Wide Eyed (5 page)

The point is: squirrels are doing everything in their power to make decent homes for themselves, and since their world is so screwy, this reminds me of how hard it is to exist.
Is it really worth it?
I wonder. But the squirrels inspire me. They don’t sit around trying to decide if life’s worth it. For them, nothing beats eating acorns in a warm, dry bed.

“I really want to get a comfortable bed,” I say. “Squirrels have comfortable beds.”

“Then why shouldn’t we?” Matt asks.

III. Delectable Food

On special occasions, we drink flutes of champagne and Matt fixes roast pork. He slathers the flesh with mint and garlic, and ties string around it to make it juicier. We associate pork with luxury because it makes the house smell rich. The dog perks up at the chance that this may be the day he scores big time. Pork makes me feel like I’m living large.

We’re celebrating the success of Matt’s newest painting. It’s as long as a Honda, and as tall as our ceiling. Red-barked trees, squirrels, and naked women cover the canvas.

We discuss how great the painting is while chewing meat.

“I love these crusty bits,” I say.

“I saved them for you.”

He’s a master chef. I’d be bony if he didn’t feed me so well. Before I met Matt, I survived on lima beans, fruit leathers, and cream of wheat.

I tell him about the time my brother and I tried to scrape together a couple of bucks to buy ice cream. It was like the Great Depression.

“Those days are over,” Matt says. I look down at my plate of pork accompanied by mustard greens, saffron-and-turmeric rice, and tomato salad. There will be tons of leftovers. Tomorrow it’ll be easy for me to make myself lunch.

The next day I come home from work and find Matt doubled over on the couch (again as if he’s been punched). He blames it on the pork, but I feel fine. I run out to get him ginger ale and saltines. When I get back he confesses that after I’d gone to work, he’d eaten pork for breakfast.

“There’s nothing wrong with pork for breakfast,” I say. “People eat bacon.”

“But I finished the whole thing,” he says. “I ate it straight out of the baking dish. It was like ten servings.”

“I know,” I say. “It tasted so good.”

“I barfed hard,” he says.

I had assumed as much.

“Pork fat chunks were floating in the toilet,” he says. “It looked like boba.”

Boba are translucent tapioca balls that come in Vietnamese drinks.

“Shut
up
,” I say.

“I just ate a huge pile of lard, basically.”

He’s like decadent old King Louis,
I think
, cooking up his maid’s canary and making her watch him eat it.
I love feeling like the maid.

IV. Equal Union

I’ve been reading passages from the
Kama Sutra
before bed every night so I can mentally prepare myself for stress the next day. (I’ll admit I read it for sexual advice too.) The section called
Ratavasthapana Prakarana
applies not only to the male/female union but also to unions of all sorts, both human and animal. Its animalistic mix-and-match metaphors apply to sex as well as attitude adjustment for dealing with weirdos. Sometimes as I’m waiting in line or sitting in traffic I see a guy bossing his girlfriend around and think,
Horse and deer, not the best.

When I first read it, I used to dream about jungle orgies: lions humping wildebeests and boa constrictors riding panthers.

“Man is divided into three classes—
shaksa,
the hare;
vrisha,
the bull; and
ashwa,
the horse—according to the size of his
lingam,
or phallus. A woman too, according to the depth of her
yoni,
vagina, is either a
mrigi,
female deer;
vadava,
a mare; or a
hastini,
female elephant.

“There are three equal unions between persons of corresponding dimensions and six unequal unions when the dimensions do not correspond, or nine kinds of union in all. In unequal unions, when the male exceeds the female in point of size, his union with a woman immediately next to him in size is called a high union and it is of two kinds, while his union with a woman most remote from his size is called the higher union and is of one kind only. When the female exceeds the male in point of size, her union with a man immediately next to her in size is called low union and is of two kinds, while her union with a man farthest from her in size is called the lower union and is of one kind only.

“In other words, the horse and the mare, and the bull and the deer, form the high union; while the horse and the deer form the highest union. On the female side, the elephant and the bull, and the mare and the hare, form low unions; while the elephant and the hare form the lowest unions.

“There are then nine kinds of unions according to dimensions. Equal unions are the best; the highest and the lowest are the worst. The rest are middling, and among them high unions are considered better than low, for in a high union, the male can satisfy his own passion without hurting the female; in a low union, it is difficult for a female to be satisfied in any manner.”

V. Favorite Song

If we can’t sleep, Matt puts on music. I like how he takes charge of the situation instead of lying there brooding all night like I do. The desire to hear music may or may not be as primal a need as food, sleep, or sex, but listening to music is necessary.

The days of wine and roses

Are distant days to me

That’s Donovan singing my favorite song of his, “Writer in the Sun,” which he composed in 1966 during a trip to Greece. Even though the words are sad, the melody is relaxing and it has this timeless quality—it makes you feel that any situation is endurable because it’s fleeting. I play the song in my head at work when I feel like quitting. Donovan strums the guitar steadily as if he’s marching in a funeral procession.

The magazine girl poses
On my glossy paper aeroplane
Too many years I spent in the city
Playing with Mr. Loss and Gain

He reminds me to spend time outdoors contemplating what irritates me so that I can let it go. Last night I was out for drinks with some girlfriends talking about how people are always trying to beat each other out for Creative Person Of The Century. But then I can’t just bail for paradise like my friend who swims with dolphins. I envy people who can enjoy themselves.

I bathe in the sun of the morning
Lemon circles swim in the tea
Fishing for time with a wishing line
And throwing it back in the sea

Donovan saw time changing and turning back in on itself. The belief that things happen for a reason is implied in his sound. It’s a calming idea, one that I like to think is true. But why has it taken me so long to get comfortable?

SINNERS

Two Band-Aids, crisscrossed like a beige plus sign, block the peephole on my grandma’s front door. To the right, a bronze crucifix doubly protects her from the dangers outside. She recently told me a cougar was stalking her from the roof. When someone knocks she warns me that it might be the neighbor who steals her trash.

“Who cares if someone steals your trash?” I ask. I turn the doorknob.

“It’s my trash, I don’t want anyone looking at it,” she whispers.

Cruise brochures and health insurance papers describe the Twilight Years—the phase when you’re too old to work but too young to drop dead—as potentially the best years of your life. Old people can finally reap the benefits of what they’ve sown—children, retirement pensions, social security, friendships— unless they’re like my grandma, a friendless money squanderer whose children can’t stand her. She used to be tactful and friendly, but that façade wore away years ago, morphing into paranoia mixed with suicidal comments.

“I’m so tired of living,” she sighs over the phone.

“Come on, it’s not that bad. You have like twenty years left. Why don’t you go to church, or volunteer somewhere?”

“I’m too old to go to church,” she complains.

My grandma’s an Evangelist who watches ladies with pancake makeup and blue hair preach about Jesus. She donates to TBN, so sales representatives fill her answering machine with messages. I guess she likes the social interaction. When someone faints on stage during Sunday worship, claiming to be cured, she’s really touched. Her version of Faith is an understanding that as long as she only goes outside to check the mailbox, God will continue to deliver Social Security checks.

My mom and I are packing up Grandma’s belongings because she’s moving into a nursing home. Mom says she’s not officially senile, but she can’t live alone anymore. The apartment smells fishy. The old blue carpet is crunchy with dried crumbs of canned cat food. Years of grease are smeared on the stovetop. The oven is a closet full of pots and pans she couldn’t wash. I clear out the kitchen cabinets, filling trash bags with Tupperware and old plastic forks and spoons. There are about 400 ketchup packets in the drawer by the sink.

Grandma’s in the bedroom instructing my mom what to pack or throw away. Every few minutes she calls to me, “You haven’t thrown anything away, have you?”

“I’m just boxing stuff,” I yell back as I tie up two more trash bags. I put a few things in open boxes to prove I didn’t chuck everything.

Back in the bedroom, there’s a pile of old bras that Mom wants to toss out. Grandma’s so mad she’s crying.

“These are my things, why are you telling me what to do with them?”

“These bras are from the ’60s. I’ll get you new ones,” Mom says.

The only way to get packed is to put her in another room. I bring her out to her beloved armchair.

“Stay out of this,” she tells me.

Mom and I unclog a closet while Grandma sorts magazines in the living room. I find a jewelry box. It’s full of rhinestone brooches, gold-plated clip-on earrings, with some fine things mixed in—a strand of pearls, lapis lazuli bracelet, small diamond pendant, and two tarnished rings.

“That’s my great-grandfather’s old ring,” my mom says. “I always wanted it.”

“What’s this one?” I ask, attracted to the ruby.

“That was your great-grandmother’s,” Mom says.

“You should have it,” she adds, under her breath as if it’s an illegal thought.

“You take that one,” I say. We’re excited to have real family heirlooms. They’re rare in our family. We slide the rings into our purses.

“What are you two doing in there?” Grandma calls, and I take the jewelry box out to show her.

“Here’s your jewelry. I’m putting it in your carry-on.”

“You should never have touched that! It’s none of your business.” She grabs the box and rummages through to see what’s missing.

“We’re here to help, and you accuse us of thievery. That’s it!” I yell, heading outside to smoke a cigarette. But first I pull the ring out of my purse and put it on so she can see. She’s too busy looking into the box to notice.

“Just get out,” she calls after me. “I’m sorry you have such a bitch for a mother.”

I have absolutely no faith that some god will redeem my grandma for her ill manners, but at the same time, I don’t think she’ll burn in hell. I do believe I have a right to inherit some piece of history, some birthright. When you’re born, you grow up having faith in the people who raise you, even if they’re crabby and psycho. I figure you should get some proof you belong to them, like a ring, or a few photos. It’s strange how confessional and indignant one can become while gazing into a gemstone’s facets.

A few weeks after my grandma moves away, I eat Chinese food at a Szechwan restaurant in Chinatown and get a fortune cookie:
Faith is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
I think about twilight while I crunch on a chewy mushroom called Cloud-Ears. Out the window, streetlights become more and more glowey and reflective, and cars begin to flip on their headlights.

The Peking ducks hanging in a window across the street grow fiery and luminescent as the heat lamps behind them become orange spotlights in the darkness. Ordering my next drink, I think of all the drinks mixed to look like twilight: Tequila Sunrise, Singapore Sling, Blue Dragon (which uses blue curaçao as its bottom layer), Cape Cod, Long Island Iced Tea. Sunset drinks mimic their environment, which is profound considering they’re only beverages.