The Mista gets home from a week of being away and tells me they’re saying that the weather this weekend is going to be shit.
He wasn’t even here? How does he know?
Of course, the Mista gets all sorts of information from reading periodicals filled with facts and figures and stories that directly impact us today, now! I could maybe find the weather forecast from somewhere on my blogroll, but the weather’s going to come whether I know about it or not.
And maybe it won’t really be so bad, just because ‘they’ say so.
Petunia is over. She agrees with the ‘them’ to whom the Mista refers.
“A bank holiday in England. Of course the weather’s going to be bad. When is there ever nice weather for a bank holiday?”
Petunia was away for the last bank holiday, the bank holiday when we did have write-home-about-it weather. The Mista reminds her of this.
“Actually it was great weather for my birthday weekend.” The Mista is all fact and reality and how things are.
Petunia has a slight streak of pessimism. Is it an example of the European stereotype? Old World Europe prepared for disappointment, that history has taught, is inevitable? Or, a stereotype of Eastern Europe and remnants of invasion and communism and hardships like having to eat newspaper soup and you were lucky if you had salt and pepper to season it up? Or is it just Petunia commentating on crap English weather?
Meanwhile, I hold out hope that ‘they’ will be wrong.
Saturday morning comes. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. I am smug.
I’m right! They’re wrong!
As smug as I can be through my sneezes and runny nose and itchy eyes. I’ve taken a tablet.
When will this thing kick in?
So certain am I in the good weather of the day, I book a court for 4pm. Petunia, the Mista and I will hit some balls. My allergies will not get in the way.
As the day passes, my certainty wanes. The sky can’t seem to make up it’s mind: to smile or frown. The wind creates little ad hoc hurricanes in our back garden. While my sneezing has abated, my nose continues to run; my eyes continue to itch.
The Mista makes note of the wind. “The wind’s going to make it not so much fun to play.”
I pretend I don’t here him.
Petunia arrives. She has ridden her bicycle. Her face is scrunched up. She looks like she has tasted something bad. “The wind is crazy and there is tons of shit in the air.”
Nothing will ruin our tennis. We’re going to have fun god damn it.
On the court, we are lethargic. It’s as if the pollen is so thick, the wind so strong, that we are unable to move through it, to move against it. All that shit in the air gets in our lungs. I start to wheeze. Petunia asks me if I’m alright. I nod because I cannot get the breathe to mutter, “yes”. The three of us agree that it feels as if we have tiny shards of glass in our eyes.
The sun is shining, though. The weather’s not total crap. Until this morning.
So maybe “they” are right.
The lady with the bad habit has no idea she’s conjuring up memories. She’s dressed in a woman’s suit, black, ill-fitting and frumpy. Cheap. Not the slick, well-fitting ensemble of rich-textured cloth you’d find in the City. More the style I think you’d find in the solicitor’s offices around Holborn, where I’m certain she has caught this west-bound Picadilly train.
Her head is tilted down; so from my vantage point – the seat opposite hers – I have an aerial view of her nose, the only visible feature of her face is only partially visible. With one hand she clutches a clump of her unkempt hair; the fingers of her other hand work through the individual strands in the captive clump. She is searching for split ends.
She pauses, releases the strand of hair, pushes her hair back and away from her eyes, and looks up. I’m shocked. While scouring her head for split ends, she had had the air of a mentalist, a fringe element, possibly homeless, definitely crazy. Yet, once the search has been put on hold, she looks quite normal, sedate. Big blue eyes in her unmade-up face.
She reaches into her bag for a pen and notebook; I breathe a sigh of relief. Her moment of obvious and outward neurosis has passed. She opens the notebook, but the cap stays firmly on the pen. She reaches up and chooses another clump of hair, eager to examine it’s contents, eager to find split ends to delve apart.
I look away. I can’t look, but I have to look. I look down.
On the floor I see her bag. It’s such a normal looking bag. It looks like it belongs to a normal looking person. Not this self-grooming monkey. An empty Tupperware sits visible in her open bag. It’s the same style Tupperware container I use.
She’s got my Tupperware. She’s just like me. Oh, please call off the search for split ends – right now! You have no idea how unattractive it makes you look.
The memories come flooding back. The mentalist-looking, self-grooming monkey in a solicitor’s office suit has become a conjurer.
I wonder if Tupperware is a brand they had in England, and consequently if it is a catch-all word like hoover or band-aid or kleenex or xerox* but to describe plastic containers of various shapes and sizes. I think how different Tupperware used to be to our modern versions, which probably have different brand names. I think about the yellow tupperware in my kitchen. It’s been used to store sugar for over 38 years. I stole it from my mother when I left the United States. I knew it would be a memento of my mother and of my childhood. I think about my mother taking the yellow tupperware from it’s place in the pantry in order to mix sugar with cinnamon, the first step in preparing what was my favourite breakfast: cinnamon toast. (memory 1)
The woman is picking up a new clump of individual strands, each a split end candidate.
Stop, stop, stop. It makes you look so tacky!
My mom was right. I praise her for breaking me of any habits that would have me mistaken for a mentalist once I was all grown up. I remember I used to search my hair for split ends. I was eleven or twelve, on the cusp of young womanhood. I remember mom chauffeuring me from piano lessons, from school, from friend’s homes. She drove a Datsun 280ZX with T-tops (a Z car!). Made me feel like Smokey and the Bandit. I used to love finding a split end and carefully pulling it apart from the two respective ends. 1 destroyed, a headful left to go. I remember mom telling me to stop. “So tacky.” she would say. (memory 2)
Despite mom’s disapproval, I continued to occasionally peruse my head for a splittable split end. I remember being on such a mission in my final year of high school. I sat across the room from Robert Cohn. He went on to become a big deal at Harvard University. In high school he was a nerd, an affable nerd who could sit at my lunch table any time he wanted. (memory 3)
I haven’t thought of Robert Cohn in years. I stopped looking for split ends because he told me he found it funny to watch me going cross-eyed from across English class.
Train of thought thanks to lady on the tube with the bad habit.
*I think I’ve noticed ‘xerox’ as a common noun and verb is falling into disuse.
I’m inclined to hate the Chelsea fans as I stand on the platform at Earl’s Court and wait for the Wimbledon-bound train. I hadn’t realised there was a game at Stamford Bridge tonight. A Champion’s League match at that.
Where have I been?
There was a time I paid attention to such things; if only to have something innocuous with which to fill awkward silences with some colleagues or customers.
The crowding on the platform feels dangerous. Five deep to get to the edge of the platform, and 4 of the 5 are going to the game, and it seems that 3 of the 5 are already pissed. Whooping and hollering and chanting songs. While the rest of us just want to get home. I can’t hear the music through my headphones. I might has well turn the walkman* off. Conserve the battery.
I’m uneasy. Tightening in gut. The result of youthful exposure to a belligerent, violent drunk. The besotted throng pulsating with anticipation and bravado, pluck and alcohol. There are two policemen standing to my right. To keep the peace. The train comes. I know I won’t be boarding it. If I’m lucky the 4 deep will move down into the carriages taking all space available leaving me to stand where I can watch the doors close across the smashed torsos and intermingled limbs.
I am lucky. The train pulls out, and I am at the edge of the platform. Right where the next pair of doors should land. My feet are just over the yellow line. I try to inch back a little bit. I get dizzy standing so close to the edge. I see a mentalist, escaped from the asylum, hone in on me as the next victim of a Tube incident.
The sign says that the next train is bound for Olympia. A collective groan of impatience from the eager fans. Then more chanting, more riling of the opposing fans, more undercurrent of large scale antagonism. More fear inside me.
Shut the fuck up! Can’t you just shut the fuck up until you get to the stadium! People are so fucking rude.
I clutch the handles of my bag, which hangs in front of my knees. I have removed it from my shoulder to optimise my surrounding space.
The Olympia-bound train pulls up; for all intents and purposes, it’s empty. I’ve evaded my imaginary mentalist … this time. The horde lists forward. They want to board even though they know better.
An announcement is made, just audible above the chanting.
“The train along platform four will no longer be going to Olympia. Due to a shortage of Wimbledon-bound trains it will be rerouted to Wimbledon.”
The floodgates have been unleashed.
On the train the chants echo even louder in my ears. Now the fans are jumping up and down. The train actually sways to their exuberance, side to side.
Fucking assholes.
I wonder if the introverted fans are embarrassed by their extroverted teammates. I want to hate the Chelsea fans, but I see that there are more demure blue jerseys than boastful ones. I see there are also annoying red and black rabblerousers. I think I want to hate all the football fans.
I get home and drop my keys into the little bowl on the table next to the door. The Mista hears me.
“Hey girl! Champion’s League is on!”
*I’m using the older, chunkier version of the one I had before the one Butters ate.
Friday morning I left my house at 7:00. I wore my standard gym kit: light-weight gray running trousers with the unmistakeable Adidas stripes up the side, a gray sweatshirt, two jogging bras (you can never do enough to make sure the ladies stay in their place), and trainers. I had my everyday work bag with laptop, camera, wallet, pen/pencil case, notebook, and other miscellaneous shit hanging from my left shoulder; my backpack with work clothes, hairbrush, shampoo & conditioner, and a padlock was strapped on my back. A tennis racket swung off my right shoulder. I locked the door, walked out my front gate, and closed it behind me.
Yes, ‘closed it’ … do you hear that, Mista? Despite what you think, I do normally close the gate behind me! It’s time you apportioned blame on true culprit (the mail man) goddamnit.
Before I had even walked the 6 meters or so to the corner kerb, I noticed it: the “mystery stench” that enveloped the capital on Friday morning.
For a moment I was back in Yeehaw, USA where the smell of the annual rodeo permeates normal life for 3 weeks out of the year. The smell of the rodeo is also the smell of a dog food factory in winter, which Yeehaw, USA also had. Friday’s Big Smoke stench was the odour of a rodeo or a dog food factory. According to the free London rag (pictured), Friday’s stench was thanks to the French*.
I couldn’t help but laugh triumphantly inside. Something petty and childish in me enjoys the Anglo-French squabbling. A bit of ‘misery likes company’ I suppose: The Americans, (“Fuck Yeah!”) aren’t the only ones who inspire disdain.
*In a quick rereading of the article, I see my bias. The French aren’t the only ones singled out. The Belgians are also mentionned. In my mind, they are a footnote. In my mind, the English blame the French. Fuck yea!
“Here’s the thing: you’d think they would have practised. Right? Wouldn’t you?” The Mista is annoyed, but keeping his temper in check. He, himself, is practised: life-practised, so this type of thing doesn’t really surprise; rather, it elicits bemused frustration.
“What do they call those things: the walkway thing that moves out to the plane? You know what I mean. They couldn’t get it to work.”
So the Mista and his fellow passengers waited 40 minutes to disembark whilst the airport people fiddled with buttons and levers and touch-pad screens* in an attempt to get the movable walkway (What are they called??!!) to move. 40 minutes inside the closed up cannister, breathing recycled air, eager to get home from their respective journeys or to their respective destinations all the while looking 20 or so feet out the window to where they should have been going.
I nod in sympathy. Yes, I would have thought they would have practised, at least the basic things, like getting passengers on and off the aeroplanes.
“And then just chaos everywhere once we did get off the plane.”
I’d prefer details to ‘just chaos’ but I have to let the Mista describe his experience in his own way.
“Really?” I encourage him to continue.
“And, I will NEVER take another taxi from terminal 5!”
“Huh?” That wasn’t a complaint I would have expected. This Mista, for as diligent a budgeter as he is, he likes his taxis (or rather, dislikes London’s public transport). “Why?”
“£55. What’s normally £40 from the other terminals. It cost £15 just to get from Terminal 5 to the other terminal areas!”
The Mista’s description of Terminal 5 on opening day seems to be winding down**, but he hasn’t yet touched on what I really want to know.
“But is it pretty?”
*Not being an airport worker person, I don’t really know with what they fiddled. This is me exercising literary license.
**The Mista does not normally check-in baggage, so he was not subjected to the lost luggage fiasco (all luggage sent to Milan???? Why????). Nonetheless, he has booked all future business trips on BMI with the sole and express purpose of avoiding Terminal 5. Hear that BA?
Last night I dreamed […]. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know what. […] I haven’t thought of it for years, yet now it is clear and detailed. I am again exasperated because my brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable….*
Almost the whole time that I’ve been reading the book I’m reading, something has bothered me – not so much about the book, but rather about me and my unreliable memory: I have a feeling that I’ve read this book before.
It’s entirely plausible.
Some months after moving to the neighbourhood, I chanced into the Fulham Public Library. I don’t know the number of times I walked by, ran by, strolled by, rode the bus by its Victorian façade. The library was like the fire station (which was just a couple of blocks east of its civic cousin): a large municipal building on the high street, a publicly funded place that (knock on wood) had nothing to do with me other than my contribution of council tax that helped provide these necessary public services to my less fortunate neighbours.
I recalled a chance meeting with another American expat – one who lived in Richmond – when years before I had lived someone else’s life** in W1. She had mentioned that she rented videos from her local library. I never met her again, but the fact that she frequented her local library must have taken seed in my brain where it lay dormant until one day I sat losing the annual budget negotiation with the Mista. The Mista proposed a budget based on necessity (a line item entitled “fun fund” would cover our entertainment needs). I touted a more liberal approach.
“Why’s the Misc. line item so small?” I queried.
I recognised there would be little room for discretionary spending according to the Mista’s budget, and books were expensive in the UK!
Isn’t everything when the US market is your basis for comparison?
I ceded the “Misc.” line item. And within the week I joined the library***. And within the month a new phase of my life started: the phase of rediscovery of the noble institution known as the public library. Every two weeks I went in with one set of books and came out with another. It was during this phase that I rediscovered the venerable Doris Lessing****. It was during this phase that I may (or may not have) read the book that I am currently reading.
Or rereading?
Like the library***, there is so much in the ambiance of the book that is familiar; but there are so many sections, passages, sentences that jar me into sitting up straight and paying overly-conscious attention, that I cannot imagine that I could have read this book previously and not remember.
Perhaps I need to buy some Gingko.
This morning as I pulled on my socks (brightly coloured stripy knee-high things), I thought about my mother teaching the five year old me how to put on my socks. It struck me that I don’t follow the technique I remember her showing me, which was so smooth and efficient; if I remember correctly, she folded the sock, turned it ½ way inside out, put my little toes into a little crack she had made, pulled a bit and PRESTO, my foot was snug as a rug in my sock.
This memory came flooding back to me as I sat on the floor pulling on my socks.
Approximately 45 minutes later I was reading the excerpt at the top of this post from the book that I am reading. Rereading?
*Still reading The Golden Notebook?
**Although it was my name and my body that occupied that year in W1, it was a fantasy. It was not my real life. Perhaps I’ll write about it some time.
***Entering the library for the first time, I was struck by the similarity with its US counterparts. The smell of the books, the bulletin boards, the children’s section, the wooden desk where the librarian took my card and stamped the books I was taking out on loan; I could have been in the library of my childhood.
****I had first read only a short story: To Room Nineteen while a freshman at university.
The main character in the book I’m reading* decides she is going to write down everything, every detail, from one day in her life. Throughout the course of her writing about that day, she wonders whether the conscious decision to write about that day has in some way altered the day itself – would the day have been any different if she’d not decided to write about it?
She gets her period, and realises during the course of a debate with a work colleague that she has gone shrill and emotional. She is annoyed with herself for letting her menstrual cycle impact who she is.
I’ve gone well past those pages, and didn’t mark them as I read them, although I thought to, but didn’t (probably because I was in the tube and a pen or pencil or sticky note wasn’t handy). I thought to mark them because they made me happy. They made me feel like I have company when I’m having my period and am not ‘at the top of my game’. I hate myself when I have my period – or at least for a few hours during the cycle. I, too, feel like I ‘go shrill’ if I’m not careful. I’ve never really compared notes about this particular subject with other women. I find comfort in knowing that way back in 1961 a fictional character would make the pages using this very subject. It makes me feel not quite so all alone in my male dominated industry. It makes me feel like I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when I feel as if I overreact or don’t react in the way I should have reacted. I can be very mean to myself.
I’m thinking about this today because my breasts feel heavy. I’ll probably be irritable in the next week; and if customer demands reach a peak, I am liable to “go shrill”.
I understand that the main character of the book I’m reading is going to have a nervous breakdown, or she at least grapples with mental instability. I know this from the book’s back cover; I’m not there – at her total collapse – yet, but there are hints. This makes me sad for her; I don’t fear for my mental health (not anymore; except for maybe the odd hour or so during my menstrual cycle) so there’s no comfort in another’s proximity to a breakdown.
Right now she’s on the tube. She seems to be cracking along the edges. This I can understand. Some thing’s haven’t changed since 1961:
The rush hour had begun. She was being jostled in a herd of people. Suddenly she was panicking, so badly that she withdrew from the people pressing towards the ticket booth …The city at rush hour – it was impossible for her to get from here, the five or six miles to her flat, in a hurry, save by the underground. No one could. They were all of them, all these people, caught by the terrible pressure of the city. […] There was nothing for it except to make herself go forward, fitted herself into the press of people, waited her turn for a ticket, went down the escalator in an ooze of people. On the platform four trains came in before she was able to squeeze herself into a compartment. Now the worst was over. She had only to stand, held upright by the pressure of people, in the brightly lit, crammed, smelling place, and in ten or twelve minutes she would be in her home station.
The tube can be the thing that drives me crazy.
*It’s still Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, observations London, Odd, stream of consciousness
I’m reading a book.
It happens to be the very same book that the woman who stood next to me on the tube in the rush-to-get-home-hour was reading. She had the look of a cliche: mousey, librarian, prim, proper, bookish. I imagined she lived alone. Or with a cat. Or maybe with a same-sex flatmate. Certainly a flatmate would wear on her nerves. She (our mouse) would pine for the peace and quiet in which she could pamper her brain with books, books and more books! Even the most considerate of flatmates would cramp her style, I imagine. Unless, her flatmate is a sister spirit! Birds of a feather who twitter over Ideas and who rarely drink, but when they do they get drunk on a glass of wine.
I was imagining a sad life for the not-quite-dour, but certainly-serious-faced young woman next to me on the tube. I noticed she was reading a thickish book. Then, I noticed it was the same one I was reading. She had probably bought it on the same 3 for 2 sale at Waterstone’s that I had, though the orange, circular sale sticker had been removed.
I had just finished reading the following passage when I noticed the girl was reading my book:
George’s approach to women was clumsy, over-humble, and he might even stammer. (But his stammer always sounded as if he were doing it on purpose.) Meanwhile his deep-set brown eyes would be fixed on the women with an almost bullying intentness. And yet his manner would remain humble, apologetic. Women got flustered or angry, or laughed nervously. He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who really, very much, needed women. {…} When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I’ve met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power.1
The girl was much further along in the book than I. She had already read this passage.
What did she think of George?
I wondered if he (or the prospect of him) excited her? Or scared her? Or did she doubt his very existence? I wondered, because I thought she must doubt George.
A girl like her wouldn’t accept that a man like George is true.
I wondered because it struck me that there was a time that I would have doubted George too. Now I know better.
1 Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. p.126.
Last night I dreamt I had a husband different than the Mista. In my dream my husband was the actor who played the most gay of the hobbits in Peter Jackson’s might-as-well-be-one-and-only-master-oeuvre. The gay hobbit only made a brief appearance in my dream. He held my (our!) little boy up by the hands to give him (our! little boy) balance as he teetered along on recently learned steps. During his teetering and tottering our! little boy exclaimed, “God Bless America!”
I was shocked silent. I think I was torn between a parent’s jubilation at the little things their children learn and the dismay of thinking I was raising a patriot.
My gay hobbit husband reacted more quickly than I.
“Don’t you ever say that again!”
I suppose I have more in common with the gay hobbit than I would have thought.
Right now, in this very moment of writing this inane little post I realise why the gay little hobbit was in my consciousness last night while I slept. All morning I’ve thought about my odd dream and wondered what it meant and how that actor got into my head. What it means, I don’t know. Not much, I suspect. But, why the actor was there is so obvious I should be ashamed to have had to wonder so long. The actor (somebody Astin; I do not currently have Internet access to google his first name … Steve? Brian?) is in a movie or TV series, which is advertised on a billboard in Holborn Station in front of the place I normally stand on the westbound platform. He got into my head in transit.
The other thing I think about as I write this post is the possible reaction to my seemingly homophobic reference to the gay little hobbit. I like gay people a whole lot. Really I do. Some of my best friends and all that. Samwise Gamgee couldn’t have been any gayer than as portrayed by Mr. Astin, and that just didn’t jive with my impression of him from the book. That’s all.
Not Quite! Not quite all! A footnote: Sean! Sean is his name. (My memory doesn’t deserve the credit. The billboard in Holborn does.)
Filed under: mista, observations London, present, problems, stream of consciousness
{The imprints of the leaves on the pavement on High Holborn have been cleaned away! Their little ghosts banished. Probably sucked up by one of these mini-cars with big, round, twirling mops rotating round and round.
{My lower lip is chapped and cracking, and I have the bad habit of biting at it and scratching at the dry skin. I’m resisting this habit and swiping a quantity of Chapstick / Vaseline / Blistex brands across my wounded lip. The result, I fear, has me looking like I’ve been enjoying a meal from KFC (or Dallas Fried Chicka or Tennessee’s Fried Chicken or even Miami’s Fried Chicken*), but I haven’t because I’m on a health kick.
I’m on a health kick. The first 5 days were no fun at all. The second week has been much more bearable. No alcohol 10 out of 11 days. No sweets other than some morsels of dark chocolate. The gym almost every day. No fried chicken for me. This greasy veneer is meant to be restorative.}
{I imagine you: wondering what it is I’m doing. Am I (is she) trying to impress? Am I (is she) too bored or too idle or too something wrong with my (her) real world that I (she) escape(s) into the matrix to be with all those friends that I (she) have (has), for the most part, not met? I imagine you wondering what’s gotten into Clarissa? “What’s gotten into her?” Are you wondering that, I wonder? It’s just an experiment. An experiment in discipline, in multi-tasking, in time travel.}
{I thought I had lost my padlock, but it was there at the gym on the very locker I used on my last visit. I was glad that I found it. I was glad that I’d not bought a new one. }
{The Mista has compiled a list of To Do weekend tasks. Pain in the ass type of things. I don’t feel like participating. How clever the Mista is to set my expectations, to get me ready. He’s learning. I’m still resentful. The last thing I want to do on the weekend is clean out the basement. What about my hobbies??????????????? The Mista will make a case that he and me and us together should come before my hobbies. I’ll know he’s right. I’ll be childishly annoyed until we go to bed. Then he’ll make me laugh with his funny ways and he’ll snuggle and tickle and whisper and hold me in the warmth under the duvet, and I’ll forget his cunning plan to consume our weekend with chores.}
*What is it with all these random geographically inspired fried chicken houses?!!!
