The Cocktail Party

“Look, it tends to be something different with me. I tend to feel the attraction and then put a feeler out there. Like a signal or something, a gesture, like ‘I know that you know that I know kind of thing’; a look, or a shrug of the shoulder. And there’s a way, if you catch my eye, that I can see the twinkle of recognition. That’s the hook. That’s the moment that I know it’s just a matter of time before I reel you in. So I kind of bait these hooks, I catch myself doing it; I just bait the hooks and cast them out and wait. Sometimes it works immediately, and sometimes it can take years. But once that hook is out there, I always get my mark.”

“What’s the challenge?” I said running a ring around the top of my wine glass, my own hook I suppose the ‘soft finger working a circle’ hook. “What’s the challenge if you know it works so well? You come off as a guy that knows it works well, so like while you’re working me, like now, like having this conversation with me, you’re working me now, this is a flirtation, right? So if you know you’re going to get me anyway. Like why all the set up. Why not just ask? ”

He lowers his eye lids, blinks, but does not answer. Not trapped. Not the response of someone cornered. He’s taking his time. He’s working. He’s working me.

“So you’re working me, and in a way it’s working,” of course I can’t stop, I’m on a roll now, “I’m flattered. You’re handsome, there’s been this thing, you’re right about it, that’s been there between us for a while, dormant and then in bloom and then dormant again.” I’m thinking about narcissus now, the flowers, and then the myth and then this man, this impossible man, another impossible man playing with me, knowing that this is going absolutely nowhere.

He sees my eyes flicker or my attention wane or something I can’t exactly figure out but his instincts are sharp and he pounces.

“Like when we argue, over politics, or art – you’re so fucking opinionated for a woman. You’re so ready to fight. It’s so refreshing and frustrating. Yeah so when we’re at it, it’s like we’re fucking don’t you think? A kind of verbal fuck, right there, right in front of everybody, you and me having it out.”

“You’re quite presumptuous.”

“Tell me it’s not true. Tell me the energy isn’t there.”

“That’s not the point!”

“God, then what is the point Stella? You can pretend all you want, but you do it too. We’re the same you and I.”

“Yeah whatever I’m sick of being like you.” And I leave walking off toward a table of hors d’ouvres.

“I saw you taking with Jerry,” this is my husband circumnavigating the room meeting up with me at the shrimp cocktail. “Heated as usual? You guys should get a room.”

“Shut up Harry!” God, men I am so sick of men. I have no idea how I got so fascinated with them to begin with, they are a never ending source of complete frustration and misery. But oh are they cute!

Now I’m in the bathroom, fixing my make-up, not feeling particularly beautiful nor perfect, hating parties, hating myself at parties, wondering what the fuck I am wasting my time for, wondering what I would be doing at home. Maybe sitting with my dog and playing solitaire. I love solitaire. I love how hard it is to pull together a happy family.

I run into Rene’s husband. Joe. He is lurking as only Joe can do. “God, I’m awful at this.” I say to Joe. “I think I am too intense for the cocktail party set, I think I am too intense for everything. I think I am only OK at work where it is OK to be intense. God, give me a conference room and a flip chart and I am an animal, but a glass of chardonnay and a room full of acquaintances and I fall apart.”

“Yeah I was like that too,” says Joe, “until I realized that the best way to endure these things is to not say anything of any great value. Just more or less look interested but don’t volunteer much.”

“But then why come?” I ask in earnest. “Really is it worth the time and the anguish?” I realize now I am breaking his rule regarding intensity and value, but still, he seems like he has a clue.

“Adrienne likes it, she likes coming, she has a good time,” he says.

“Does she really? Or does she just say she does? Does she come home and do the play by play? Does she freak out over what she said to whom and who might not like it? Or does she gossip about what people said, I always worry that people gossip about me later. Or does she worry about drinking too much, has she found a way to pace herself?” clearly the whole intensity thing is lost on me.

“I dunno. Sometimes we talk about it and sometimes we don’t.”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Think about making it trivial,” says helpful Joe, “It really helps.”

Why bother! Is what I’m thinking. Why bother with the hair and the make up and the outfit and the heels, oh god the heels. Why bother with the drinking and the banter. I imagine when we were single it felt a bit like a mating ritual, but now we’re all paired up. So there’s really nothing to be gained.

Jerry again, in front of the cheese plate, “What are you drinking?”

Me, “Chardonnay. I’m trying to pace myself. I’m thinking of switching to something red, slow myself down.”

“Why?”

“Don’t want to get sloppy.”

“I love it when you get sloppy.”

Nice. Worst fear. My sloppiness is obvious.

“Fuck you Jerry.”

“You know I’m your biggest fan.”

“Whatever that means,” I don’t even want to know what that means. Like maybe someone else is not my fan. Like what does biggest mean in this context? Like what am I supposed to do with that.

“What am I supposed to do with that Jerry?”

He shrugs and walks across the room to his wife, cupping her ass as he looks over his shoulder at me. He is playing. Nothing is on the table. It’s his way.

“God that Jerry drives me crazy.” This is Amanda, my best friend. “What a slut. I don’t know how she deals with him.” this from a woman whose husband is a hound himself.

We are all hounds.

One From the Archives 2002

A Tourist in New York
January 2002


I.
Are we different they ask? They are somber. They are quiet. Like a dog, kicked, they cower in a corner of themselves. Eyes watching. Brows twitching. They wait.

The cabs no longer honk their horns. Even now I hear a bird sing. We jumped when a box hit the ground. There is fear. But a new kind.

There is no petty larceny. No pickpockets. No muggings. No sirens. No jackhammers. No wolf-whistles. No whistles at all. Gone are the pulsing cars with blaring bass lines. People are polite. Polite! A construction worker said excuse me as I pushed by his shoulder on the corner of 6th and 19th. Excuse me. I’m sorry. And he moved over to let me pass.

I spent a significant amount of time wondering what was going to happen next.


II.
The prevailing winds send a cloud of ash and dust up the avenue. A gray, acrid haze hangs in the air. Motes of white, like dandelion fluff float and land invading our eyes, our noses, our throats. The wind blows cans and friends into the street. I point my nose high like a dog sniffing the wind for rabbits.

Is it a fire? We need a radio but use the cell to call a friend. What is it? No one knows and we think again of the unseen hole guarded by red ticket holders. We were barred entry and instead looked up at the impossible sky.

The smoke drove the joy from our day. The winds swept us uptown to more mundane dangers. Death by taxi cab. Death in the park. The unbearable burn of the cold.

We bought mugs of orange soup and sat with the dog, dreaming of aliens.

He never wants to go out I thought. That dog never wants to go outside.

III.
Tattered flags are flapping from cars and off poles in my neighborhood. I saw them too in Harlem. On Queens Boulevard. We feel like patriots and hold our breath as the plane bumps and grinds its way back home to the unreasonable beauty of California.

Halfway home my breath comes easier knowing the fuel tanks have lightened their load and we are beyond the danger of being recommissioned as a missile.

I am ready to go home. I miss my children, my husband, my dog, the boredom, the laundry. I miss the tranquility. I close my eyes and anticipate the memory of eerie stillness in the city that I love like a parent, a brother, a friend.

Times Square and no horns. Stuck in traffic, in a cab for God’s sake. For hours.

Nothing.
Patience.
Breathe.

So much for therapy - fiction (sort of)

“Look at us,” he said, “We’re time travelers!”

I was trying in that moment to reconcile the face in front of me with the child I had left behind 40 years ago. Left but never left. Left but have a spent a lifetime searching for. “Who are you?” was what I was thinking but what I said was “You look like your father” which was true enough and he said “You look like Rayna Star” which was an amazing compliment since I had not been Rayna Star for 30 odd years trading off husbands and last names in a series of new identities each one taking me further and further away from Tailwind Lane. The home of my youth. The last place I used Star to define me.

“I am old,” I said. “I was molested by a priest” was his answer. “After we moved away.” and so it was out there. The missing forty years. Just like that. I said nothing. I had been talking about my trauma and my mistakes now once a week for twenty years. There was nothing about them that was interesting to me anymore but still I plopped down $130 a week to go over them. Week after week. Year after year. The same stories. “I’ve been in therapy for twenty years” I said in an offering of solidarity. “I just quit,” he said. “How many times can you drag the garbage to the curb?” I hugged him then. Or wanted to. Instead I let go of my own sacks. Just put them down then and there. “I loved you,” I said. “And I you,” he answered. And I said, “I don’t think I ever recovered from losing you.” And he said, “Me either.”

There was never that moment. That ‘Now What?’ moment. The moment where everyone recognizes in awkward self consciousness the horrible lapse in judgment that led to the reunion. The moment where the fantasy past and the realistic present collide. I expected we would have it. Reinforced my coping skills with positive and affirmative internal messaging. Shored up my diminished self-esteem. Provided exit strategies and possible outcome scenarios in order to rehearse comfortable escapes and soft landings. I prepared with mental imaging of my support network, the current partners, friends and professionals that could help me process the shame and disappointment that I might be feeling if this opportunity, like so many others, did not play out the way I expected. I calculated minutes to hours to dollars ratios to project a cost analysis of recovery due to yet another hair-brained emotional recovery plan gone array. But it was all for naught. Despite my best efforts to plan for self-sabotage and implement a self-soothing recovery plan, none of my usual machinations were called for. We had fun. Although I had thought that I would never in my life experience it again in such a pure and innocent manner.

This is what happened:

After forty years of interruption, we met, we remembered, and we laughed.

Beauty

I do not spend a lot on my appearance. I’m forty-nine years old. I look my age. My hair is frizzy and has grey in it. I had it blown out once and could barely tolerate the attention. The next day I took a shower and the frizz returned. No one told me that $40 could disappear in an instant in your morning shower. I don’t get my nails done. My hands are a mess. I pick at my fingers. When I worry about my work, it shows on my fingertips. My mother told me that lovely fingers are important. That you speak with your hands. That people judge you by your nails. I wonder what my judges say about my ratty fingers. I can never seem to have all ten digits at the same nail length. Once I tried hard to maintain them, to see if it would make a difference. But invariably one or the other would break and I would have to start the process all over again. It was distracting. I can’t be bothered. I have stopped. And my neck sags in a way that makes me angry with gravity. And my eyebrows are full. And I have a stomach that wasn’t flat before I had children and now has given up hope. And I can’t seem to wear high heels for anything longer than a few hours at a stretch. I am a short woman who wears flat shoes. People have to bend over to talk to me. They look like ostriches or giraffes. I look like a baby bird stretching out my neck to meet them.

I recently read an article about women who spend $1 – $2,000 dollars a month on their appearance. I do not have $1,000 to $2,000 per month to spend on my appearance and even if I did I am not sure that I would. But I know many women who do. I see them at the grocery store. I see them in fancy cars. I see them pushing food around their plates at restaurants. They make me feel self conscious when I order dessert.

I am upset with these women. I assume they are as well educated as the next person. That she reads the paper and watches TV. I am upset that she has become so seemingly vacuous. That her appearance seems to be her main concern while we live in a world where our food supply may be tainted, where people are bombing each other with their bodies as weapons, where poor people and people of color factor jail time into their life’s journeys. Somehow none of this seems to matter to this woman. To her, it is all about hair and eyebrows and nails. I am furious with her. I have been furious with her for a while. She makes me feel ugly and poor. Part of my fury is personal. She seems so preoccupied, which I seem to take personally. In fairness to her I must admit I am also preoccupied, we are all preoccupied with something I suppose. I am also obsessed with her. Maybe as obsessed with her as she is with herself.

This woman drives me crazy. She makes me feel inadequate but also superior. I pity her her high maintenance, even as I envy her her beauty. She and I have a complicated relationship. I imagine she hardly notices me, as she is looking down her long straightened nose. She might see me as a garden gnome, she might laugh haughtily at me, she might think I’m slovenly, she might feel superior. I am not sure. I am not sure what she sees or what she thinks. And I must admit I have never asked her. It is the same with the woman under the veil. I don’t know that much about her either, but I think about her all the time too. Armies of women, hidden behind walls of cloth and cosmetics. Hidden from each other and the world.

On the heels of the $2,000 a month (every month – this is a regular thing) woman article, I read another article asking if America is ready for a trophy wife in the White House. This one came with pictures of said wife, looking as if she were out for the night with her father and her child. My stomach knots. I am obsolete. I can no longer find myself in the news. People like me are not newsworthy. We disappear. I assume there are quite a few of us. I wonder why we have kept our mouths shut. This is a free country right? I don’t feel free, I feel invisible. Like the women under veils. We could be powerful force but are irrelevant. How has it happened that we are irrelevant? Looking like me has become an embarrassment. A social liability. As the American lifespan increases I face the second half of my life feeling as if there is no place for me in it.

Some of the 2K a month women are single, perhaps hoping it is not too late to find a mate. Some are married to attractive men who may or may not have roving eyes. I wonder if their men miss the face they fell in love with. I wonder who these women see when they look in the mirror. All the faces end up looking the same to me. Like those veils. They hide the woman inside.

Eight Dollar Eggs

It started with the mouse actually. He died. I didn’t believe anything anyone told me, before that. I thought people were way too precious about things like food and water – way too cautious like it was some new form of narcissism, all this food and environmental awareness. Like I read today in the New York Times that there is a market where you can get a dozen eggs for eight dollars a dozen. Eight dollars. So I was thinking about who would buy those eggs and what would happen if they were right and all the other eggs were contaminated and let’s say we all died from contaminated eggs and who would be left? All the people roaming the earth would be the people who one, could afford eight dollar a dozen eggs and two, cared enough to buy them – or maybe two should be knew they existed because until I read the article I never knew eight dollar eggs existed. They must be some eggs. I’m just a person who doesn’t want to be killed by food. Food and terrorists. If anyone told me ten years ago that I would be afraid of food and terrorists I would have told them they were crazy. Now it’s all I can think about.

Eight divided by twelve is sixty six cents and let’s say, a dollar divided by twelve is eight cents so that’s a difference of fifty eight cents. So by not choosing to spend and extra fifty eight cents an egg I could be dead, but if I could find those eggs, and eat them instead of my bargain eggs, which by the way, I drive out of my way to buy special, I could be living with the other people who are in the know about egg poisoning. I know it’s hard to believe but fifty eight cents seems a small price to pay to stay alive. Although I imagine the other people might get on my nerves a little. But I’d still be alive. I can’t vouch for the quality of life or anything since I would imagine there aren’t many of those eight dollar eggs around and after they are gone I have no idea what you’d eat and basically the rest of the world plus all the animals might be dead except the in-the-know foodies that you pass sometimes at whole foods that always seem to have unlimited money to buy organic stuff all the time. Where does that money come from, and the time to do the research? Like do these people work, or do they just spend whatever time and money they have looking for the perfect white eggplant and non poisonous eggs because they know something we don’t know? Really, it was in the New York Times. Everyone is going to want those eggs.

So the mouse. I was home reading the mail and I got that little print out that you sometimes get from the utility company which makes you worry about all the trees they cut down to make the paper for them. This one included a little graph of some kind that said that they had decided to change the chemical composition of our water. And that as a result the levels of arsenic were going to up, but not to worry because they were still safe levels. And have a nice day.

I didn’t think much of it, and we were mostly drinking bottled water then. This was before someone told me that the bottles were worse for the environment than the water was for us, so back then we were still using bottles although this mouse, my kid’s mouse was on the tap – it was easier to fill his bottle that way. I didn’t think much about the arsenic levels, I just noted it, in the way you note things, in the “how do they decide a safe arsenic level” kind of way. So the mouse, Arthur, was a feeder mouse. Little. We saved him from being eaten by a snake. We were proud of that. He cost fifty cents although the cage and the little spinny wheel set us back about fifty bucks. Anyway, he was sweet. Ran a lot. We had to WD40 his wheel or he would keep us up at night. He was not a pet per se as much as a form of visual entertainment. So we didn’t interact all that much, except to clean the cage, and change his water and feed him. And we watched him run in circles. But after the water changed, this mouse was not the same. Really not the same. He started growing lumps. And started bleeding from his ears. And I called the water company and asked if anyone else was dying from their arsenic changes and they said no, no one. But I never believed them and this poor mouse ended up dying a horrible death. We buried him in the back yard. But I still feel bad. Maybe he would have survived on bottled water.

The water that we brush our teeth with every day killed that mouse. He was the first indication that something had gone terribly wrong.