Authors: Suzy Vitello
You lie back on the firm, new mattress.
Shit.
After five months, you invite the carpenter back home.
26.
Blowing in Firm Pose
You line up your towel and water bottle on the carpet, in view of a wall of mirrors. There you stand in this hot, hot room, breathing in. Breathing out. The carpenter stands beside you, on his own towel. This is a new thing—this Yoga class. An idea you had: something to do together. And there he is, your husband, his reflection in the mirror: orange swimming trunks, hairy belly. His eyes, one shade less red than a scratch. His beard, a wooly goatee that covers the soft part of his throat.
What you know now for certain, is that nothing changes, fundamentally.
And everything changes, all the time. It is this paradox you must contend with. You, and the carpenter. But one day you’ll understand that the carpenter has known this all along.
During the summers preceding our parent’s divorce, we were kept in our grandparents’ attic.
Except for TV shows and hotdog meals, of which we partook downstairs, the bulk of our time those summers was spent folded under dormers, frolicking among antique toys, reams of paper, a dollhouse and decade-size piles of magazines.
Shoved up against a sloping wall of the north dormer, there was a coffin-shaped toy box.
Grandfather had made the toy box for my father, and it held a sawdust-filled dog on wheels, a set of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs dolls and a handsome prince with plastic hair, several jigsaw puzzles in boxes that were Scotch-taped at the corners, and a quiz game: Name the Capitals of the 48 States.
Toni
most often chose to play with the Snow White and prince, and, holding them at odd angles, their plastic lips lined up like the “X” of a Phillips screw, she made them kiss. Repeatedly. Meanwhile, I set up the seven dwarfs like bowling pins and knocked them down with a deflated rubber ball.
Truly though,
I was more interested in the magazines and catalogs hidden behind sliding plywood, on the east side of the attic. National Geographic, Scientific American, McCalls, Family Circle: our grandparents hoarded them all. When she grew bored with the kissing, Toni joined me. She clipped out all the Betsy McCall paper dolls featured on the last page of the namesake magazines, but to me, the little cherub in lacy white underpants seemed far too angelic. Too cute. More interesting were the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, with the expansive toy sections in the back containing doll carriages, high chairs, cradles. I grabbed the scissors from my sister’s hand as she scrambled to find a second pair, and together we cut out photos of these toys, and taped them to wish lists: scraps of yellowed paper from the swollen oak desk on the west side of the attic. Naively, we scrawled the outdated prices next to the merchandise, creating documents of hope and expectation, for we each had several dollars saved, flattened and stuffed in wallets we made from vinyl and gimp at the Stanley Demming Park summer camp where Grandmother deposited us occasionally.
So there we were, clipping and writing and dreaming.
The sketches in the catalog were very fancy—different from the more contemporary Sears catalogs my mother consulted—and it gradually dawned on me, on my nine-year-old brain, that these catalogs were twenty years out of date. Toni sat next to me, musing out loud: should we order the tiny set of dishes, or the fancy perambulator? “We can’t buy these,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t sell these toys anymore.”
“Oh.”
Just that. Oh, and a shrug, and on to the next thing. I felt like pushing her. Felt the weight, once again, of being an older, plainer, smarter big sister. Toni headed back to the toy box and began untangling a length of rope. “I’m going to pretend this is my pet,” she said.
I yanked the rope from her hand.
“You’re a stupe!”
I shrieked: “We’re not playing invisible pet!
We’re going to make stuff. Dolls, and doll equipment. Now!”
“Um.
Okay,” said my little sister, who had just lost her first tooth a few days earlier and thus had received non-stop attention of every adult we’d encountered. I was glad we had the day before us, up in the attic. Thankful that our day would not be punctuated with adults cooing at Toni as though she was a Persian kitten or the Hope Diamond.
Luckily, we had an entire roll of newsprint our mother had left us before scooting off to finish her education at some sort of art camp.
We had a box of crayons, scissors, glue. We had Lego, Playdoh. We had scraps of material.
In summers past, we’d invented a game called The Bunny Family, which consisted of four sizes of crude rabbits made from various Lego bricks.
Babies, children, teenagers and parents. We hopped them around, Toni’s red family, my black one, engaged them in picnics on chenille bedspreads, rides on the ancient wheeled dog. The teenagers of our bunny families were extremely ill behaved. They often hopped off to smoke cigarettes fashioned from the ends of toothpicks and affixed to the centers of their brick heads with pinches of Playdoh. Sometimes, they pushed their siblings off the bed, sending them cracking to pieces on Grandmother’s linoleum floor. Alas, because of the smooth, rigid construct of these Lego clans, their possibilities were finite. We couldn’t give them hair, or various body shapes. I wanted to create kids who were naughty, obviously naughty, and smooth, generic Lego bunnies somehow missed the mark.
Meanwhile, my father and mother were both having affairs.
My father, the doctor (Grandmother and Grandfather’s only child), was back in San Diego, venturing over the border into Tijuana occasionally, to partake of inexpensive prostitutes as a supplement to his serial stash of nurses. My mother entertained relationships with the odd artist or eccentric stoner up at art school. Though I didn’t really understand adult relationships—the concept of fidelity, the idea of cheating—I had overheard some late-night conversations between my parents. My mother’s boyfriends were referred to as “those losers you sleep with,” while my father’s indiscretions were “sluts.”
The clandestine nature of these liaisons was transmitted through the tenor of my father’s voice.
There was a high-pitched squeak to the sound, consistent with an angry tirade, only in these conversations he tried to rein in his wrath to the confines of a whisper.
In the shadow of our parents’ trysts, we invented a new game.
For this rendition of family life we turned to the newsprint, pens and scissors. We called it Stanleys and Joes. The new families featured infants, youngsters, adults, and bad teenagers. Stanley was the troubled adolescent from my family; Joe belonged to Toni’s. The parents of our Stanleys and Joes were ineffectual backdrop. Hardly worthy of drawing, let alone cutting out. We offered, like the adults in Peanuts, only their muffled voices. The babies were likewise, unimportant. Often we never even bothered cutting them out of the newsprint.
We drew several rough drafts of Stanley and Joe, however, only satisfied when the diameters of their unruly tresses were large enough to imagine doll-sized rats, snakes and spiders hiding there.
Stanley and Joe sported, in addition to their tonsorial calamities, long, unclipped fingernails. They hid vegetables in their hair, and disgorged various bugs and reptiles in order to scare the little kids behind their parents’ backs. They refused, of course, to bathe, which led to occasional modification with crayon or ink pen, denoting additional filth.
We found some craft eyes in the bottom of the toy box, and attempted to stick them on the faces of our teenagers, but when we did, Stanley and Joe resembled the nerds of the Mystery Date board game, not at all our intention.
And yet, the idea of a nerdy family member was somehow crucial.
Enter James.
James was the archetypal pariah. Fat, zitty, bespectacled, he was the perfect target for a Stanley or a Joe. We each had a James. Toni’s was more definite in outline, mine more festooned with acne. We pasted craft eyes on these new paper dolls, and drew heavy, black-framed glasses around them. The weight of the eyes caused their heads to bend forward, making interaction, especially interaction involving Stanley and Joe, impossible. We discovered pipe cleaners were the perfect remedy, and taped them down the backs of our cutouts. Oh, what fun we had, launching epithets at our unpopular Jameses. Throwing hearty paper knuckle punches.
As time went on, we became obsessed with this game.
So much so that we began to bring the paper dolls with when Grandmother called us down for lunch. One day, Grandmother noticed our companions as we carefully laid them down on the table beside our frankfurters and cucumber salad lunch. She held my Stanley up to the window, “This is just a scribble here,” she said, pointing at the coiling hair of my Stanley, the pasted on rat facsimile peeking from the mess. “What a gruesome little man,” she said, holding the paper doll at arm’s length just before slapping him down next to my plate.
“Jacqueline, Jacqueline, Jacqueline.”
She shook her head. “And all those instructions from Mrs. Becker.”
Ingrid Becker was, like Grandmother, a member of the Warwick Art League, and we’d taken a few of her children’s art lessons.
They were expensive, however, and a bit out of the way, whereas the Stanley Demming Park and its cheesy craft sessions were free and just a few blocks from the house. But when we offered our park crafts up for inspection, Grandmother would hold them to the light, peering through bifocals, trying desperately to translate the value of the gimp key chain or the gum-wrapper necklace into her upper class Viennese frame of reference. Grandmother eventually gave up on art lessons for us. We seemed content up in the attic, after all, so both the Ingrid Becker classes and the park craft afternoons fell by the wayside.
“Where is the effort?” Grandmother asked, wagging her finger first at us, then at our Stanley, Joe and James dolls who were now propped against the alpine motif napkin holder.
“Why do you make these scraps when Grandfather’s dollhouse sits in the dust?”
“But we do play with it,” Toni and I lied, in unison, with practiced singsong voices.
We’d stayed up all night playing with the dollhouse Grandfather had painstakingly crafted that first Christmas, three-and-a-half years earlier. A residence down the street had served as a model: the dentist’s home. The entire front wall of the house was a door you could open, complete with a small, brass knob. There was a living room, a bathroom and two bedrooms, initially, and a small wooden staircase connecting top with bottom. With each renovation, presented on subsequent Christmases, the dollhouse became more cumbersome, less graspable.
The previous Christmas, Grandfather had introduced a maid doll and a maid’s quarters, complete with a large deck and plastic ornamental shrubs.
With my pre-adolescent growth spurt had come a clumsiness, and I invariably knocked over miniature tchotchkes and dismembered tiny chairs while reaching into one of the studies from the foyer. Playing dollhouse consisted more of re-erecting items than following the “imagination,” and I forbade my little sister, who, naturally, was not cursed with my brand of clumsiness, from playing dollhouse when there were funner things to do.
We ate our frankfurters in silence while Grandmother dusted the cuckoo clock and muttered something about the housekeeper missing a section of wax on the kitchen floor.
~
Funner things, the following summer, included hours of television.
I was now ten years old, and had just completed fourth grade in San Diego, where, in addition to awkward, I’d grown astoundingly unattractive: my teeth achieving maximum buck, my hair a new layer of frizz, and my eyes galloping to coke bottle territory. Toni, with her long eyelashes and pixie voice, remained an affront. There had been one episode, in the bathroom at Point Loma Elementary, where I had been approached by one of my sister’s classmates. “Your last name is Houston? Like Toni Houston?” I nodded at the girl’s incredulous expression. “But why is she so pretty, and you’re such a dog?” I was still of an age where I thought all questions required an answer of some sort, but the query was one I myself pondered relentlessly. So I shrugged, and continued rubbing powdered soap into my raw, red hands.
So here we were, back at Grandmother’s house for another summer.
This was the year we began viewing All My Children. We’d worked up to it slowly, prolonging our television time gradually, sitting through myriad game shows: Truth or Consequences, Let’s Make a Deal. Up in the attic, Toni and I had created a blended version of the soap operas and game shows, and for this, we returned to the roll of newsprint. We traced life-size male dolls around each other’s bodies: three for each of us, because that was the format on The Dating Game. Then, we set our prospects on the sofa facing the dusty dollhouse, their paper bodies bent at their penis-less crotches. We took turns being the host, inventing answers for the three paper boyfriends. The other of us, the one seeking a date, sat on the very edge of the sofa, separated from the paper boyfriends by the flat plywood roof of the maid’s quarters.
“Where would you take me on a date?” Toni might ask.
“Bachelor number one?”
“To the park,” I’d say in a deep, affecting voice.
“To sit on the bench and kiss.”