Cartoon burlesque

I was a nanny for Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, and he had a sister.  In the middle of the afternoon on a crisp fall day I was walking the sister across a street and she was killed by a hit and run driver. 

I went back to the house where Calvin lived with his dad – a 40-something, stocky, beer-drinking divorcee.  I gave them the terrible news and  it seemed to cause almost no reaction.  Calvin asked a few morbid questions and went to bed.  However the  entire next day he acted out and misbehaved, wouldn’t focus on lessons, threw tantrums. 

I was at dinner at a german pub with his father that night.  He told me over and over how amazed he was at my patience with his son.  I said I was astonished at how he was still able to trust someone who’d been in charge of his other child when she died.

And then I said, “Calvin is a cartoon character.  This behaviour is nothing new.  I nannied for him last year.  He didn’t have a sister that time around and no one was killed and he behaved exactly the same way, because that’s how he is drawn.”

Calvin’s father sat, thinking this over, but said nothing.

“It’s like burlesque,” I said.  You sit in the audience and you get teased up to a certain level but it never crosses that line.  Why?  Because if you go too far, you release the tension.  And without the tension, there’s no reason to watch.  This is no different. Calvin has to remain the same and never achieve catharsis.  Otherwise you will lose your audience.”

Calvin’s parent was now standing against the wall across from me, a tall, beautiful brunette in a grey hoodie, dark jeans, gorgeous understated boots.  She nodded again, our conversation over, and walked away.  I watched her from behind, took a breath and exhaled, “Damn. That is one hot mother.”  Beside me, a couple of the men perched on barstools echoed my appreciation.

Laaaa-ser and anesthetic

This, while somewhat surreal, is a true account.

Last night I drove 3h up to Vancouver to see my folks.

Actually, for full disclosure, I first drove 2.75h up to Delta, BC, a satellite city, in order to have a tall middle-aged French-Canadian woman smear gel on my skin and "boil" my hair shafts by zapping me with a laser.

Before beginning my virgin journey down laser hair removal road, the esthetician warned me of rare but alarming possible side effects including blistering, scabbing, and accidental depigmentation of the  skin.  Her postop instructions were to ice the area to bring down swelling, and to be patient while, for 1-2 weeks, the dying hair continues to "evacorate" - some combination I presume of evacuate and evaporate.

My fondest moment came when she asked me to gauge the pain from 1-10.  The sensation of the laser is a lot like being snapped with a rubber band - in ten places at once.  It's no worse than, and actually faster and less painful, than waxing.  "Low," I told her.

She smiled.  "You're a tough lady."

There is a compliment never before leveled at me.  I can think of umpteen contexts immediately where people I know are orders of magnitude tougher: on the soccer pitch, in the weight room, dealing with chronic illness, handling a break-up, after an ankle sprain, while receiving criticism... the list goes on.  Apparently where *I* shine is while lying on a disposable-paper-covered massage table, with a laser aimed at my furriest regions.

It's another fifteen minutes' drive to get to Richmond, a yet-closer-in suburb of Vancouver, at Frieda's B&B, my mother's favourite jumping-off point for Vancouver airport-based travels.

The evening was unexpectedly pleasant apart from the predictable tension while my mother sparred with the server at dinner.

"What can I get for you?"

"Do you have a senior's menu?" We had just spent ten minutes looking at the two laminated pages of the Hog Shack's specialties: ribs, fish and chips, burgers and deep-fried appetizers.  My mother insisted on this venue rather than the recommended Italian Posada's because it was a block closer to the car.  Until we arrived, the median age would not even have achieved 30something unless one left out the plentiful toddler datapoints.

"No, I'm sorry."

"Well," my mother flattened her lips, a gesture I suddenly realized I recognized - I had seen the toddlers here making it after being denied soda or a biscuit, right before they burst into wailing.  "I want something small.  Light."

"Have you seen our salads?" 

"I don't want salad." One of my mother's superpowers is to cast doubt in her fellow conversationalist's mental stability with otherwise simple statements.  It's all in the tone.  It's like being snapped in the face with a rubber band.  It's over before you halfway even realize it's happened.

"We don't have anything else that's small; you could just order something and only eat part of it."

While my father and I ordered, my mother pondered this dilemma, finally settling for a greek salad.

I used to hate going to anything but buffet restaurants, where there are no serving staff to disapprove of.  A major perk of visiting my parents as an adult is that I can usually manage to get in a whole glass of wine before ordering dinner.  It takes the sting out of my mother's rapid-fire commentary.

While we waited for the food to arrive, I was educated on which of my closest friends my mother considers rudest, on a scale of 1 to intolerable.  I ordered another glass of Pinot Gris and mentally raised it to my sister, who, though a year and a half younger, pioneered the prophylactic and palliative use of alcohol at family functions.  She's always been a trail-blazer. 

Murder mystery

I'm hosting a party, a reunion of sorts. Family and friends from all stages of the last four decades of my life are crowded into my living room.  The small white-washed space has a sliding glass door on one wall and a cafeteria style kitchen along another.  You can slide a tray across the aluminum surface, walk by the silent eye-level vapor shield, peer into the prep area unstaffed by white-clad, be-gloved food workers, and, despite the absence of french fries and lasagne, clearly make out the smell of deep frying oil and baking cheese.

Most people are coupled.  There are older couples like my aunt Lydia and uncle Mark - a retired mafia don and a stocky ex-beauty pageant winner (not in that order).  And younger: mostly friends from university or work.  Except Daniel, an off-duty police officer I met one night on the dance floor.  His wife Marisa is stunning in a simple maroon cocktail dress.  Then the occasional single. Me.  And my cousin Nancy - Mark and Lydia's only child.  

My uncle is drunk; his anecdotes have been getting louder with each passing beverage on the rocks.  It's so mathematically precise, I'm tempted to graph it.  X axis in whiskey units, Y axis in decibels.

He is pointing across the room at Lydia, the star of his latest embellished tale, and suddenly his anger surges, his fist becomes a pistol, and he shoots her.  Twice.  She goes down. 

Commotion, screaming.  People try to scatter and cower simultaneously.  Daniel vaults the plexiglass shield of the cafeteria, picks up a cleaver and hurls it Mark-ward.  It flies through the air in slow motion, exactly like a ninja movie throwing star, each rotation audibly snicking through the air before embedding itself in my uncle's right temple. 

The police must use time machines, they arrive so quickly.  Then I realize Daniel's presence here, even off the clock, might explain that instead of one or two, we have twelve responding officers, and an entire SWAT team of detectives picking through evidence and taking statements.

Lydia's condition looks ominous.  She is crumpled on the floor, a smear of blood across her ribcage.  But the bullet is lodged in her the right side and she is still breathing, just unconscious.  The paramedics tell me there is a good chance it missed vital organs though they won't know for sure till the doctors at the hospital examine her.  She will need X-rays.  Hydration.  Years of therapy.  She is whisked off in an ambulance, not the same one that carries away the body bag containing my uncle. 

The only other person needing medical attention is Nancy.  The right side of her face is covered in blood but after cleaning her off gently with a wet dish towel, I discover there is only a small wound on the top right side of her head, hidden almost entirely by her thick auburn hair.  One of my uncle's bullets must have gone wide.  Luckily the bullet only grazed her.  She is in shock.  I hand her off to the EMTs who dress her wound, cover her with a blanket and tell her she will heal just fine.  I almost laugh at the absurdity of the statement.

"I've got blood," says one of the detectives, as she snap-snap-snaps her police camera.  The team of detectives - only four people it turns out though they seem like a mob in my tiny living room - efficiently swarm and document evidence.  One of them slips on the generic ivory gloves common to law enforcement and cafeteria workers and heads into the kitchen to hunt for the missing bullet; he finds it, buried in the far wall.  On his way back, he stops to linger behind the counter, examining the surface for more clues.  I barely resist the urge to ask him if the special today is Sloppy Joes.

Thanks to Daniel, I'm allowed to sit in on the detectives' meeting.  They are working out why my uncle, now deceased, would want to kill his wife, still in a coma.  Neither the "vic" nor the "perp" can currently answer questions.  There are pictures of people and closeups of blood stains tacked onto a black marker timeline of events. 

The criminologist stands up and points to several pictures - blood-stained carpet from my aunt.  Bloody handprints on the coffee table where my cousin's wound was dressed.  Cleaver protruding from a forehead, also dripping blood.  "The blood sample from the perp does not match the victims," she says-

Well, duh, I am thinking, bristling at the notion that my family engages in incestuous marriages -

"There is another sample that matches the daughter, however." 

-and it sinks in that she is referring to the victims in plural, not possessive.  

During questioning, everyone's blood has been sampled.  The criminologist's professional mask cracks just a little as she meets my eyes, "Yours." 

It's the kind of match, she says, that you'd expect from a sibling.  A half-sibling, to be precise - a half-sibling on the father's side because the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA is NOT similar.

My father.  And Lydia.

And Nancy and me.

This is a lot to take in.

I sit down.

At that moment there is screaming from the morgue, which just happens to be next door.  A woman in a lab coat and face shield, gloves covered in blood, bursts through the french doors.  "He's alive," she shrieks.  "I was about to start the AUTOPSY.  Pulled the cleaver from his head and he MOVED."  Another minute and she would have been cutting open his abdomen with a scalpel.

We troop in through the doors to see my uncle, dead-skin grey and woozy but upright on the stainless steel slab.  It's not a homicide anymore, not even one perpetrated and the attempted murder charge he'll face no longer seems like such a mystery.

I head home puzzling over what I'll say to Lydia: I've got good news and bad news.  The good news is your father came back to zombie life seconds before becoming a science experiment.  The bad news...

Or: Good news: you have a sister!  Your homicidal father is not really your father!!

Characters that appear in this dream bear no resemblance to persons living or dead, besides myself.  The dream author also makes no claims of expertise in the fields of criminology or medicine, apart from what urban myths might be perpetuated by watching far too much ER and Law and Order.

Blind leading the blind

A blast shakes the bomb shelter.  Another, hard; dust rains from the ceiling.  Lights flicker, flicker, then zzzt just like that we’re in the dark. My boyfriend’s hand slips out from mine in all the commotion and I am alone, blind, scared.  

People swirl around me, talking, screaming, crying.  An eternity of being randomly jostled and bumped.  Finally, finally the emergency lights come back on.  People rush for the exit.  I fight to stand still in the stampede.  Where is he?

The overhead emergency lights are old, incandescent, a barely-remembered yellow.  Without the aggressive blue tinge of fluorescence, the world seems  transformed.  The corners harbor soft shadows. 

I’m trying to breathe, quell panic, when I spot him.  Maybe twenty feet away, near the exit, barely able to keep his feet in the streaming crowd.  Pale.  Shaken.  He visibly recoils at each touch as people stream by him. 

When his eyes meet mine I can feel his relief from where I’m standing.  “I SEE you,” he says, rushing towards me, and when I take his hand again, he is trembling.

Everyone is in black gauzy silhouette, he says. Why can he see only me?  He’s desperate to know, do I see the people in silhouette too?  Are we both dead?  Are they? Are we surrounded by ghosts, and us the only survivors? 

But no.  I see everyone just fine.   I tow him by the hand through the crowd, and he keeps his head down, shrinking into me, trying not to look directly at anyone else.

The bomb shelter is actually a tunnel, a labyrinth really, of underground hallways commonly used when the winters get cold.  I turn left, right, right, swimming upstream, away from the exits.  I am heading for my parents’ kitchen.

Ten long minutes later I emerge into a vaulted room.  A staircase winds in a lazy helix around the perimeter, and at each level opens onto a wide plateau where small groups of people are working on different parts of the cooking process.  My parents are at the very top; I can hear them arguing, something about cilantro and onions. 

Near the top of the stairs, I pause for breath, preparing myself to introduce Andrew to my parents.  We flew in from the coast last night; they’ve never met.  I look back and he’s standing a landing below me, speaking nervously to two dead goats propped against the wall, trying to make small talk.  Before I can correct him, I realize my parents have disappeared, headed down the back stairs to the basement.  Shit.

“They’re DEAD,” I hiss, and Andrew looks stricken.  “Not my PARENTS,” I say.  “Those are GOATS.”  I realize the world looks more different to him than I can imagine; it’s like he’s suddenly half-blind.  “Come here, I need you,” I say and as he reaches me I tug him toward the door at the far end of my parents’ landing.  If we hurry we can catch up to them.

Two steps down the stairs, my childhood fear of this basement journey kicks in.  It is five long steps down before you can feel the hanging metal switch that turns on the one ancient lightbulb.  I don’t understand why it’s not already on; my parents just went this way.  I reach forward, find it blind, pull.  Nothing.  I pull again.  The light clicks on, then flares and dies.  I inhale sharply, dig my fingers into Andrew’s arm. 

“Fuck,” I hiss.  “I fucking hate the dark.”  It’s weird, he tells me, but he can see everything.  He guides me through the blackness, helps me stumble down the thirty-seven stairs, while my heart beats nearly out of my chest. 

Time keeps on slippin'

520 AM
I woke with a man's voice in my head:
"today my session begins"
In the moment before I woke, at 519:59 AM, I knew what that meant.

I'll be teaching a microbiology class on South Seattle Community College campus in the fall.  Four days a week, I wake up hours early, drive through morning traffic, across the West Seattle Bridge, dodging big rigs and pokey slowheads through narrow pothole-ridden lanes, so I can sit through two and half hours of the summer section, to be reminded of what I learned almost 20 years ago as a college freshman.

It's Tuesday.  Today we'll be talking about the lac operon.

The voice belongs to an ex colleague.  In my dream he was writing the narrative for my life.  He has been writing me emails in real life.  In my dream he was a reliable narrator.  In real life his writing contains only a passing relationship to the facts most other people in his world agree on.

I don't remember anything else clearly enough to write it down.  It's fading.  Receding into the past.  I'm not even sure why I bothered to write this down except that I've never woken like that before, with such a clear voice, someone else's voice, getting in the last dream word.  It's remarkable.

This morning I'm acutely aware of my mortality.  I feel the minutes that tick away my life. I woke and thought, it's been so long since I wrote anything besides an email trying to deal with some new crisis at work.  I thought about habits.

For years I would wake on my own and head to the gym with sleep still stuck at the corners of my eyes.  These days my tendons hurt when I wake.  I'm in physical therapy Tuesday evenings instead of running around after a soccer ball.
 
My tendons also disapprove of my old habit of social dancing 3-4 nights a week.  Instead, I'm watching tv at night, eating my dinner from aluminum trays with the cats' eyes trained on me, waiting for some distraction so they can lick sour cream or gravy from the lid.

I'm using an alarm these days, like I did back in college - and snoozing, pushing the time as far forward as I can and still walk into that 8am class seconds before it begins.

I haven't written in months.  I'll be forty in less than a week.  I feel old and tired and fat.

I thought about going back to sleep, about the heaviness of my eyes, and the 5am grey rain.  I got up and dug out my laptop.  I don't have a lot to say but it's a start.

Nooner and kiss-off

A woman, I'll call her Wendy, meets me for lunch at a diner across the street from my work.  I don't know her well, she's the recently added girlfriend of a male friend, part of a larger social group.  I was surprised by her invitation.  We order sandwiches - turkey club for me, tuna melt for her - and pints of alcohol.

"I've always wanted to have sex with another woman, " she says, after a brief discussion of the weather and state of gardening in her yard.  Not, she continues, because she thinks she is gay, but because she just wants to know if it's really any different than with a man.  Wendy's green eyes hold my gaze, steady.  Short auburn hair, not even a hint of color on her pale Irish complexion. 

We're alone in the back room of the restaurant.  I lay Wendy down on the table which is covered with a crisp white tablecloth, matching topsheet, and red satin pillows.  I crawl across the table toward her, on my hands and knees, knocking the salt and pepper and cutlery on the floor.

Her clothes melt under my breath like they are being burned from her skin.  I focus, as per her request, on the obvious, which results to both of our surprise in a body part that has ballooned to the size of a medium-sized red banana.

She looks as surprised as I feel.  I suck on it and feel her breath/pulse skyrocket.  She thanks me fervently three times in rapid succession, then sits up and looks me in the eye.  "Please?"  I know what she wants and I'm on board, really. but I've never done exactly that before.  I hesitate, wondering if it's safe, should I use protection, what are the rules here.

Before I can proceed, the back room begins to fill up with lunch crowd and we put our clothes back on, remove the sheet from the table.  Some of the other members of the social group we belong to join us.  Wendy and I discuss the sexual experience clinically.

Her boyfriend is there, a longstanding group member.  He is doing his level best to contribute to the discussion with nonchalance.  His eyes are fever-bright, though, and his cheeks flush as he asks who was topping whom.

"I was in charge, the whole time," Wendy says.

"Of course," I reply, with a no-you-weren't smile.  Further discussion and defining of terms. We agree on one thing: we both enjoy an encounter where the give and take is rapid and mutual.  "But really, it's only in a BDSM scene that there is usually a clear role like that," I say.  For the first time I see the ears of people at a nearby table perk up.  It's time to go.  I'm not modest but I don't really want to be the talking-on-your-cell-on-a-crowded-bus girl.

As we leave the diner, I pass a man posted up at the bar with a girl.  By "man", I mean a guy wearing a giant fruit fly costume with a large red-lettered sign around his neck: "Verbal abuse: it's no secret."   He's seated across from a gorgeous blonde in a toga, presumably playing the role of beaten-down wife.  I hear a muffled male voice complaining he's too hot and wants to use the restroom.  Through the costume's open mouth, I see a short asian man in his 40s.

I wait outside the bathroom for Wendy, cleaning my hands with the pump-it-yourself sanitizer.  My sandwich is sitting poorly in my stomach. 

Back at work, I pass my old boss in the hallway.  We haven't talked since I transferred to another research group nearby.  I've had a secret fear she's angry and avoiding me.  We chit chat for a minute as we walk down the hall toward her office.  I relax.  I'm just being paranoid after all.  At her office she turns, as if about to say "see ya later" or "nice running into you".

"Just one thing.  I'm so busy.  In future, I need you to just talk to Christine."  She's the tech, already a good friend.  I can feel shame and tears spring up and race ahead of them to put a pleasant smile on my face, matching hers.

"Of course," I say, as if this is the most normal thing in the world.

"It's just that I don't have time for this kind of thing," she continues.  She is still smiling, a facial expression so devoid of emotion I know it's a mask.  I know I'm not paranoid.  I know I shouldn't care.  I walk away, tears sliding down the inside of my mind, the everything's-totally-fine smile intact.

I wake.  It's Sunday.  I have to go to work.  I texted friends last night to see if they'd like to meet today for lunch. Time to find my phone, check email, make breakfast.

Beach towel detente

I dreamt I was lying on the White House lawn as part of the Tourists Tan for America war fundraiser.  I shared an unremarkable patch of lawn in a forgotten corner of the grounds with about thirty other people but had the coveted corner spot.

A woman I knew in college approached me.  We had parted on less than ideal terms, so I had a small moment of "what do I do" panic. To my surprise she picked up as if we'd never stopped talking.  Or at least, as if she never had.  She danced a hula around the recumbent bodies on her frequent trips back and forth to the fountain to refill her giant water-spritzing bottle.  She spritzed as she sat across from me getting reacquainted, spritzed the air and herself as she traveled, and evangelized.  "You know," she yelled from a five-yard distance during one refilling expedition, never breaking the conversation, "spritzing keeps your skin years younger.  It's been clinically proven."

Her mom and daughter were on their way, she told me, and we needed to save space for them.  She indicated a spot between her towel and mine and then got up to refill her spritzer yet again.  I was immediately uncomfortable.  On this lawn, with space at a premium, she was asking me to reserve a significant chunk of the choicest real estate without a habeus.  It was going to be tough and I hated conflict.  As if reading my mind, Kelly Ripa and an equally TV-ready but unfamous brunette began inching into the space my newly reinstated friend had vacated.

"Take the corner," I offered, moving into the space my friend's mom theoretically would inhabit.  At least then we wouldn't be separated.  Kelly's eyes shone her thanks.  A man at my feet shot me a look of utter shock and respect.

"Chivalrous," he said.  I smiled.