HOMESICK FOR HIRE

 

Opportunity awaits.  Staying positive, when I feel like I’m embarking on a wagon train to the wild west.  I’ve imagined packing for a cross-country journey for years, inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Ma had Pa, but I am Ma with the muzzle-loader, alone.

I bought pepper spray, but the gun on my belt and the revolver under the table should prevent the need to use it.

Also, tonight I learned that this is my only week alone.  I’ll have company next week, armed company most likely.  The .45 will still ride on my belt, but company can do the shooting with his or her own pistol.

All in all, this is a crazy thing to do.  Before embarking on these small adventures, I usually need to do some serious nesting, and today was no different.  I flipped rooms with Thundergirl successfully.  Many hugs, much laughter, all a surprise to her.  Now I lay in this smaller room, with my things, but…condensed.  Less room to make a mess, I hope?  A chance to look at new things upon waking?  Different places to hang pictures?  Actually, I do not care where I sleep.  I just wanted that sweet girl to feel special, and she does.  I’ll camp out in the back, and she can have the bigness.  This is my version of a bedsitter.  This is my French attic, my retreat from the world. I can’t see a street from these windows, only the yard and houses.  Once I fill it with plants, paintings, more mirrors, curtains too full for the narrow windows, then it will be mine.  For now, I rest uneasily with blank spaces.

My past housemates hated my love of textures and layers.  Now I pile and pile and pile, hanging scarves over chairs and the one fur stole I can’t seem to give away across a sconce on the wall.  Too many blankets stack on the trunk, but there are not quite enough…yet.  The stack might reach the ceiling some day, and I would be happy about that. I reject minimalism for sensation and stimulation to the point of satiation.  This is my calm.  This is my home.

Tomorrow, when I drive away, I will feel physical pangs of loss, even though I’m coming back in two days.  Imagine how leaving my little person with her daddy felt when that was new.  I died a little every time.  I still do, but she always comes back to me.

I always come back home, too.  The things I’ve carried for decades, junk to you, home to me, carry with them my family.  I’ve lost nearly everything in a fire, and I learned the value and valuelessness of possessions.  Then, I still had the people I treasured.  Now, those people are gone, but I have the things that they touched every day.  Because I have those things, and I share them with my small person who touches them every day, I am home.

THE GIRL NEEDS HER VILLAGE

Skip ahead.  Tattooing stories (and there are a few good ones) can wait.

I intend to pull a fast on on the daughter.  This won’t be easy.  I have my limitations, one of which is difficulty in lifting mattresses, and boy, is my mattress heavy.

Her room is the small one, of course.  That’s where the kid goes when a new house happens.  This time, it’s different.  I’ve had that huge bedroom, by my standards, for almost a year.  She has a little bright room at the back of the house.

She “entertains”.  I don’t, at least, not in my bedroom.  My bedroom is the stash zone, where baskets of clean laundry live until I get around to putting things away, where bags destined for Goodwill hide in plain sight until I remember to put them into the trunk of the car, where art supplies and suitcases full of yarn and fabric stand, waiting my attention.  No dresser–that is the TV stand in the front room.  Bookshelves, a chair piled with I DON’T KNOW WHAT, and a library table cum desk.  Gosh, I like that table.  It was an estate sale splurge, with wildly turned legs and glass balls with iron paws for feet.  I’m a sucker for real furniture, and it fit my refurnishing budget, AND it was the last day of the sale, so HALF PRICE! So many reasons to like that table.

What was I talking about?

So, we are switching rooms, but she doesn’t know it yet.  She suggested it a month ago, and I delayed answering.  Within twenty-four hours, my mind was made up.  I sleep in my room, and make lazy messes in it.  She plays in hers, with sometimes four other friends.  She doesn’t have that many toys, but they can’t be played with properly in the small space.  Plastic villages spring up on her floor, and she can’t get to her bed without becoming a reluctant Godzilla.

When we moved to this cottage, our refuge and sanctuary, I vowed to keep it pretty for both of us.  I’ve held up that vow, except for my personal space.  My bedroom has been a terrible mess my whole life.  What is wrong with me, that I can’t keep it clean for more than a few days?  Why do I sleep with clean laundry piled at the foot of my bed, with books and papers and trays scattered anywhere I won’t (hopefully) kick them off?  The dirty laundry goes directly to the floor next to my side of the bed if I don’t shower right before I turn in.  The bathroom stays clean, of course.  Other people see the bathroom.

I will restrict my space.  If the mess piles up to my ears, well, I’ll keep sleeping in the mess and bring it up in therapy.  Thunder can have her room to move.  All I do in my room is sleep.

The transformation begins this evening, as soon as she goes to her daddy’s.  The beginning is really just a thorough culling of crap from my bedroom while she is at school.  I’ve already cleared a bookshelf for her, and those books are living not in my room, but the front room, where I can’t forget about them.  Last time I cleaned, it took me forty minutes.  This time will be less, because the books are gone and the laundry is gone. When she gets home from school, we will celebrate MY clean room, which she appreciates.  She abhors the mess.  The big reveal will happen on Friday morning before the bus.

I love surprises for that lovely little person, even when they mean I might throw my back out at ten tonight.

THE GIRL WITH THE INVISIBLE TATTOO

I was a terrible waitress, and I barely survived two months at a Chinese restaurant where I was the only non-Mandarin speaker.  Yelled at in the kitchen, words just sounds, faces always disgusted with my stupidity, and I wanted to die of embarrassment when the customers asked me what they were saying.  They were calling me a stupid white bitch, one kind Chinese amah told me. The owner’s daughter, seven, pulled my hair by the long braid down my back and made me spill saucy plates onto my white shirts, for the staff’s amusement.  My only pleasure was waiting for the owner’s husband’s cigar ash to fall into the wok.  Buckets of pork marinated at room temperature in salt and spices for days at a time.  The job scared me and disgusted me, and I left with no notice.

At the diner, I was a great baker, seven pies a morning for the farmer breakfast crowd, and soft things for the elderly clientele of the salad bar at lunch.  Cockroaches fell off of the ceiling and into the meringue.  The kitchen flooded on my end when it rained, and the rain never stopped that summer.  1993 was a year of dampness and mildew and mud, and a boy from Indiana who brought me cantaloupes to woo me at the back door of the puddled kitchen.  I love watermelon, not cantaloupe, but my boyfriend appreciated them.  Watermelons were my thing, and I ate so much of it that summer that I threw it up, more than once.

Then, a better job at a grocery store deli.  No cockroaches, but lots of meat like substances that we all pretended were meat.  The real meat lived down the back hall, and Skater Dave from high school watched it during evening shifts.  He couldn’t cut it, just watch it.  I still don’t know why he was there; a symbol in a white coat?  I wore white scrubs, too, and a coat when I could snag one from the butcher’s uniform rack.  My days were filled with frying chicken and slicing fake meat.  My pride lay in my ability to layer cutlets prettily on the sub sandwiches, ruffling the edges like pictures in cookbooks showed, and being able to pick up exactly a pound of sliced meat out of the case for a customer, without having to take any off or add any to the digital scale.  I had every code memorized for that machine, because my job was the only thing that I spent any thought over.  My real life was a mess, with a boyfriend in the pits of depression and anxiety and affairs.  He had to start his day with a hit on the bong, and I started each month peeing in a cup for the meatcutter’s union.  He left me for his co-worker’s daughter, or niece, or something.  At any rate, she had a career, and was a grownup.  I was not even twenty-one.  He left with the lyrics of Althea ringing in my ears, but proposed to her five weeks after he moved out, not born to be a bachelor after all.

I moved to a big house with two other girls.  I never even unpacked.  All I did was work, and come home, and go out all night with my friends and then a new boyfriend, the one who had such great satellite to watch.  We could stay up all night, dancing and drinking with his friends and mine, and I could work a morning shift at the deli, then sleep at three.  The schedule held up for a year, and then I crashed.  I quit everything but the boy, whom I loved more than anything but my grandma, so I moved in with my grandma.

My goldsmithing teacher had tried and failed at a few other businesses.  He made boxer shorts.  He made funny teeth to sell at gas stations and county fairs.  He ran for mayor of his hometown.  When he opened a pawn shop, I had a job.  I cut waxes again, and sized a ring now and then, and stood behind the pawn counter doing nothing.  It was a guilt job.  He still felt bad over firing me.  His wife told him that I couldn’t be trusted if my boyfriend was fired from the shop, so I went as a package.  That may have been true, but it doesn’t matter, does it?  Customers came in with anything they thought was worth some money.  Most of it was junk.  My biggest job was to deliver repaired jewelry to retail shops and pick up the new broken stuff.  Sometimes, a gun was bundled into the backpack, to be engraved.  Sometimes, other things, but I don’t know what.  I learned to smile and look sweet and extract payments for services rendered with honeyed words.  The jewelry shop owners always obliged, but no one really liked me, the costly bearer of shiny things who slouched through their front doors every week.  Even my co-workers didn’t really like me.  I was the odd add-on.  Maybe I was the girlfriend?  No, she lived down the street.  At the pawn shop, I learned to watch and be silent; when it was time to move, I left without fanfare.  Some of them weren’t even sure of my name, but my boss loved me.

A radical move to central Illinois found me broke again, but in love and cohabitating with the object of my desire.  He didn’t work, and his parents sent money.  We both lived off of that for a while, and then I became a telemarketer who didn’t have to sell anything.  Calling people just to tell them that their high-tech caller ID would soon have a name on the screen really bothered them.  The apartment didn’t come with a parking space, so I biked to work through a series of rough neighborhoods in the dark.  It was always dark.  The buses didn’t go where I needed to go, except to the community college campus.  Those classes kept me from feeling like a schlub among the sort-of Ivy Leaguers in attendance at the Real University where I lived.  One class, an anatomy drawing seminar, landed me yet another job: I became Champaign’s first female tattoo artist.

WHAT I HAVE DONE FOR MONEY

Three.  Three posts, and I’ve said nothing interestingly profound.  I’ve bitched, actually, which goes against one of my personal-flexible-makes-me-a-better-human rules.  Self-suggestions, let’s call them.  Rules break, and then failure results.  The failures have stacked high enough, in the eyes of the judgey world.  I allow myself to bend and flow and change.

Today, a list of successes.  I’ve done some interesting things.  Let us measure successes by the ways in which experiences have made me a more interesting person, okay?  I’ll feel better about that.  We’ll start with jobs.  What we do makes us who we are, says Marx.

My first job made me question my fitness to be an employee.  I assembled boxes with grids of cardboard inside them, to hold circuit boards for shipping. No one else did this job.  I stood in the middle of a big room, surrounded by people hunched over workstations and assembling circuit boards.  I longed to hold a soldering gun.  My fine motor skills were sharp, and I knew I could do that job.  Papa had put a soldering gun in my hands as soon as he decided that I was responsible enough to not get hurt–at least, not badly enough to draw the attention of Gram, who would have forbidden any more soldering if I’d suffered a blister.

After a summer of brokeness, and a college semester of being not just broke but shamefully broke, I accidentally landed a job at a movie theater.  My friend needed a ride to his interview.  The interviewer assumed that I was there for the job, too.  He hired us all, a dozen or so former high school classmates plus one former employee, on the spot.  Well, all but one.  I think the interviewer was homophobic, or didn’t like my other friend’s gloriously feathered hair/Black Sabbath style combo.  I wore what I happened to be wearing when I got the “I need a lift” call: cutoffs and a tie-dyed tank over my wet swimsuit.  Solo beach day.  I smelled like lake water and sunblock, and didn’t take any part of the interview seriously, and I got the job.

We really were hired as a team.  The theater had to be reopened from scratch, and we were the fresh crew.  If one of us had a flat, another could come to the rescue.  If one of us was hung over, any good friend would step in to help out a suffering comrade.  And suffer, we did, but at our own stupid hands.  Too much partying left us ragged for tomorrow’s matinee, and those of us old enough to go to bars (or to that one bar where no one knew that I was only 19 because I dated much older people), took full advantage of the very flexible schedule that an interlaced workforce allows.  Shifts were negotiated over pitchers of Stag.  I probably benefitted the most, being a non-drinker and owning a reliable car. Staying late and covering shifts was never a problem.  While other staffers complained about thirty-dollar paychecks, I just tucked my (then enormous) hundred and twenty into my wallet.  I could skip the kegger.  My hangovers were brutal, and being drunk wasn’t much fun.

At that job, I learned that the people in charge of me really had no power over me.  My manager, who interviewed and hired me, hid in his office until closing.  He never told anyone what to do. The people who had worked at the theater under different management taught the new ones how to stock, run cash registers, how to make change at the box office without a calculator, and how to be the jerk with the flashlight who shushes middleschoolers. Management bagged the deposit and smoked weed under the projector fans, but I didn’t actually know that second bit until he quit.  He had a muppet name, which I couldn’t say without giggling.  His boss didn’t like my hair, which was shaved into a topknot and braided with shells and beads, and my shoes had too much white on them.  I took a Magic Marker and colored the toes of my Chuck Taylors black while he finished his barrage of writeups for other uniform indiscretions among the staff.  I did my job well, and my register always came out even.  I showed up and spoke nicely to everyone.  The writeups didn’t get anyone fired, and the manager went back to getting stoned.

I met a future boyfriend there, the boss’s replacement after being forced into rehab for slipping back into a cocaine habit.  The boyfriend part happened later; he was the most boring person I had ever met, but smart.  He just watched too much TV.  His parents had a satellite, and he had access to porn when porn was harder to find.

My next job fell into my lap, through another happy accident.  My much-older live-in boyfriend worked for his cousin by former marriage.  They were jewelers.  I came to lunch, and left with a job offer.  A sheet of silver was handed to me, and a saw, and a hammer, with the order, “Make a ring out of this,” which is just what I did.  He paid me almost nothing, but I learned how to size rings and cut waxes and make things shiny.  I learned how to handle very small, very expensive things and not lose them to carelessness or greed.  An opal passed through my hands that was worth more than a car.  Opals crack if they’re looked at crosseyed, but it didn’t crack.  I could find a diamond on the floor faster than anyone.  My waxes for custom work were better than I was taught.  Sizing and reshanking bored me silly, and I was fired before I got to setting stones.  He couldn’t pay his taxes, so he couldn’t pay us.  Both my boyfriend and I were fired on the same afternoon.  I had asked for a raise the day before, and the stricken look on my boss’s face told me that the answer would be no, and worse.  He cried when he looked at me, and later called me in the middle of the night to apologize; on the drive home, without income and with bills to pay for the first time, I sobbed in fear and anger and “I told myself so”s.  Three months later, he had left his wife and left his business and had gone to Graceland, which was actually the Collinsville Super 8, but his wife didn’t know that.  I knew he didn’t want to fire me.  No apology was needed.

STOP

He might have meant well, but his devotion made me sad.  What woman wouldn’t want a man who never fails to say good morning, good afternoon, good night, you are loved, you are beautiful, you are perfect, let me take you everywhere you’ve ever wanted to go? All of that, and–AND–I could also love anyone and everyone else I wanted?  In his unflagging outpourings of support  he never wavered. He would change his whole life to spend it with me, if only I would have him.  The tiny slivers of information that I shared after my clear statement of disinterest, not even sentences, must have blossomed in his mind as some kind of hope.

I have seen him once since that end, almost a year ago.  I had avoided him successfully for months, and then one day, I slipped.  He saw me, and I couldn’t duck away again.  He cried on me, wetting my shoulder with snot and tears, telling me that he would always love me the most.  All I could do was mumble into his shirt, “I’m sorry. You will be okay.  You will forget.”  The letters increased, and the text messages full of that engulfing acceptance and love did, too.  There had been a quiet time, with nothing.  Nothing was easier.  Reading the love hurt me, guilty that I couldn’t feel it back.

This kind of heartbreak swirls all around me some days. I am the ruiner of families.  I am the breaker of promises.  I didn’t try hard enough, didn’t work hard enough, and anything that makes me sad is all my fault, I am told.  Sometimes, I accidentally whisper it into my own ear, until I remember that don’t really believe it.

Changing my life saved my life.  Leaving my family twisted us all into wreckage, all but the baby.  She had suffered the most before I left; she watched and learned and mimicked my ways.  Stay quiet when voices rise, duck into a corner when stomping and door slamming commence.  The baby, my baby, I snatched from a front-row seat in Emotional Abuse 101, and the kind and loving other man whom I rejected in favor of nothing, wanted to put a roof over our heads for the rest of his days, be a steady man for me and my baby.  Still, no.  No no no no.

And tonight, I sent a brief final email.  His kindnesses keep a wound just a little raw.  His devotion picks at my peace, and gives me no closure.  He “loves forever”, no matter what.  I thought I did, and I was wrong.  I loved the unwavering acceptance, which I had never experienced, but had given so many times.  I loved the feeling of safety and sureness he gave, which I had tried to give to my loves.  I wanted to experience that kind of love in return.  Sadly, he offered, and I now refuse.

I do love a man today.  He loves me back.  We don’t spend much time together, but when we do, I can’t imagine loving another man so much.  When we are apart, I think that I may have imagined him, until I see his name on my phone with words of adoration attached.  This man, I love forever.  This man isn’t willing to envelop me into his life with his lovely daughters in a glorious swoosh.  We all barely know one another, careful not to push our beautiful jumble of daughters together too quickly. I like them both very much; he is a very good father and a good man.  The baby will meet his daughters eventually.

For the first time, at almost forty, I am truly in love. He is not perfect, but perfect for me.  I understand him.  I admire him.  I respect him.  Because I respect him, I listen quietly as he tells me that he can’t imagine me in his life every day.  He has been alone for a long time, but if I am the greatest love of his life, why doesn’t he want to welcome me into his daily life?  Many hearts are involved, certainly.  I understand that.  He cherishes his girls like I cherish mine.  I wouldn’t push her into a new life without her consent.  I see that he would never do that to his lovely daughters, either.  But where is the willingness to make the situation possible?  Who has to till that soil, to make a new, strong thing grow?  I won’t push this time, or ever again.  My presence must be a thing deeply desired, not a casual convenience.  He says that he is “here for me.”   I know he is, to the extent that he can be anywhere.

This is why the unwavering devotion of the man I don’t love keeps me raw; contrasts glare at me, unfairly, unwanted.  I want him to go away, so I don’t have these daily reminders of a man willing to wrap me and mine in his heart without conditions.  I don’t want him.  I can’t be his friend, knowing that he can’t not love me.

Stop rebreaking me when I feel fragile enough to shatter, some days, I told him.  What if I can’t remember how the pieces fit back together again?

EVERY MORNING

Two weeks ago, a scout showed himself.  He didn’t look like any mouse I’d seen, sooty black and brave and bouncy.  His path never varied.  He had a schedule: sunset, quiet house, leave closet, crawl under bedroom door, under dresser, then under refrigerator.  The rest I couldn’t see.

So, I had a mouse.  The rodent management section at the hardware store terrified me.  He didn’t need to die, he just needed to leave.  I announced the presence of the mouse in my house at work, and the new Pie Lady offered to adopt him.  Solution!  Catch that mouse, send him packing, and he lives a fat and lazy life with this nice girl.  The night before I needed to go to work, he closed himself in the trap and spent the night there.  His attitude had become less bouncy, but he recovered after a few bites of apple and raisin, and even tried to chew his way out of the box she made for him.

Another trap stayed in place, baited with peanut butter, just in case.  It snapped closed two days later.  The mouse inside didn’t handle its confinement well, and chewed itself in panic.  I found this out when I tried to release it near the bike trail.  A heavy rock ended that mouse’s misery.

Again, two quiet days, and another mouse in the trap.  Again, self-mutilation forced me to kill it myself.  I knew what to expect this time; the traces of blood at the breathing vent sent me in search of a brick.  I smashed the box, black plastic shards and fur and one eye dislodged from the whole thing.  A mess.

After the first bloody mouse, I bought enclosed death-inducing traps, four of them, just in case.  More peanut butter, a turn of a sinister clicky dial, and it was set.  The second bloody mouse happened, and I put the death traps in places where I would go, if I were a mouse.  A quick death must be more humane than the terror of being trapped and gnawing and gnawing.

They didn’t die.  Three as of today have been broken inside the traps, but not too broken to kick and squeal when the trap tilted in my hands.  One last death trap and one “humane” trap are set, and I expect to have to finish off those mice, if they are unlucky enough to get caught.  The last one, I drowned in its trap, in a bucket of rainwater in the back yard.  The water around the black box curled red and then pink, and in less than ten seconds, the box was still and the water stopped shivering.  I’ll drown the rest.  We’ve had plenty of rain.

Every morning, a new death.  Today, two.

The first little black mouse did not take to his life of leisure.  He rebelled until his well-meaning caretaker took him to a park.  He sprang from the box and ran to the top of a tree, lucky.

My love offers to check traps for me, wants to spare me the tears.  In these gray days, tears will come regardless, so there may as well be a good reason for them.  Better to exploit the mice and the rain and these little casualties than to blame anything less explainable, I think.  The rain came just in time.