You for real or are you just
My sweet fantasy?
Returning to my house that evening, I saw everything with a freshly critical eye—particularly the twenty-five-year old blue Landcruiser with the mismatched red door panel that’s been parked in the driveway for over a year. Should I stick a few dried ears of corn on it, to fit in? I worry that there is nothing to be done for us, especially when I recall that time we left a full-size freezer to defrost on the front lawn for an entire weekend. It was fully defrosted after only a few hours, but we figured, better safe than sorry. Also, better lazy than respectable.
I was already growing ashamed of the fact that, when recycling day rolls around, ours is the only bin that overflows with empty beer and wine bottles. Sure, the occasional milk-gallon jug or soup can sneaks in, but mostly it’s a shiny brown avalanche of empty booze receptacles piled at the end of the driveway every other week. It is some small comfort knowing that we drink decent beer, even if it is in obscene quantities. Our neighbors, their monocles splintering in disapproval, will have to admit that at least we have taste in something. And I know that the man who comes around in the mornings before trash collection (in his Saab) to cash in on our empties appreciates us. Last week he left the loveliest gilt-edged, monogrammed calling card.
‘Molly,’ you are probably thinking. “Why are you complaining about your excessively wealthy neighborhood? You grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. You never fit in there either. You used to hug your doorman. At least you can feel safe walking the dog at night.’ But I can’t! In my last neighborhood, all I had to fear was roving gangs of teenagers and drunken college students. These I at least vaguely understood, having once been part of each of their ranks. Now I am faced with the unknown, having never even remotely rubbed elbows with wealthy suburbanites. When I am faced with the unknown, my mind fills in the blanks with outlandish, unrealistic fears. I blame being read to as a child.
I feel increasingly out of place as I amble past immaculately trimmed lawns in old sneakers and pajama pants, with an unpedigreed dog at the end of a leash that is frayed in three places and coated with dried leaves—and not as a decorative homage to fall. What if someone thinks I am trespassing and calls the cops? What if they decide to administer their own brand of high-end vigilante justice, and I am found in the woods, beaten within an inch of my life with a diamond-headed walking stick? I fear that during one of my innocent, late-night walks, I will accidentally witness a clandestine affair between a wealthy socialite neighbor and her landscaper and have hounds released at me, or be run over by a limo.
I know. There’s something wrong with me. I think it’s mostly the abundance of lively fall decorations that have me flustered. There’s something unnerving about a neighborhood in which lawns are green and uncluttered in the twilight of October, while entranceways, pillars and gateposts are ablaze with fake foliage. I suppose I should be appreciative of the time and effort that is put into these embellishments. After all, they are there for the enjoyment of myself and the few other residents who live in this small community, and they certainly beat my last neighborhood’s October decoration of choice: raw eggs. The least I can do is admire their work. And curb my dog.
Molly: hi mama!
SHKESPEARE: It’s Dad, but I haven’t learned how to do IM yet!
Molly: Hi Dad! You’re doing fine!
SHKESPEARE: I’m taking an Internet class at the “Y” but we have only had one calss. I gotta go. Bye, Bye!
Dad
Lately I have been thinking about money a good deal. Isn’t it funny how you always end up thinking about the things you don’t have? Nope. Especially when those things are either money or sex. It is funny when those things are rickets, though. Rickets.
I’ve always envied those famous and wealthy people who say, in television interviews, that they are the luckiest people alive because they get to make money doing the things they love. I suppose anyone could pull that off in theory, by learning to love whatever it is they’re stuck doing. However, I’ve noticed that it’s mostly writers and actors and rock stars who say that kind of thing. Have you ever heard a dentist tell an interviewer, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”? Then again, how many dentists do you see interviewed on television? Not too many. Maybe they have bad publicists.
In the beginning of my junior year of college, after working long hours at two separate summer jobs which left me exhausted at the end of the day, it began to occur to me that in a lot of ways, Money and Fun appeared to be mutually exclusive. By this I mean I couldn’t have the one if I was working to get the other. But, if I didn’t work to get the other, then the one often meant going to a movie at the $3 theatre and eating sugar packets.
After careful deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that right now there are four ways for me to get more money.
1) Work hard at an honest job and build a career.
2) Inherit.
3) Marry rich.
4) Search the pockets of all my pants.
The last idea is definitely the most appealing at the moment. In fact, I think I’ll go and do that right now. It isn’t that I don’t want to work; I would just prefer to already be successful. I really think I’d have a talent for coasting. Give me a critically acclaimed bestseller under my belt and I’ll spend my days in Italy eating omelets and struggling with writer’s block while the tabloids whisper about how I might never write the Great American Novel again. It’s not the success and fame I fear, it’s the effort it takes to get them.
I do have a job right now, but it’s definitely not in the field I studied in college. In fact, my college degree (in Literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing) feels a little less impressive with each relative and stranger alike who asks, “But what are you going to do with it?” I got the damn degree, shouldn’t that be enough? Nobody asks you that question when you have a baby, and that takes less than a year. Fine, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with it. But first I’m going to go rummage through my pants.
-roll of duct tape
-spare pair of socks
-unopened thing of Mrs. T’s Margarita Salt
What’s inexplicably (or explicably, if you just let me explic, please, I can explic!) in your desk drawer?
I did four loads of laundry last Sunday. I even did one load that was only bathroom mats. This meant washing the mats from my roommates’ bathrooms along with my own so that I would have a full load. I was concerned that this was creepy, but was also secretly proud of my thoughtfulness, and part of me hoped they would notice. They didn’t. Or at least, no one approached me to say, “My bathroom mat was so fuzzy and clean when I stepped out of the shower today! Did you wash it? I’m slightly unnerved, but grateful.” I guess I’m glad no one noticed, but on the other hand, it was a lot of effort for little reward. I didn’t want to dry the mats in the dryer for fear of melting their rubber backs, so I spread them out on the grass in the back yard to dry in the sun. This way I figured they would also be fresher, and have a ‘sun-dried’ appeal. I came outside to check them often, flipping them over when I thought one side was getting dryer. I tended to them like a shepherd, watching over a flock of brightly colored bathroom mats that weren’t going anywhere.
That very same day I gave the dog a bath, swept the house (at least the parts where the dog wanders, which necessitates sweeping), and tended to the backyard garden. That evening, I found a recipe online that looked good, picked up a few groceries, and cooked dinner.
Until relatively recently, none of those activities would have occurred to me naturally—except perhaps the laundry part, and then only if my pile of dirty clothes had reached Orange Alert status, also known as Code “Bedroom Door Won’t Open”. I am not sure what has changed. I was more or less content to live in squalor while I was in school and then during my first year or three out of college. In my first post-college apartment, the linoleum floor in the living room generally had the gritty consistency of cat litter, and I slept on a camping mattress for eight months. The closest I ever came to cooking was heating up leftover takeout, and adding water to cans of frozen juice concentrate. With that standard of living, perhaps I had nowhere to go but up?
Granted, at that point mine was not an apartment that invited even base-level maintenance. It more invited murder. We were living in scenic, beautiful Hawai’i, but our seedy Honolulu apartment lacked an ocean view. It did offer a view of an alley strewn with trash, and the occasional wandering chicken. More than once we came home to find the police parked haphazardly in our parking lot, lights flashing. Years later I would watch on TV as Dog the Bounty Hunter busted junkie after junkie in apartments that looked exactly like the one I had lived in. No one was ever impressed when I pointed that out, though, so I stopped.
My roommate and I knew that anything we put up on those unevenly painted cinderblock walls was mainly in an effort to cover them. This set the bar for our decorating standards embarrassingly low. We endured months of visitors noticing our arbitrary “23rd Annual Honolulu Beer Fest” poster in the living room and asking, ‘Hey, how was the Beer Fest?’ We couldn’t tell them. Had they seen our apartment? We were clearly on a budget. Fancy beer, like legitimate wall-art, was well out of our price-range. We preferred to sit on our concrete balcony and drink coconut slurpees laced with cheap rum and pretend we were pirates. I hope my mother isn’t reading this.
But since she probably is, let me point out once again that I have clearly matured. My wall decorations now reflect my taste in art and entertainment, rather than my ability to peel flyers off of walls in public places. I drink snobbish imported beer occasionally. I walk around my house in bare feet without risking tetanus. Sometimes though, I am not sure how to feel about this domestic maturity. I almost don’t want to admit to myself how much I like sweeping the beautiful old wooden floors of my current house. Washing the dog gave me a feeling of great satisfaction, until he did that thing where he walks around the bed, rubbing himself against it on every side and leaving enormous amounts of wet dog hair on the comforter. Washing the comforter gave me decidedly less satisfaction. Damn dog.
Perhaps it is my improved living arrangements that have caused this change, making me take notice of my surroundings and look after them with a new respect. Perhaps it is the acquisition of a job that doesn’t pay me in large wads of singles at the end of the night, meaning that I am able to spend money on where I live. Possibly I just got tired of sticky floors and leering piles of laundry, cheap liquor and streetcorner furniture. I suppose I can get used to this new me. Whatever caused this change, though, I hope it lasts, because although my roommates don’t appreciate clean bath mats, they probably really won’t appreciate rum slurpees.
My boyfriend inherited a fish when one of his roommates moved out. He is in a huge tank in the bedroom which needs to be filled with water or the filter makes a splashing noise all night long which fills my nightmares. He is an impressively large white fish (about the size of a pot roast) with teeth, and he can see you from outside his tank and follows you as you walk along it, particularly when you have just gotten out of the shower and are groping for a towel and feel at your most vulnerable. In the mornings he likes to sound a gentle, loving wake-up call by banging against the filter in his tank which makes a noise like a gunshot. Sometimes he will do this a dozen times in the course of an hour if you have decided to sleep in because it’s a weekend. He doesn’t eat that much and he’s great otherwise. If we had more that just the bedroom of this shared house to put him in, i.e. if he could go in the livingroom or the basement or pretty much anywhere else, he would make an excellent and fascinating pet. But as it stands, he gots to go. Let’s make a deal.
Location: Medford
Molly: godzilla vs. grandma godzilla!
Dave: grandma godzilla vs. the crushing weight of impending mortality!
Molly: godzilla vs. his inner critic!
Dave: godzilla vs. monsters! and his own shame!
Molly: godzilla is never going to be good enough!
Dave: godzilla should just give up and go back to bed!
Molly: Why isn’t godzilla doing something more with his life?!
Dave: when will godzilla find love?
Later that day…
Molly: It’s the new black!
Molly: It’s the new Thursday!
Molly: It’s the new bowling!
Molly: It’s like wearing white shoes after labor day, and then punching pigs in the face and then eating their bacon!
Molly: I should perhaps limit my caffeine intake after 3pm.
I Heard Tell 
