Area Woman Blows Gasket (5 page)

To Be Mrs. or Not to Be Mrs.

It seems to be growing fashionable again among educated women of my acquaintance to take their husband's surname after marching
down the aisle. The Washington conservative writer Danielle Crittenden, who is married to George Bush's former speech writer
David Frum, has observed that wives who insist on keeping their own names are simply engaging in a "display of insecurity."

That's an interesting thought. Call my preference for staying Pearson a sign of insecurity if you like, but my husband's last
name is Pottie, and going through my life as Patty Pottie has about as much appeal to me as wearing a dunce cap to a ball.

Besides, I already have a name, as I see it, and my merger with my husband is symbolized in other ways, such as that I— and
no other woman— get to wear his boxer shorts when all of my underwear is in the laundry. Also, of course, we have wedding
rings, and a joint checking account, and children with our blended DNA and their very own talent for tantrums, which my husband
and I suffer through in tandem. So I tend to think of myself as fully and demonstrably merged.

Like everything else, the question of what a woman ought to do with her name upon donning her wedding gown has more than one
answer in our culture. Some answers are highly inventive— such as a couple whose surnames were both colors, which they changed
to the hue that those two colors created when mixed, which was, we hope, not puce. Other answers involve hyphens or an ungainly
split between husband and pen name, or indeed the use of an alias.

If you're getting married and can't decide whether to be Mrs. His Wife, as the Washington pundit referred to herself, or instead
Mrs. Beige, or The Jackal, perhaps you might consider the customs of other countries.

The Burmese, for example, have no last names, which makes these sorts of feminist quandaries irrelevant. Madonna could marry
Fabio and not a single Burmese eyebrow would rise.

The Indian state of Kerala is a matrilineal culture, with property being passed down from mother to daughter. Thus, the men
who marry in Kerala adopt their wives' names. They may or may not resent it— I couldn't find any reference to the debate in
a scan of the
Times
of India.

Elsewhere in India, women keep their fathers' last names when they get married, whereas their husbands have reversed names.
My husband and I, if married in Rajasthan, would become Patricia Pearson and Pottie Ambrose, which I would call a much better
deal for me.

In other parts of India, on the other hand, it's more common for women to take their husband's names, although not always.

In Ethiopia a woman takes her father's first name as a lifelong moniker. If I were Ethiopian, my name would be Patricia Geoffrey,
and my daughter would be Clara Ambrose instead of Clara Pottie, and marriage wouldn't alter that one way or the other.

Every Ethiopian name has a concrete meaning, like
potato
or
lion,
so tracing one's lineage backward means stringing words together to form an actual sentence. Instead of having a family coat
of arms or other visual symbol for lineage, you get a phrase like "God's potato, eater of lions."The system is probably getting
a bit mucked up by new generations of Ethiopians, mind you, who emigrate to Israel or England and marry men with names like
Arnie.

But the basic objective is to convey blood lineage in one's name rather than husband-love, which is also true for women in
Singapore and Taiwan, who keep their paternal surnames.

The Mexicans have managed to evolve a highly complicated naming custom, wherein a woman grows up with her father's last name
followed by her mother's last name, which in my case would be Pearson Mackenzie. When she marries, she loses her father, adds
her spouse, and moves her mother to the middle: Mackenzie Pottie. Partly for that reason, Mexican women generally prefer to
go by their first names only, as in Dona Flora or Dona Sofia. Maybe that's what I should have done. I was born in Mexico,
so I could appropriate the convention and walk around demanding to be called Dona Pat. Why not?

Or I could hyphenate the combination and show respect for both my lineage and my husband. From now on, I'm going to sign all
documents "Mrs. His Wife-Dona Pat." What do you think?

The Illusion of Choice

Lately I've been wondering, whatever happened to that press conference that Bill Gates gave a few years ago, in which he announced
his intention to develop software that could connect my oven to the Internet? No further explanation was proffered in any
of the news accounts that I read at the time. Nevertheless, for some reason, in the exciting near future, if Gates carries
through on his vision, my oven will download recipes directly from the World Wide Web to itself.

Well, if Bill Gates doesn't mind me asking, what the hell for?

Can my oven read? No. Does my oven have opposable thumbs? No, I have never caught my oven in the act of holding measuring
spoons or assembling a cup of flour. Maybe I'm misunderstanding Gates s dreams for the future. Maybe he also plans to develop
a smart oven with thumbs. That way, oh bless the gods, I can come home from work and have an oven-ready meal, prepared lovingly
for me by a large appliance.

Did I mention what the hell for?

What's wrong with lifting frozen lasagna out of the freezer and sticking it in the oven myself? Am I so strapped for time,
so physically enfeebled, that I can't even transfer objects from one appliance to another?

What all this amounts to is a perfect encapsulation of the tizzy that the information technology revolution has got itself
in. As I see it, the world divides into two groups: There are those who, like Bill Gates, are nine-year-old boys at heart,
saying, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could attach giant springs to our feet, so all we had to do to get to school would be to
jump off the roofs of our houses and land in the homeroom in one
bounce?" And
those who reply: "Not really, no."

Belonging to this second group, I am cringing at the thought of the impending, home-based software revolution. What do I need
in my kitchen and bathroom that isn't there already? Did I need an electric toothbrush? Did I require a K-Tel automatic hamburger
patty stacker? Do I sit around pining for one of those things that instantly seals plastic bags? Have I ever once used more
than ten percent of the available functions on my VCR remote control? I'm still figuring out the efficacy of household technologies
from the 1970s, like the butter temperature switch in my fridge, which never seems to have the faintest impact on the relative
solidity of my butter even though I occasionally change it, out of curiosity, from "medium" to "soft."

My mother-in-law, an inveterate watcher of infomercials, once acquired a remote-control camping lantern, which could be turned
on and off from twenty yards away. Somehow this eased her anxiety about what might happen if, at the age of seventy-eight,
she suddenly needed to sleep in a tent in the woods and had to go to the bathroom and a fairy stole her flashlight while she
was more than twenty yards from her sleeping bag . . . just as the sun set and plunged everything into darkness.

At least she didn't have to upgrade the technology on her never-used lantern. I, on the other hand, buy a perfectly useful
computer and discover that its parts are obsolete within twelve months because the
"wouldn't it be great?"
crowd are at the helm of computer companies. My office has become not so much a graveyard for electronics as an orphanage.
I have three computers in my closet that I was simply forced to abandon when I discovered that their makers would no longer
supply me with replacement batteries. There are entire cars out there on the road putt-putting around that are older than
my parents, and I can't keep a computer operating for longer than the shelf-life of cold medicine.

God forbid that anyone should still own a tape deck or a VCR. When DVDs began slinking onto the shelves at my local Blockbuster,
just innocently presenting themselves in nonthreatening clusters beside the videos, my heart sank as I fingered the change
in my pocket. How long, I wondered sadly, how long until I had to buy a DVD player in order to see movies? How long until
I had to throw out all my cassettes because no car I rented would play anything but CDs?

There is a shift, I feel, and a wildly disconcerting one, between the days of being asked by wildly hopeful advertisers to
buy stupid things on late-night TV and a market that
makes
you spend new money on products by undermining the value of what you have. The market, and the choices, are ever so slowly
growing less free.

Let It All Come Down

Eight thirty at night and I've just received a call from Alba, who works for a credit card company.

"Patricia," she ventured, in a soft and almost tentative voice, "I'm concerned that you haven't made your minimum payment
this month, is everything all right?"

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it in puzzled disgust. The tone of her question was so intimate and so worried
that I imagined her asking for an update on my marriage.

Are you all right? Have robbers stolen your wallet? Did a tornado whirl through your house? Is there anything I can do?

"Oh. Right," I said. 'Til pay right away."

And I did. The next day I mailed a check. But still I received two more phone calls in as many days inquiring about my personal
state of mental health. By the weekend I lay in bed imagining the conversation I really ought to have had with Alba.

"I hesitate to be rude, Alba," I should have said, twirling the phone cord between my fingers as I felt my pulse speed up,
priming for the challenge, "but I feel like maybe you're behaving a bit oddly. Has that occurred to you? Do you not think
it's odd to phone someone at home, at night, whom you have never met, and inquire about her personal mental health? Is it
possible that you don't feel concern for me so much as for your job, which would at least render your concern plausible? Is
it okay for me to say that? Is your job at risk if I don't pay my minimum payment? Like, are you on a minimum-payment commission
or something? I could phone your manager and explain that you and I are concerned about each other and that we are going to
work this out privately. I could say: Back off, this is between me and Alba."

I imagined her falling silent for a time, and then stonily falling back upon her point: "It would be helpful if you made a
payment."

"Okay, Alba," I would say, sadly and reflectively. "Okay." I actually have no objection to paying my bills, although I sometimes
forget for a while. What alarms me, however, is the sequence of behaviors that credit card companies engage in as they transform
you from potential client to serf. Is it not slightly creepy? At first, they court you aggressively. The other day, for instance,
I was writing about being driven daft by consumer choices, when the phone rang, and incautiously I dared to answer it. Without
further ado, I found myself listening to an impenetrable monologue from a department store sales rep about some sort of insurance
plan that could be applied to my card
right now,
this minute, provided I digested everything he was babbling about on the spot, whereupon all I had to do was say "yes."

"But I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," I pointed out. "Can't you just send me something in the mail?"

"No ma'am, this offer is only available now, bla de bla." And off he went again, explaining something that I had neither the
time nor the patience to deconstruct, while the pleasant task of . . . well . . . damning hucksters just like him swiftly
faded and I had to take a break. Go to my corner Starbucks. Order a no-whip, decaf, grande mocha latte with a shot of Thorazine.
Dream of escape.

Came home to find credit cards flinging themselves through my mail slot with offers of preapproved cards and extravagant compliments
about my special status as a recipient. A friend's four-year-old son was preapproved for one of these cards, which we thought
was interesting, given that all he would think to do was use the card as a diving board for his Rescue Heroes.

Essentially, these are cards that you would otherwise never think to apply for— because you're fine. Doing fine. But after
ignoring eighteen that come through the mail, you look at the nineteenth and start to think, Wow. Seven thousand dollars'
credit preapproved! Consider how much microwave popcorn, Primordiale Nuit lotion, and funerals you could buy!

Ah, what the hell. You get the card. The low interest rate strings you along for a while until it evaporates and you're laying
out roughly twelve times the bank rate in interest just to pay off new shoes. Hello quagmire of debt. Then, this is what credit
card companies do. They dog you with their weird pseudo-intimate inquiries when you find yourself a week past due. It's scary,
because this does not happen with the phone company or the furnace guys. They send you reminder notices in the mail, and then
eventually just threaten to cut you off. They don't pretend they care. And thus, they don't betray you in the way that credit
card companies do when you still fail to pay, for whatever reason, and the nicey-nice credit card people drop the temperature
in their voices to frigid and kneecap you with a baseball bat.

I know this, because in the space of six weeks, one memorable time, I moved houses and gave birth to a son, with the predictable
result that I entirely forgot about a rarely used credit card whose minimal billings no longer arrived at the correct address.
Busy as I was, swaying back and forth and back and forth to Bob Marley tunes as Geoffrey bawled in his Snugli, I was taken
off guard one day by a phone call from a "Mr. Hobbs." He left a number but no explanation as to why he had called.

Unlike Alba, who didn't give me her last name, Mr. Hobbs refused to give me his first name, when I got back to him, in a spirit
of perfect reversal. Alba was my friend. Mr. Hobbs was not. He informed me that I owed the full bill to this credit card company
immediately, and then he told me to phone him back when I had made payment. I took note, scrawled out a check, and then resumed
sleep deprivation and reggae staggering, planning to mail out a bunch of stuff on Friday. But, earth to new mother Patricia!
No, no, no! Once you are in Hobbsian hands, you cannot wait until
Friday.
What are you, a freak? Less than twenty-four hours elapsed between our initial conversation and the time that Mr. Hobbs felt
free to leave a message at Ambrose's office, pretending that he needed to reach me urgently and could not get through. At
the same time, he went after Doug.

Doug.

Doug was my neighbor, a morgue technician at a nearby hospital who spent hours in his garage at night listening to Aerosmith
and Led Zeppelin and tinkering with his proudly acquired second-hand Jaguar. Doug— he of the pale green scrubs— had a preternatural
George Hamilton tan, a receding hairline, and two boisterous blond sons who played road hockey in the alley. He also had a
wife— a lean, curly-haired woman named April who was constantly and tensely engaged in the weeding and pruning of her postage-stamp
garden.

"Oh, for God's sake," April would mutter loudly on her side of the fence, knowing that I was on the other side, "I am so sick
of this."

I was left to presume that she meant my cats, who were probably pooing in her troweled rows of compost, but she wasn't the
sort to say it directly, just glared at me whenever we chanced to see each other over the ivy.

I never saw April and Doug at the neighborhood cafes and bars or the chic shops that lined our street. They shunned the funky
downtown core in which they were inescapably trapped by the convenient walk to their hospital jobs, and their unhappiness
was palpable, and toxic. The day that Mr. Hobbs saw fit to call Ambrose's workplace, Doug came over and twisted our old-fashioned
doorbell.

"Hi," he said, staring wildly over my head and using a tone that barked /
am not interested in you or your phone calls,
"I got a message for you to call someone named Mr. Hobbs." He handed me the phone number.

I gaped in astonishment. "That is bizarre!" I exclaimed. Then I asked, as an afterthought, "Did Mr. Hobbs phone you today?"

Maybe this was from before Hobbs had reached me, I thought, maybe he was not deliberately trying to portray me as a delinquent
slut unfit for the neighborhood, while shaming me at the same time in front of my husband's work colleagues. Maybe . . . ?

Doug nodded. Today He still wouldn't make eye contact. I understood that it was part of Doug's tangled and waterlogged fate
to share this neighborhood with writers and artists and Vietnamese people when he was, simply, Doug. He just wanted everyone
to go away. His wife, with her brittle snip-snapping about not stepping on the tulips, his bouncy children, the dead bodies,
the breast-feeding neighbors with collection agents on their case. As I perceived it, Doug wanted to relive the successful
part of his life that had taken place in a garage somewhere with Aerosmith and a car. Over and over, he wanted this, like
the movie
Groundhog Day,
but played out as a fantasy rather than a cautionary tale.

I took the number, thanked Doug, and retreated inside. I phoned Mr. Hobbs and flared with outrage that he had done what he'd
done. Was he insane? Had the rules of civilized conduct changed? Mr. Hobbs calmly passed me over to his manager, proforma.
You could tell he did it all the time. And as God, the sleeping Geoffrey, and Ambrose are my witnesses, this woman, his manager,
dressed me down with such fervor and vitriol that I felt like a suspect in serial homicide.

"Don't you ever, EVER, talk to one of my employees that way," she bellowed.

"Your employee called my neighbor!" I protested.

"My employees are professionals who do whatever is required to make people like you honor your outstanding debts." People
like me. I was a mother in a bathrobe and detachable bra flaps.

"You are to MARCH down to the nearest Money Mart," she commanded, "do you understand? And WIRE the entire amount that you
owe, RIGHT NOW."

I tried to argue with her, but she interrupted me with verbal thumps against my chest. "Do you want to go to JAIL? Is that
it? Do you want to go to JAIL?"

Berated and screamed at until I finally capitulated, I left the baby with Ambrose and obediently went off to wire the full
amount I owed to the collection agency from a nearby Money Mart, only later confirming that nothing like that— NOTHING— was
mandated under Ontario law. You do, in fact, get to send a check by snail mail. You do not, in fact, face the prospect of
imprisonment for doing so.

I have never hated anyone in my entire life as vehemently as I hated Mr. Hobbs and his army-issue boss. For weeks I plotted
my revenge, a la Uma Thurman in
Kill Bill.
But ultimately, there was very little that I could do, other than file a complaint with the relevant government ministry.
Instead, I signed up for a course, entitled "How to Hide Your Assets and Disappear."

It's not the government you need to worry about in terms of invasion of privacy, the instructor said, it's the private sector.
Just so.