  I mean, you went from being fat, smoking, drinking to losing all that weight, leading a healthy life, teaching yoga.  You really are my heroine.” 

            “Yeah,” I added, “you also stopped sleeping around with any man who asked you.  You’re no longer the neighborhood whore.”  But I pronounced it “who-a” to get more of a laugh, which I did.  I always resort to humor to avoid sticky tar pits.  But really I wanted to laugh at both of them or slap them silly.

            “Please!”  I wanted to scream.  “Are you two completely nuts?  Gumby, Bunny is your role model for what?  Self-hatred?  Suicide?  Sickness?  She and you are so clearly trying to control your aging by controlling your food.  Neither one of you looks pretty, only pathetic, and your self-satisfied smiles, sometimes so knowing and secretive disgust me.”

            What is particularly disappointing is that Bunny is a woman I, too, have long admired.  When I first met her twenty years ago, she was studying for her PhD in psychology and was a drug and alcohol counselor and aspiring psychotherapist.  She had been a nurse in her earlier days and she talked to me about things other than how I looked or where she was teaching yoga, or about the rock-climbing wall she had installed in her house.  She was more outgoing and sociable.  Now she looks likes she is shrinking not only in body, but also in presence.  She seems to be willing her body away as though she could become airy and incorporeal.  She clearly wants to disappear.  “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”  Like Hamlet, I imagine, she wants to effervesce into nothingness.

            So it’s a sad situation for Bunny and her husband, but it seems sadistic for her to have taken Gumby under her fragile and brittle wing to instruct her in the ways of starving to death in a seemingly noble and admirable way.   Yes, they are avoiding middle and old age spread, the spare tires around the waist, the Ethel Merman wings of fat hanging off their upper arms, but they risk osteoporosis, kidney failure, wasting away of muscle, confused thinking, blotchy skin, depression, sensitivity to cold, yellowing skin, and of course, death.