la femme follette

exhibit a

Wednesday it "snowed," which is to say that there was something in the air, but what landed is not even enough to bother scraping from my car's windshield.  This is why a car is equipped with a windshield wiper.  Whatever.  While it snowed, Fillette and Garçon crowed and wished and hoped for "real snow," which has entered their lexicon as our children.  Whenever they complain about the "cold" or exclaim over the "snow," I vow to take them to Siberia.  They used to be afraid of it, but lately they get excited.  The thing is, Mari does not want to go to Siberia.  "It's cold there," he says. 

The funny difference between he and I is that he does not miss the weather back home.  He scoffs at the simulacrum of winter here, but at the same time he is grateful that he does not have to haul out his cojones and face weather well below 0 for a quarter of the year.  This is why every winter I am wracked by a tubercular homesickness and he just steps around me where I am prostrate with longing so he can cheerfully get into the car and enjoy the driving off without scraping.  He cannot fathom that I would want it to be 5 degrees below 0 just for old times sake.  Not to mention -40 just for a lark -- just in case we go soft. 

We just straightened this out, he and I, because Fillette was expressing a wish to learn ice skating.  I told her that it was not possible.  Mari interrupted and pointed out the indoor ice rink on campus.  I stared, speechless.  Surely I have driven past it a million times and never once equated the Indoor Ice Rink Building with, uh, ice skating.  Because, I explained to him, that is for hockey and also, Olympians, obviously. He laughed at me, while I sat there, stubbornly trying to reconcile "indoor" with "ice skating."  It seemed pitiful to me.  Much as an indoor swimming pool must seem to people from Southern California.   

I explained to my deprived child my life on ice skates.  When I was a girl, growing up not so far away from where her father was a boy, I went ice skating nearly every short afternoon all winter long with an assortment of cousins and neighbors and pals.  The park near my house then, very much like the park near her house now, had a large depression in its landscape.  The fabulous Chicago Park District filled it with water every year and we skated, all the time.  This was in the late 1970s, when even young children in big cities were allowed to go outside and play without the smothering of constant caregiving. 

I was as old then as Garçon is now, and he is barely allowed to play in front of the house with his sister.  Not because I think it is unsafe, because I do not.  They live here.  It is perfectly appropriate.  They are not the heir and heiress to a vast ketchup fortune or anything.  The problem is that the culture says that children must be smothered by my constant vigilance every minute of every day.  So, it is a good thing that the ice skating is indoors where one needs to pay admission, for her father can take her.  Indoor ice skating would certainly break my heart.  Plus, I still think it is pathetic. 

In the area of burden of constant supervision, there was a heinie-showing incident last week at Fillette's afterschool program.  I sure do long for the days when age-appropriate developmental sex play used to mean a box of condoms, a latex dress, an innocent affect, & a fifth of Wild Turkey.  Life was so simple then.  Now there has to be handwringing.  Parenting is so difficult, not for the snap decisions I have to make.  I handled that fine, even though she made her confession while I was trying to read the Sunday magazine section (unfair!  so unfair!) and have a cup of tea.  I could not have been less prepared, unless it had been Garçon, really.  In her words:

Mama, last week?  When I was in the bathroom at [Coyote Ugly]?  My friend [Exhibitionist], showed me her butt.

[I do not hit the ceiling, but instead have spurious reaction of raising one eyebrow while not looking up from newspaper, so she goes on, gathering steam.]

Then she said I had to show me her butt back, I mean show her my butt back.  I told her it was bad behavior, but she said, uh, she told me that no one would find out and I wouldn't get into trouble, so I did.

Then I had to say something.  That is my least favorite part of parenting, the part where the child is waiting and I have to say something. No staging area!  Also, I was minding my own business, reading the newspaper.  Go talk to your father!  I mean!  I settled for saying her name in that way that mothers have, that Garçon imitates so excellently when she is on her last chance with him, all the syllables clipped off and the last long vowel taking a whole breath to get out.  She tucked her head down, "I know, I know!  I am sorry!!"

God.  Anyhow, she got a calm chatter from me about how she already knows that the least she can do to keep safe is to keep her self to herself.  Plus, "no one will find out" is the biggest flag that waves to warn of big trouble ahead.  Also, that she is at the start of a very long road of telling her friends "no" to things that she knows are bad behavior.  Last, that I know it is hard to say no to friends, that it takes great courage, but if she is brave enough to confess bad behavior to her newspaper-reading (!!) mother, that she is way brave enough to say no to her friends, for god's sake.

Her consequence was simple and direct: she could not attend her program for a week.  It was the same consequence -- albeit a longer sentence -- with the same explanation -- children who cannot take care of themselves do not get to be by themselves -- she had for the clothes-on offense of sunburning herself with delinquent sunscreen application at camp last summer.  I did not feel like I was overreacting.  My whole thing about this was to keep it simple.  Upbeat!  Sex-positive!  Which was not my midwestern nor catholic childhood experience at all.

This is why although things are good in my own home, I may be a little rolly inside.  I feel all feeling-y because yesterday, while picking up Garçon, I mentioned to the program director that there was a little heinie-showing incident.  She asked me with who and I said, obliquely, waving it away, "Just girls.  In the bathroom."  But when she asked me who a second time, I caved and gave up the name.  I have no experience in this arena of dealing with administrator types, I tell myself, I told myself.  But a cursory glance at any of my behavior with other "administrators" and "experts" even in the recent past reveals that to be a pretty fat lie.  I ratted the kid out. 

After we left last night, I heard the program director calling the girl's name across the hallway.  I felt so bad.  Because I really want to believe -- I really do believe -- that this incident is not a big deal.  I think that the issue with Fillette is not about heinies, but about her being able to resist the considerable lure of peers.  The complementarity of my children is thus: Garçon wants to please no one, at the expense of himself, and Fillette wants to please everyone, at the expense of herself.  I am much more worried about her long-term resistance to peer pressure than any kind of showing her butt.  This incident was hardly made about bodies at all, except for the larger issues around safety and secretkeeping. 

I have a terrible feeling that this child's mother is not going to see this in the same way.  I am trying so hard to keep my upbringing out of my children's life, but I think I just served it up to someone else's.  This is one of the great misgivings of parenting I think that people without children have -- this idea that one raises their own children, in a deeply-personalized fashion, and no one else's children are any of their concern.  Which is complete bullshit.  Parenting operates within a culture, just like all the rest.  Mari and I have opted out of so much -- institutional schooling, television programming, toys that get on my nerves -- and still, we get hamstrung and caught up by ballet and ten hours a week in a recreational afterschool program.  I can no sooner say that no one else's children affect my parenting choices or my children or my life than I can walk down the street sneezing on people and not expect it to influence my lifetime rate of contusions received.

But whatever.  Judging from the reactions we get on the regular, Mari and I are at the far reaches of still-civilized parenting, verging on the feral.  We let our children call us by our first names.  !!!  So, I guess Ratted-Out Child will have to bloom where she is planted.  I did, once.  I do wish the weather were cold enough to be purgative.  Then I wouldn't even need snow, no.  Just a nice dry day's high in the low teens would suffice.  But!  I am still less homesick than I typically am in these conditions, inside and out.  It might be time to go to the gym, anyhow.  Finally. 

          

homegirl

While I was out yesterday making unfortunate small talk with people I used to think were not morons, I discovered that a number of individuals learned a little something from the lead story of Thursday's New York Times -- the Mississippi River is in Minneapolis????  If my jaw could have hit the floor. I mean.  To admit to it?  To a Midwesterner?!  One who has never faltered in over a decade in her flat-voweled accent?  Impertinent!

Many years ago, when Mari and I were living in Washington, DC.  Mr P---- F---- and I were out at a swinging cocktail hour with a bunch of his boring wonk friends and a guy asked me how I knew Mr P---- F---- and I told him that we went to university together.  Boring Wonk (who was surely from Connecticut) says, "Oh, yeah, in Michigan."  I fixed him with a glare and coldly corrected him.  He shrugged, "Yeah, Wisconsin, you know, yeah."  with a lameness that said Eh, same difference.

Oh!  It makes my blood boil still!!  I slapped the table at which we sat, hard, with the flat of my hand.  I pointed right between his stupid, beady eyes and spoke sharply to him, "You people!  This is the problem with you fucking people!  Michigan and Wisconsin are not the same!  That's like saying, oh, New Hampshire and North Carolina, I get them mixed up!  Fuck you!!"

At that time in my newly-transplanted life, I really did not make a distinction between my 1. regionalism and 2. intolerance for fools.  I look back on that confrontation now and think that maybe I could have been less irate about it, for while it is true that mixing up Wisconsin and Michigan is very much the same as confusing New Hampshire with North Carolina, the knowledge of that is not something that an outsider could well appreciate.  I was not even angry in the way that people from the perimeter of the country like to believe, that we all in the heartland have an inferiority complex about our status as a no-man's land, as "flyover country."  The fact is that Midwesterners prefer for these sissies who complain about the weather and also do not know when to shut their mouths to stay where they are and bellyache on someone else's time. 

Two years ago just this week, I took my son home.  He had only once been to my hometown, a long time before he had teeth, but this time, he was six.  Along the way, we were to meet friends in Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie, in a state park for a picnic and a visit.  All the day leading up to the picnic, I told Garçon that we would be meeting our friends at the beach, and he was excited about it.  He had been an excellent travel companion, a perfect exhibit of why he is my favorite child. 

We arrived at the park midday, the weather was hot and clear, the sky was gorgeous, blue, big, and the sun glittered in the teeny waves thrown along the surface of the water.  I -- who had been by turns moping and despondent that I ever left the homeland and jubilant and satisfied to have this return to the region -- turned to him and said, "Here we are!"  He looked around, wandered down past the tree line to the shore, and came back to me, full of pity for my delusions: Mommy, this is not the beach.   

It was a grim moment, full of gravel in my heart where my shining love for my child had been in all the moments before that.  Of course, of course, this was not the beach to a baby who grew up visiting the Atlantic all along its North American coast.  At the same time, here was a person unwilling to even entertain a broader definition of beach when confronted with a. a body of water which to the naked eye on shore is as large as a sea, b. sand, and c. the permeating scent of sunblock.  This closed something between us, in my pathways of devotion to him, my first baby, and I thought, seething to myself, full of sorrow, This is the problem with you fucking people.  Ever since that day I have known that my children will always be strangers to me in some measure.  It amazes us, Mari and I, that there is something elemental about us, about our friends, about our families and lives and expectations that our children will never, never understand. 

That is my regionalism, which I feel as something I could hold in my hand, it is so real to me, more than it is to Mari, though he understands it completely.  I may be as loyal to the long-left Midwest as anyone has ever been in the annals of displaced Midwesterners.  Ironically, I know that I can never return, the channel is closed to me by my constant companions, Bellyachers One and Two.  It is not possible for Midwesterners to live companionably while in the Midwest with people who complain about even the mildest winter weather with such noise.  I try to stay quiet and no longer point my fingers right between people's eyes.  I can handle that, we are taught from childhood about how to suck it up.  Also, the children can expect to go tent camping some January in Acadia National Park, to which I am looking forward with no small amount of perverse glee.  (I hope it will be freezing!  Freezing!!  So far below-zero cold that we say I thought hell was hot.)      

I can keep one rein in each hand when it comes to the children, surely, but out in the world it becomes tricker, separating regionalism from disparaging morons.  There is this not knowing that Michigan and Wisconsin are not the same, and it is conflated with the not knowing that the Mississippi runs right through downtown Minneapolis, or that the largest freshwater lakes on Earth are chucked into the same territory.  It is impossible to divorce innocent obtuseness from the pernicious derision parceled in this superiority complex wherein the perimeter of the country maintains this idea that the Midwest is not worthy of being known.  This is something on constant, preening display by its subscribers, even if the Midwesterner in the room shows no sign of internalizing these detractions.

OK, whatever, so don't know anything about it, that Bob Engler is not hardly Bob LaFollette, for starters.  Fine.  But to not know that the fucking Mississippi River starts in Minnesota?  Christ almighty, read a fucking book.  This is not covered in the US Geography textbooks in the elementary schools of this region?  Goddamn, honestly, even the Indigo Girls' lyrics could have told anyone that,  come on.  I vow to remain forever intolerant of fools, for even longer than my vowels are wrought flat as the prairie.

girls gone wild

The Nelly Moser clematis is in great, showy bloom right now, covered in palm-sized flowers, the plant as big and wide as a teenaged football star, and people stop to ooh and ahh over it and if I am sitting outside neighbors wish to talk to me about it and I tell them the latest story in Nelly's scintillating memoir, of how she almost died last year and I was v concerned because her fall show last year was so scanty, hot summer, sulky waterer, etc.  People love Nelly.

I was out yesterday, convalescing in the fresh air of the porch, hiding from Nelly's admirers behind the considerable mass of the climbing rose -- Mme Alfred Carriere -- that is planted at the foundation, right behind old Nelly.  When the clematis is in full show, no one notices the 8-foot tall and 6-foot wide medium-green rosebush full of buds swelling pink against their seams.  But in a few weeks, after they bloom with that smell --the fragrance! -- and half the show is fully-opened to its whitest color while the rest are all still palest-pink, well, then people will talk about that.  I planted Mme Carriere just two years ago with a root ball that fit easily into the palm of one hand.   The whole thing came shipped from Heirloom Roses in something the size of a church basement coffee cup.  This year already, I have to consider a strategic pruning so that next year it doesn't take over my house.

My operation went well, though there is still time for a terrible infection to set in and kill me, I suppose.  I was feeling pretty surly when we got to the hospital at quarter-past six in the morning, what since I had not had hardly any sleep and certainly nothing like breakfast and was ravenous.  I tend towards contrariness at best in a medical facility, I just chafe at rules, but I was pretty well reigned-in, I'd say. Almost certainly, Mari would disagree.

I did manage to perplex the hospital registrar by politely but firmly declining to disclose my maiden name, though her response was a stellar kind of acceptance of my position.  Mostly, my inner scofflaw was satisfied enough to have broken the rules by lying about having had anything to eat or drink since midnight, though by my kind of Clintonian rules (v handy for scofflaws), it was not actually lying.  I did not eat or drink anything.  It is just that I was holding a piece of dark chocolate in my mouth on the way to the hospital and I am not sure what happened to it. 

It is surely the tiniest boost from those two squares of gingered Green and Black's that kept me from dissolving into hysterical tears at the sensory cruelty of the slipper socks, the IV's paper tape, and the cute anaethesiologist's confoundedness in the face of my egg allergy.   Note to the girls at the hospital surgical center:   It is just sadistic to brew the waiting room coffee when patients who have not eaten are arriving.

In the end I had the most excellent satisfaction of being discharged into Mari's care, turned loose into the ritzy, high-dollar neighborhood surrounding the hospital with weather that was sunny and gorgeous and I was wearing the cutest back-fastening blouse with the cutest embroidery that made me feel a little like Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson.  I bought the shirt on Wednesday from Anthropologie because the pre-op nurse told me I would need something that fastened instead of pulling over and I owned nothing of the sort until I marched right on over to right this surgical wrong.

(must note:  scofflaw about starving; on board in regard to fashion.  revealed priorities) 

The excellently satisfying part is none of that.  Well, the blouse, but the stuff of seamy and lurid tone that I love was that I had the most excellent hair that was the most excellent bouffant combination of salon-blowout, ultra-fuck-bedhead, and matted down with blood.  I was still stoned & wild-eyed on fentanyl, so when we got to the well-heeled crowd's restaurant for breakfast, it was just as if I was winding down after the most excellent all-night party ever.  Totally Katharine Hepburn meets Valley of the Dolls with an extra Cronenberg feature-ette.  (which totally equals Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson, now that I think of it.  no?) Then my husband brought me 45 percocets and a raft of antibiotic capsules.  I suppose I shall be sitting in the garden again today, still stoned as Betty Ford and squarely against biotics.   

extensile

Last week we had time.  We went to the aquarium, heedlessly, all of us in love.  Easy come, easy go.  Not the love, just the time.  Mari has a couple of deadlines looming large and is gone more than usual this week.  I am pretty free, but I can see it, on the horizon of my wall-mounted 120-day At-A-Glance write-on/wipe-off calendar, I can see where it lights up in the distance -- boom -- the powder keg of mid-April to late-May.  Then it will be calm again.    

A woman with whom I have been acquainted for years, here and there and (obviously) not well, found out that I do not have help.  She found this impossible to believe and kept asking smaller and smaller questions to quantify it.  I don't find it so impossible to believe.  When the children were 2 and 4 and Mari was on travel for an entire summer, I had help; I had a college girl in here 8 or 10 hours a week.  Basically, she would take the kids out so I could clean the house in peace, without someone pouring nail polish on the floor in another room.   

We had a cleaning lady briefly a few years ago and that was when I found out the mostly-shameful truth about me was that I would rather pay someone to take my children while I cleaned my own house.  Oh, it's not so grim as that!  Sometimes, I would go downtown and get a manicure or just wander around.  When the kids were that young, I was still fierce in my resistance and had some idea that I deserved "Me-Time," which I pretty much now find kind of a laughable concept.  At the same time, I am no longer feeding people with my body.  Also, these people are old enough now to load and unload the dishwasher while I do the crossword over a second cup of tea.  Talk about Me-Time, indeed.

I notice this all goes back to a clean house.  For me, a clean house is the proof that I need that everything is in order and my life is just fine, thank you very much.  A few months ago, I confessed to having gotten up and hit the bricks on a project so immediately that at 2 or 3 or whatever, everyone was still in their pajamas, which never happens in this house.  I won't feed the children breakfast until they have gotten dressed, including shoes.  Not even on Christmas.  But when I mentioned that, a girlfriend cringed and divulged she could not enjoy being in her pajamas in the daytime, that it felt like depression.  I know that when the children are small, I am supposed to be burning my bra and letting the housework go, but fuck that.  It feels like sloth, which in its turn, feels like depression.

At the same time, this means that the house is clean in inverse proportion to my actual well-being.  When I am anxious and overwhelmed, which is not as often as people might guess, having that I have no "help," the house is so clean you can eat off the floors, and I relish the sisyphean order of keeping it to such a standard, even with the two children, for the endlessness keeps me active.  The product of a clean house keeps me focused, when I feel frazzled and think, what am I even doing, how can I, when should I, I, I, I, etc, I just look around and have proof in the fact of the house being clean.  I can touch it and lick it and eat from its floors.  I have clearly not been wasting all my time watching soaps and eating bonbons.  Phew.

Currently, because I have two people who are starting to pull their own weight -- besides the dishwasher, they manage the recycling, make the rice, make their beds, change their own sheets, vacuum their own sleeping space, and are mostly cheerfully hounded into putting away their own clean clothes -- I am having the strange experience of living in a really clean house with a lot of time to waste.  Besides the abovementioned crossword, I have this week read three books, caught up on a dozen or more late-waiting correspondents, sorted through the pile of education-related papers in a rubbermaid tote bin under my desk and organized them by child and more or less by subject.  Also, I might be writing a poem in the way way back of my head.  Or something that might remind me of a poem.  I am not sure.

It is worth mentioning that besides being in deep denial about the truth of a friend's hospital stay, which makes sorting homeschool detritus the A Number-One Activity around here (always about clean!), I am not really knitting anything, even though Fillette has a birthday coming very very soon and I have a project on the needles for her that I am not really working on.  I can't read while I knit.  A magazine, but that's it.  Other people do it, so maybe I just have not figured it out yet. 

Things other people have figured out before me, surely:

1. put steel-cut oatmeal in rice cooker to cook it without all that effing stirring.
2. when laundering children's garments, a gallon-sized ziploc bag is a perfect way to put a little thing on pre-soak without leaving a big dumb splashy bucket around or taking over a  basin.               
3. the reason no pot roast in the world has ever tasted like my mother's pot roast is because what my mother called a pot roast, the rest of this country calls a brisket.  A-ha.

Fillette peeps around corners every time she hears the sounds of me giggling at Mari's jokes or swooning before his considerable charm.  Frequently now, when we come up for air, making out in the kitchen in broad daylight, she will be standing there, having sneaked down she has on little tiny silent cat feet, I ask her, generously, in a secret joke with Mari, "Well, hello, Electra.  Can we help you?"  She says to me, sassily, "Don't call me that."  It makes me laugh.

I was wondering with Mari yesterday, what if it isn't Electra?  What if it isn't about him, what if it is about me, and in the rush to a. sexualize children and b. be heterosexist, convention has said that it is about her relationship with her father?  But she never hangs around her father any other time!  I don't find her lingering around him when I have been in the shower or off running errands, basking in his hilarious knock-knock jokery or asking him to fly her like a plane.  Much like my little Oedipus who just grew away from me, she wants to be with me, all the time (way less sitting in my lap, making out, but she's less spoony than he is anyhow), and then when I am with Mari, oh! here she comes!  At the very least, I don't think she wants to rival me.  I very much get the sense that she wants to see me in action.  There is a lot of action to see in my marriage.  A lot of giggling and swooning, yes. 

We are on the threshold of the season of birthdays here!  The children's, close enough to be one, and mine, also our wedding anniversary, aka, Wedding Birthday, for which the children marvellously demand (as with their own birthdays) one story of the wedding birth, and also celebratory cake.  This year I realized with some great amount of thrill, that they are old enough and I said to each of them, last night, at bedtime, whispered in each ear for them to think about what they would make the other for their birthday, that we would plan it special.  Not that either of them can keep a secret.  As soon as I left the room, I am sure they started their own Up-All-Night Birthday Committee.  They have this sweetness, it's like time times love, those two.   

sanguinary

Last week, my friend Kylie was talking about bacon and I could barely stand it and then the next day, Algren was going on about bulgogi and so I woke up the third day feeling like I had fangs in my mouth. I have not as yet been sated, though I did inhale a 12-ounce package of bacon in 36 hours by crumbling it over my own servings of various non-meat meals. The best part of the whole Bacon Interlude was that Garçon sidled into the kitchen on the second day and surreptitiously helped himself to a crunched-off strip of bacon. Ha-ha. He was like a cat that got something bad and sticky in its mouth. GACK GACK ARRRGH GACK GACK. He thought it was something tasty, something vegetarian and chippy. Ha-ha.

But still, my bloodlust endures. I would suck anyone's anything to get a vat of lamb shwarma delivered to my door. Or a good plate of carnitas with extra lime. Shwew! I am fanning myself. I did finally, after four years, just this week discover a good gluten-free approximation of okonomiyaki, so I am a little bit satisfied in this deprived-by-allergies department. But not in the nominal-vegetarian area, no.

Monday, I had my second consultation with second surgeon. I was going to see three, but then I realized the third one was not so exciting and my time this month has already been pretty limited. The situation is thus: I have a lesion which is too large to be removed by a dermatologist, which is not as dangerous as it sounds, nor due to any real negligence on my part. Where I am lacking in negligence of my own health, I more than make up for it in an extreme and painful ambivalence, terror, and anxiety concerning the entire medical profession, save one pediatric surgeon I dated in the era of pursuit of my mrs degree, who ironically, is more than qualified to handle this excision. Not that it would not be awkward to contact him.

The point is this: as terrified as I am already of normal physicians, having to hire a plastic surgeon has been beyond free-fall horror. Plastic surgeons are just no good. Unless they are fixing up babies with cleft palates on their own nickel, they are silicone junkies! Making money on misery! I saw Joan Rivers today on Martha and a very angry person did that to her! No good!

I talked myself into an amazing anxious state of endless weeping and pronounced agoraphobia in the onset of this year before I realized that maybe Kylie could keep my kids for an hour or so two Mondays in a row and Mari could come with me for protection. Without Mari, certainly there was a risk that one minute I could be asking about the lesion on my head and the next they could be forcing Botox between my eyes and rifling my handbag! Egads! Safety in numbers!

Of course when Mari and I got there, when the receptionist ushered us into the exam room, there was a gigantic box of breast implants behind the exam table. Immediately we were like 12-year-old boys, Mari and I. "Oooooooh!" I squealed. "Fake ta-tas!!" And then I kind of threw a couple at him, like juggleable beanbags, while I jostled a few of my own. Delighted with our amazing, lurid fortune, Mari exhorted me to stick them in my bra, quick, and I said, "No! We'll get caught!!" Then I fidgeted for a minute before deciding the only thing to do was take pictures with my cameraphone. Technology has enhanced all of our lives.

We did not caught playing with them, though our scuffling and shushing and giggling when we heard the doctor knock at the door was not the natural-acting act of seasoned reckless scofflaws such as ourselves. We are a little out of practice. Mari and I were real fucking hellraisers before we had kids; no vandalism, but high jinks practical jokers. Oh, youth, one is so young while it gets wasted.

But the doctor was quite nice and gentle and has done this procedure before, seen this condition before. I have complete confidence in him. His credentials are impeccable. The problem with him is that he is a sleazy plastic surgeon. Well, he is not a sleazy plastic surgeon, but he heads a sleazy plastic surgery practice. Breast implants lying around where anyone can juggle them! Really vapid office staff! Ugly, cheesy waiting room!! All of his domain names are kind of embarrassing! A million gigantic boxes of pharmaceutical widgets, uh, whatsits ... things like restalyne post-it pads, botox pens, etc. A tawdry office park location! But his experience is solid and I really get the idea that he got to the top of his game and said, "God, you know? I could be doing fee-for-service fake ta-tas. Fuck managed care and their $68 burn reconstruction jobs. I have to pay malpractice insurance."

When he found out where I was from, he asked me if I was excited about the Super Bowl. I told him very kindly that I do not follow professional football. He confessed, a little bit shyly, to us that he was going to the game and that was exciting to him. He then kind of dug the toe of his really expensive shoe into the carpet while he said that it was just because his brother works for the NFL, so that's why. Plus, their parents are down there for the winter, so that would be nice to see them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does his mother know what he does for a living? He is a plastic surgeon. He is like a divorce attorney with a scalpel. I want to like him, but I just want him to be more medical. I would be more comfortable, in the case of a bad pathology report on this bad patch of skin, if he had a full complement of hospital facilities behind him. He does not.

The other surgeon I saw does have that. She is much younger than the first surgeon (although he is only in his early 40s), has had her entire career in large university facilities, specializing in a lot of reconstructions post-oncology. She also wants to execute the excision in two operations, three months apart, which is a little like, I mean, hell to the no. She also sent me kind of a bitchy email today in response to a question I had about post-operative recovery as it related to scheduling the procedure by way of Mari's time at home. In addition, she seemed a little unclear about what it was she was looking at. It is a birthmark that 0.3% of babies in the whole world are born with; it has its own pathology. The other surgeon is extensively experienced in pediatrics; the other one, the one in the sleazy practice? Mari keeps saying, "She had on cool boots. She seems more communicative." (this before the bitchy email) I just don't know who to pick. I'm afraid that I'm just going to say toss the lot of it and wait for some sort of emergency to develop around it. I wish my hairstylist could do it. I just can't stand doctors.

foison

I came home Sunday from the Dreaded Excellent Not Too Shabby Girl Vacation to find waiting for me in a my pile of mail a CD that Billy Bob Kowalski and his much older elder brother put together last year. Kowalski spent a good deal of last year teaching himself to play the mandolin, and added to the brothers' other considerable combined musical talents, they spent a few long weeks in the studio last fall assembling a sweet collection of original compositions and american folk standards, not least of which is a gorgeous rendition of "Summertime." They had it ready in time for Christmas, as it was their present for their mother. Like Elvis. They are so cute, and really, it is Quit-Your-Day-Job good.

This CD has allowed for some excellently benign spousal harassment. This morning, I sallied by the office door, balancing the disc on one finger and telling Mari I was going to take a shower with Kowalski, then reporting gaily from the bathroom that it was oddly exactly like being 22 again: I was in the shower, getting soap in my eyes and trying not to drown and he was yodeling along right outside. But, with much less door-slamming, toothbrushing sounds, and passive-aggressive pancake-making. Most excitingly, I can now control his volume.

I talked to Kowalski briefly this afternoon, including in my silvertongued review a brief report of the superb heckling climate his work has engendered; he was predictably shocked. I dusted him off and reminded him of how it goes around here. Mari and I have been dishing it out, having a rollicking good time for the past few weeks, so this collection comes at an excellent time, since we were running out of our own material. Lately, we've been reduced to leaving ersatz Google search results on our computer screens "accidentally." He started it with "how to kill your wife and get away with it" and I countered with "best birth control for women over 35," which is only funny in light of Mari's vasectomy. Ha-ha. He came back with "what is the antidote for anomie," which is directly related to some Chicago-style lawlessness I indulged last week, and I was waiting on my next move, but then Kowalski's project came in the mail and I am thus armed with hijinks for the foreseeable future.

It is Kowalski's stodgy midwestern sense of propriety (which only seems to get exercised in this one category) that always leads him to be mortified by my lighthearted reports of his role as foil in the spectacularly wriggly and rambunctious antics Mari and I engage. All joking aside, Mari has never minded Kowalski and any number of former beaux to be around, what since it is without exception educational in some regard.  Like cultural anthropology, or spying.

This is not as much of an issue now as it was 12 years ago when he was about to marry a flibbertigibbet he dated for about 8 weeks before slipping a sparkly bauble on her left hand in response to her coy but antagonistic triple-dog dare to marry her, but the dynamic persists. Yes, I challenged an interesting stranger I quite fancied to marry me and he countered with a reckless display of adventure. In this, I knew beyond any doubt that he was exactly my kind of guy, or at least not a baby whinercakes wishy-washy mama's boy. Still, I spent much of the first year of my marriage shut up in the bathroom, hiding in the full, bubbly tub. He was preternaturally secure about this, usually remarking dryly, "Take your time, we've got the rest of our lives."

I stopped hiding in the bathroom (from him, I still hide from the children in there) several years ago, but Mari revealed as recently as last night that he still loves to witness me around people I have known since I was a teenager. One of his favorite recent memories of me is in 2005 having dinner with me and several friends from college. I was sitting across from Mari, next to the children, with my friend Chickie on my other side. Chickie and I were slouching in the booth, against each other so that if one were removed the other would topple, with our arms loosely twined and each with a hand resting in the other's lap, heads together. In Mari's recollection, Chickie was telling a hilarious anecdote about his wife and their children to me and there was not one trace of caution or wariness in my countenance or conversational reflex.

What since I am a socially-anxious freakshow of the sort that would spend the entire first year of her marriage hiding from her husband's appreciative gaze, these moments are monumental. I only in the last three or four years have assented to Mari touching me in front of other people. I say to him, to other people, "I married him. Vows! What else does he want?" In other words: I'll take my time; we've got the rest of our lives. Watching me with my guard all the way down with people I do not see all the time fascinates Mari. I can still be slow to warm to him if he spends more than his usual two days away on travel. When Kowalski calls and I go all looselimbed and spoony in the first two minutes of the call and spend the rest of the week with headlights for eyes saying ok to everything, it is the kind of thing Mari likes to overhear. Plus, he gives up a half-hour to read the bedtime stories and in exchange has a dreamy and receptive wife and he didn't have to do any of the heavy plying. People often find this scandalous, but we did not marry those losers, thank god.

One thing he has said is this: Most people have their families around, telling the stories, filling the details, pulling down the projection screen. I don't have that around me. What I do have are boisterous anecdotes that get told as a result of contextualizing some kind of flushed hilarity he did not quite understand as it happened, and in that, he always learns something about me. I am not necessarily secretive, but one definitely has to know what questions to ask. Or either catch me as a girl and smother the shit out of me, like Kowalski did. A young woman who uses all of her resources squirming away from one's formidable and encompassing lure has very little left to run her smokescreen. I think Kowalski is Mari's favorite because he knows just absolutely everything about me, including almost always how to draw me out without me catching on.  This is because while Mari is a skilled observer, as in ornithology, at the zenith of my resistance to Kowalski, he was a stalker, as in breaking-and-entering, watching me sleep.

Five years ago, while Mari and I were shopping in a West Village food salon I used my very best Italian to ask the man behind the case to tell me what was in a prepared salad. We went back and forth and when I was satisifed, I took my wrapped package down from the counter and turned to Mari. He was astonished. I asked him what the face was about. He said, "You ... speak ... Italian??" As I thought that much was certainly obvious to someone having stood there, I walked away to the cash wrap without a word. Later, at the Israeli's house, he said almost accusingly to the Israeli, "Did you know Femme spoke Italian?" The Israeli agreed that he did, but was wry when he pointed out that the question begged here was why Mari did not know.

I told Fillette last weekend that she would have to join her Papa's club when we were in Actress's apartment and I absentmindedly sat down to fidget at Sound Designer's piano. Three bars into "Für Elise" and she was standing next to me at the piano, mouth open. "How do you know how to play the piano?" True to form, I stood up and covered the keys, all done, before telling her briskly I learned as a child and it was time for her bath. She was as a person always is when they are in sudden receipt of my many and varied inconspicuous talents and skills, stammering and full of questions I do not really wish to answer. Like her father and everyone else, she will eventually catch on and learn the right questions to ask. Or, she will learn to spy quietly, without interrupting.  In realizing there is something huge she does not know about me, she knows more about me than she ever has to date.

I suspect that with her uncomplicated clarity, so much like Kowalski's, she'll skip the questions and go straight to the high-pressure cajoling and demands. It will work as long as I don't see her coming. For years, Kowalski has been after me to accompany him. I would, as a girl -- as his nominal girlfriend -- walk right past the piano in his house, never so much as resting my handbag on the bench. He knew I played: I had sheet music piled all around my apartment, would frequently explain away a half-day saying I was in the piano rooms at school with a friend.  I refused to play, for him, with him, endlessly, terribly.   

Much in the same way Fillette caught me at the piano, like Mari caught me speaking Italian, Kowalski caught me once humming and was on to my madrigalian resources. I never did it again where he could hear, no amount of coddling or sweet talk would change my mind about my tightly-sealed vocal cords. Recently, on the phone, he was working out a mandolin sequence and kept aggressively hesitating in the start of each refrain, where the second part comes in, and though it is a sentimental favorite of mine, I sat stonily on the line, lips zipped. He said, just as meanly as I was being silent, "I know you can sing, Femme." I flatly refused. He asked disconsolately, "Even now?" Now that I tend towards being sweeter and more pliable than ever, he meant. "Especially now," I told him resolutely. "Because I am not married to you and am I to learn nothing from June Carter Cash?"

It is a little weird to have my house filled up with the quotidian day-and-night serenading of the most excellent epic affair of my girlhood. That I know all the lyrics to a pining love song about Kowalski's dog because I have heard it in every revision for the last two years. Kowalski sings to me all the time on the phone because he wants to know what I think. I never showcased my practical skills for him, but I am quick to hold forth on technical matters. I had to stop a track today and play it again because the sound of his brother's speaking voice in the background brought his face into my mind in sharp detail and I wondered longingly and with great sincerity about his sweet daughter, his wife. For someone so squirmy and resistant, I spent an awful lot of time traveling the midwest to have dinner with Kowalski's siblings.

I told Mari today of how Kowalski took it like a knife to his heart when I told him that I gaily sang along with the recorded version of himself. After all the telephonic moaning and groaning, he asked hopefully, "Did we sound good?" I told him yes. His response was wordless grief peppered with I-knew-it-ism at this missed opportunity. This is not the first time in a decade Kowalski has had such a response to me. He asked me to reconsider my prohibition. I refused. This is not the last I will hear of this, I know, but I am firm.

I had to explain to Mari the years of stonewalling and ambivalence on this matter, stories of which are in general not new to Mari, even as the calculated antagonism in them reflects none of what he knows of being with me. I explained that even though I am more pliable and agreeable now, I will never sing along with Kowalski in real time. June Carter Cash came up. The two broke-down songs on the CD that are fabulously soundtracked into the dirty turmoil of my on-again and off-again liaison with Kowalski were deconstructed. Mari was surprised that such as what he now knows about Kowalski's musical chops -- and how much I like to be good at what I do with people who are also good at what that is, plus my outsized fondness for Kowalski -- I had never given confirmation of my singing voice.

Mari and I run a regular Rodgers and Hammerstein production around here when we are in the right mood. He was a little smug and a lot contented. He is probably going to short-sheet my side of the bed tonight. That's fine. I have plans to change my cellphone ringtone to Kowalski's bouyant rendition of "Sunny Side of the Street." Also load a copy of the whole CD in every slot in our car's changer. Ha-ha. Oh, that's good. It's a good CD. Mari and I sound good singing along to it, really.

contagious excitement

Approximately two hours after the last guests left our party last night, Fillette (for whom the entire night had been normal, through dinner, bath, and the bedtime routine) suddenly and right in front of our astonished eyes, within minutes, becomes covered in tiny pink blisters.  Worst party ever!  Now I have to call every one of our friends and tell them.  This is very terrible.  I hope no one dies, or even gets shingles, which I hear is like a fate worse than death. 

The effect of the party is that I have a six-pound varied supply of smoked meats in my refrigerator.  There is handmade pepperoni, hot salami, sweet and hot soppressatas, a wet salami, and some cappiccola.  Also, I have some manchego, something called izdiabal, I think, cremosa provolone (made in wisconsin!), and a bit of asiago.  The ricotta cake was incredibly well-received, and I have inhaled the incredible smell of the leftovers so often that no one would dare eat it now, even if it were not just dissolving right inside the fridge.  It will have to be thrown away tomorrow.

(Shout-out technical talk to Marsha and the lovely Santos:  I had to cook a large quantity of lentils and black-eyed peas in cylindrical stockpots, instead of using lower, deeper sauciers, and so purchased a heat diffuser for the party's food preparation.  It changed my life.  Only regular stirring!  Not any stirring to prevent scorching!  What a miracle!  I had often wondered if my life would be wonderful if I had one, and now I know the answer is Yes.) 

I wish that the children ate meat, for we have an awful lot of it, even the unsmoked variety (most of which has been put up in the freezer), but I am now quarantined and so housebound with two children whose dietary requirements are narrow and also about which they have capricious, yet, unwavering ideas.

Fillette is a picky eater and I do not wish to argue with her about what she will and won't stonewall, particularly when she is ill.  Tonight, she had congee -- rice porridge (the third miracle of the heat diffuser!) -- with a poached egg on top and some grated ginger within, where she could not see it, but only say, Is something, er, soapy in there??  And then I would say, innocently, "Hm?" and then distract her, with a change of subject.  Say, dancing, or singing. 

Mari thought for certain that I had exhausted the plentitudes of Eye Schmaltz for rent on DVD while Garçon was ill, but no.  I came home from the library today with two Shirley Temple films (hence, the dancing and singing talk), two from Joe Camp's Benji series, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, Bambi, and the original Miracle Worker, with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.   

Tomorrow morning, early, Garçon starts his very first trial at working for our eccentric neighborhood cat lady, helping her with landscaping detail.  God only knows how much she plans to pay him, but it shall not hurt the child to learn that Hard Work Has Some Reward.  Case in point:  mere weeks after I wrote on and on about my dissatisfaction with the plastic desperation of the world's gift givers, giving and giving, for the sake of getting it wrong, an umbrella swift arrived here at my very own home, addressed to my husband, but intended for me.   Now I can spend hours winding yarn that I have bought in skeins, and in addition, a whole world of Yarn for Sale has been opened to me!  Because I am no longer limited by the skein/hank issue!  This is where Mari learns that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!  Happy New Year!

the low-rise jeans have gone on long enough

I was trying to tell Mari, who was live on a conference call, that the plumber called and was on his way.  I attempted this with an elaborate ass-cracking charade while fake-pointing and fake-chatting with the cordless house phone in my hand.  Mari kept gesturing back at me in ways that plainly said, What The Hell, Crazy Lady?, and I gave up in disgust and flounced from the room.  Later, when he was free, I said, "The plumber!  Duh!!"  and he said that the ass-crack=plumber thing escaped him because I could have been any of the many girls in ill-fitting pants riding the subway, or even me, while I am crawling around, cleaning the bathroom.

Enough.  I shake my fist at fashion's sky.

audio-visional

Fillette's body is completely free.  I want to keep her home and listen to her chatter on about what she knows to be true and what she thinks is real and watch her furrow her little brow and work hard at copying Picasso's works on paper.  We recently had observation in the ballet classroom and Mari and I talked quietly later, during the several days following, about how she was so lacking in the complicity of objectification.  Not to be too women's studies about it.

What was interesting to me was that in two different groups of girls, with different teachers and all, that Fillette and her excellent goofball friend Emily were the only ones not peering at their parents, hesitantly and coyly dancing while watching for a positive response.  Fillette was the only one that didn't pay her parents any mind, aside from a wave or a smile when she chasséd past.  Emily is a most excellent and rambunctious showoff.  15 years from now, she will have a YouTube clip from some frat party that shows her winning at some feat of strength while completely hammered, and she won't be able to stop laughing the whole time, able to only gasp out between guffaws, "omigod, omigod, omigod."  Oh, I hope we still know her then.  She will be awesome.

Fillette has plenty of problems and fragilities, sure, but not about her body.  She is much more of an interior mystery.  Today, I was driving the car and worrying about something that has been overwhelming me a little.  Plus also I was tired, Mari has been on travel all week and I miss him and somehow, because of all this, I was driving the children to the grocery store at 9pm.  Whatever.  I broke into a little sob and from the back seat, she said, "What is it?  What's wrong, Mommy??" 

I was going to explain to her that I was tired and overwhelmed, and she interrupted.  "Are you sad because when you called Kay to come with us to the Wegman's, she didn't answer the phone and she didn't call you back?"  I told her no, and was laughing a little while I did.  I asked her if that would make her cry.  Oh, yes, she responded, quite sincerely.  I thought, god!  how sweet and little and simple and excellent it all is for her!  I just love her.  Eventually, after she let me get a word in edgewise, she summarized for me as such, It is like in the Edward books, when he isn't feeling ready. 

Things that are really not problems, but complaintive:   

1. the grocery store has been out of Maille Original Dijon every time I go, for weeks.
2. low-rise pants piss me off now.  I am tired of my belly and lower back being cold.  if I wanted this part of my body to be cold all winter, I would have a baby and nurse it at the playground.  those days are over.  I would like to have a toasty midriff, but still look cute.  the answer is skirts, I guess. 
3. san pellegrino water has apparently been found to have trace amounts of uranium, in tests done by some zealous german consumers evaluative publication.  ordinarily, I never ever ever would give a fuck about something like that, but a friend ("friend!") told me and now I feel as if I can't ignore it.  who tells their friends stuff like that?!  does no one remember what happened to Karen Silkwood!?!  god!

Speaking of "friends," I have to wonder who it was in the Diamond Industry Lobby that got the person in Hollywood so pissed off at them that a movie called Blood Diamond is coming out during the year's biggest shopping season. Mari and I saw the preview months ago and I asked him then, Was someone a nonconsensual beard followed by a nasty confrontation of something in a flagrante plus a muckraking divorce or what the hell? I secretly and cynically thought the movie wouldn't make it to the theatres as planned.  Well, but there it is.  I wonder if anyone will watch it.  I almost certainly will not, since the preview made me seasick with the waving camera and it hardly seemed worth the cost of tickets + 3 hours babysitting, but it didn't look as if it candy-coated the industry. 

I have been shopping a lot more than usual lately, mostly at the IKEA and the grocery store late-nights.  Everyone is singing along to the overhead music.  I'm there with them.  It is quite like being in a musical.  What is interesting to me is that I have no recollection of ever listening to most of these songs deliberately, yet I somehow know all the lyrics.  Old Gerry Rafferty's "Right Down the Line?"  "Band on the Run?"  Mais non!!  There must have been some sort of 1970s brainwashing hardwiring to which I was programmed, for although I was confused by the seemingly-familiar introductory lyric, to which my companion in the bulk foods aisle -- a pretty blond woman, in her early 40s, dressed in a really expensive suit -- was keeping right up with, I was able to join right in with her when the rain exploded and we fell into the sun.  And how??  I  have supposed already, I guess.  I think this is also from where my singular talent of equivocation must come.

The world is wonderful when you are a child, certainly; lyrics must just seep into your brain.  Garçon and Fillette have been telling any friend who will listen that their mommy got eyeglasses from the doctor that go inside her eyes, instead of on her face!  They are called contact lenses.  Surprisingly (to me), not one of their little buddies has said, "Duh."

I was first prescribed a pair of contacts in the late 80s, when my only option due to astigmatism was a gas-permeable lens.  I wore them until I got pregnant with Garçon and then my life involved a lot of napping and needing to see in the night and dry eyes and sensitivity and I was just not any longer vain enough to withstand the torture of these hard little pieces of plastic.  Neither am I vain enough to have surgery to fix my terrible myopia.  But last week at the optometrist, I said to him, wistfully, Isn't there a comfortable 21st century option now? and lo, soft contact lenses. 

In addition, he gave me the best news, which was that I am not about to go blind from the glaucoma, no.  The reason I was having so much trouble with my left eye was because my astigmatism there was rounding out and disappearing and had so rendered my eyeglass prescription obsolete.  Also, painful.  So, soft contacts are a treat in comparison.  And I only need one toric!  I bought drops for the dryness.  We will see.

Baby blankets do not knit themselves.  I called the upholsterer today and told him I want to change my fabric for the chair he has.  There are now 31 days until Famille Follette's biggest party of the year.  14 days until long-weekend houseguests and a short trip (finally) to see that dealer-guy show at the Met!

teething and nothingness

The children are in an art class in a part of town that supports loitering and people-watching, so I have had a couple of hours each day this week to skulk around behind prescription wayfarers holding a cup of megachain iced decaf while I contribute nothing to the world.  Except, I guess, that one of those things was shopping for my alter ego, Ermentrude Diaphony, United States Tooth Fairy, to find a small magic ball for Garçon.

Mari kept saying to me, I don't know if you're going to be able to get what they are expecting.  and I kept saying, harrumph, for when it comes to Les Enfants, I am very much like Mary Poppins, with the magic and the knowing and, also, the harrumphing.   While it was true that I only had the words "small magic ball" on which to go, I don't spend nearly every single moment of their little lives with them so that I can be perplexed by a simple request for the tooth fairy, do I?  What would be the point of being with them so much if all they would be to me are strangers?  These were all questions that I had for Mari, but in the interest of marital harmony and maximum told-you-so impact, I let it go and went out to the store I knew would have what I needed and bought it and brought it home and showed him.

He was still not satisfied and continued in his uncertainty and characteristic perfectionism.  I am of the mind that perfectionism is so paralyzing -- we might get it wrong!  better just to do nothing!!  It's very annoying to me and frankly, being the primary caregiver to 2 children is the fastest way I know to bust it up, that attitude, because you can't just lounge around, fretting and doing nothing.  Something has to be done when, for example, the child has lost a tooth and is waiting for the Tooth Fairy to deliver, and an imperfect something is always better than a perfect nothing, by definition, not to be too existentialist about it.  Mari is a perfectionist by nature, but I think this tendency has been exacerbated by his latest project at work, which is very much in the realm of planning and endless meetings.  I mean, he comes home with stories of having meetings about meetings.  but here, at Chez Follette, we can take a risk now and then that good enough is better than if only.      

The ball came from a store in the neighborhood where these things are, this kind of faeried store with all kinds of wiccan and pagan relics, as well as a lovely selection of jewelry made of every polished stone imaginable.  I spent five minutes finding what I needed: a polished, handful- sized sphere of mineral with some kind of brilliant starbust on the inside of the ball that shows in an arc of sparkles when you turn it toward you in the light.

A note from Ermentrude was left under his pillow, exchanged for his slightly desultory note to her, I lost a tooth last week and cannot find it.  It was supposed to be for a small magic ball.  Can you find it?  Ermentrude's note was cheerful, small, smudged with silver glitter, did not miss a dig at asking him to work on his left-handed penmanship, and told him the ball was left in their playroom, on the table.  Their delight with the rightness of it was something palpable, to say nothing of the sledgehammer presence of the squealing and breathless shouting and gratitude of Ermentrude's miraculous prescience, their elaborating on its sheer perfection.  I do not believe I actually said I told you so to my husband.  I thought it would be immodest, and unecessary, really.