Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim (21 page)

I felt the same way in my marriages.

But I’m not divorcing Spunky, though it would be cheaper.

Also on week one, I opened his door and put a gate in front of it, so he could come and go if he wished, or have a playdate with one of my other cats. But there was no sign of his coming out, nor of the other cats going in. I might have missed a secret nocturnal meeting, but I didn’t install a cat cam. The day I spy on my pets, I need to get a life.

Or a midlife.

By the end of week two, there was no change in Spunky. Still every day I went in for Spunky Time and talked to him. I told him to join the family and have some fun, and finally, two days ago, he leaned into my hand to be petted.

Yay!

Later on, I have a conversation with Mother Mary. Of course, it’s not about Spunky, because I still haven’t told her about Harry’s death. I’m still waiting for the right moment. In 2015.

“What are you up to?” I ask her, when she picks up.

“Laundry.”

“Aw, why don’t you go outside, to get some sun?”

“Nah.”

“How about some shopping? Did you buy your new sheets?”

“Not yet. Maybe later.”

I try to assess her tone. Is she depressed? Tired? Sick, negative? None of the above or all of the above? “Ma, you okay?”

“Sure, I’m fine,” she says, chuckling. “How’re you?”

And that’s when it hits me.

She’s Spunky.

She doesn’t have to be doing anything—running errands, going places, making new friends. She’s content, and at peace, just by being.

At her age, she’s earned the right to be settled, and still.

And so has Spunky.

I went upstairs to tell him my revelation. I told Spunky he was home, where he could just relax, and that he had already joined the family, simply by being our elder statesman, who sits on the heater.

He looked up at me with round golden eyes, and he lifted his chin to be scratched.

No, he didn’t purr.

He didn’t have to.

Subtext

By Lisa

I’m loving texting, and I’ll tell you why.

I need more stress in my life. I like my blood pounding in my veins, pressing against my arterial walls, transforming me into a walking pressure cooker.

Thank you, texting.

Let me take you back in time, friends.

I remember when there were things called letters, and in law school, I recall specifically waiting for a letter from a guy I had a crush on. We were dating, but he went away for the summer, and he never wrote. I actually checked the mail, every day. But no letters.

Face it, letters sucked.

But then, when I became a lawyer, the fax machine came along. To send a fax, we had to go down to the windowless bowels of the firm to a ring of hell called the Word Processing Department, which contained a highly underappreciated and undoubtedly underpaid group of women. None of the lawyers knew the names of the word processors, but I did because, like the firm’s messengers, they were mostly Italian.

Yes, I did get my paycheck before everyone else. I had friends in low places.

Grazie.

Faxes used to be called facsimiles, and they came hot out of the machine, like you were baking at the office. We used to fax our lunch orders, which is the kind of thing that lawyers think is badass, and also I was dating somebody who used to send me poetry by fax. It didn’t last until the advent of email, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Computers came along, then the Internet, then email, which is now antique.

Back in the day, people would brag about how much email they got. Cool people got the most. By that time I had become an author, albeit a struggling one, and I heard from authors who got like fifty readers’ emails a day.

I got no email except for spam, and back then, I even liked spam. This was before Viagra, which overstayed its welcome. By about three inches.

But soon we came to understand that email was just another task, and one that people expected you to perform right away, as in within a few hours or the same day.

We thought that fast.

How quaint.

Because then we got cell phones, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, and now we text like crazy and expect a reply in three, two, one …

NOW.

Texting is generational, but not always in ways you’d expect. For example, every time I’m with Daughter Francesca and she gets a text, I look over and ask her, “Aren’t you going to get that?”

She’ll shrug. “Whenever.”

I blink. I can’t ignore a text, like in the old days when I couldn’t ignore a ringing phone.

What gives?

I went online, where I learned that every time somebody reads a text, they get a surge of dopamine in the brain. You know about dopamine. It makes you dopey.

And its little burst of pleasure makes getting a text almost addictive, much like trolling the Internet in general. I can’t explain why I am the one addicted to Francesca’s texts when she isn’t, except that I’m dopier.

And her iPhone, unlike my BlackBerry, actually beeps until you answer. My BlackBerry doesn’t, maybe because it knows that uncool business types like me don’t need to be told twice.

Yet Francesca just says no, and it took me a while before I realized that she was having ongoing text conversations with four different people throughout the day, all while we were running errands, making dinner, and cleaning up. To her credit, she did this with such finesse that I didn’t notice, in contrast to my rookie reaching for my phone at each text alert, even during dinner.

Most of my texts are about work, some are about fun, but I mentally feel them piling up if I don’t answer them. Texts are the new email, the never-ending list of Things To Do. I actually have a crack on the dry skin of my thumb from my CrackBerry, and sometimes my neck hurts from looking down all the time.

“Mom,” Francesca said. “You need to chill.”

And I do, but I can’t.

Except when it comes to dating, where the time you take to return the text is carefully measured, and examined. I wasn’t sure of the protocol, but took a poll of my besties Laura and Franca, in addition to Francesca, and here’s the skinny: If he replies right away, you reply right away. If he replies a day later, you reply a day later. In texting, symmetry rules.

Also it matters what you say and how you say it. I have edited my text messages more times than any of my novels. Francesca has coached me to be more informal and approving—ironically, the tone of every one of these columns, but nowhere in anything I text. Evidently, when you set up a date, “looking forward to it” isn’t sexy.

And don’t write xoxo before you have xoxoed.

Also, emoticons are out unless you’re dating a twelve-year-old.

☺

Bottom line, you have to keep your texts in context.

In-box of Letters

By Francesca

I was recently informed that I am at 95% capacity at my Gmail account.

Anyone who has a Gmail account will appreciate the irony. Gmail’s tagline was once, “Why delete? Unlimited storage!” So for me to be at capacity feels like being told I’m walking too close to the edge of the world.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand the concept of physical space on the World Wide Web. I thought the Internet was like outer space—an infinite expanse of interconnected websites orbited by advertisements, black holes of discount shopping, and countless porn stars.

So if the Internet doesn’t have physical space, how did I run out of it?

Well, I didn’t exactly run out. Gmail tells me more storage exists, I just have to buy it.

Immaterial space doesn’t come cheap.

So I set about trying to understand how I had exhausted my inexhaustible storage. I clicked to see the “oldest” email in my in-box and learn when I’d opened the account.

5/19/06 was my first email. It was from my then-boyfriend, who set up the account for me. The subject line was “test,” and the body contained only one line, all lower case: “hey lovely lady.”

Aw.

Well, I couldn’t delete that.

I clicked through some of our lovey-dovey emails and found myself swooning all over again. Until I got a few pages further into the-honeymoon’s-over stretch of emails, and I regained my senses.

Please, I can’t afford any more airplane trips to get dumped.

But truthfully, I cried a little rereading our breakup emails. Viewing our year-plus relationship condensed within a few pages of messages, I could see that we really loved each other, we really tried, and it ended anyway. Two people with good hearts and the best intentions just couldn’t make it work. I felt sad and comforted at the same time.

Despite the heartache, I wouldn’t “Trash” any of it.

But I had to make room somewhere, so I got back to culling, this time starting with the insane number of emails between me and my best friend. Many were as short as one line, how important could they be?

Reading a few, I confirmed they weren’t important.

They were hilarious.

I was crying again, this time with laughter. We had email threads riffing on boys, professors, classmates, celebrities, ourselves, everything.

I remember Harvard as a pressure cooker, but I’d forgotten how fantastic she and I were at letting off steam.

I started forwarding the best ones to her, but they were all the best ones, and soon I realized my email-blast-from-the-past was only going to clutter her in-box and mine.

Not helping.

The only person who emails me more than my best friend is my mother. When I filter my in-box to show only those messages from [email protected], the system is so overwhelmed, it can’t calculate an exact number, saying only that it’s displaying one given page “of
many.
”

If you take this as proof that she’s checking in on me all the time, you’re mistaken.

She does that by phone.

My mom uses email to send me cell phone pictures of our pets. Our routine is that she sends the picture with no text at all, and I reply with a funny caption. It’s like our own personal
cuteoverload.com
.

And “many” is polite. She has sent me hundreds—maybe thousands!—of them over the years, but her cell-phone-photography skills haven’t improved one bit. Most of the pictures are blurry, marred by a finger, incredibly dark, or flashed so bright that the dog looks like Cujo.

Still, even the grainiest of images are cherished reminders of my furry family back home, and my in-box archive now includes photos of four pets that are no longer with us.

So I’m keeping them. Every last one.

I also tried eliminating old emails relating to schoolwork, but that task was a) arduous, because there was no common sender or keyword with which to fish for them, and b) anxiety-inducing, because rereading them returned me to that time when there was always too much to read, too many papers to write, and too harsh a curve on tomorrow’s exam.

I could almost smell my all-nighter fuel of microwave popcorn and the sick-sweet taste of Red Bull.

Blech.

Word to the wise: Red Bull doesn’t give you wings; it gives you the runs.

PTSD aside, since my hard-drive wipeout in the Great Crash of 2010, many of these emails contain the only remaining copies of papers I wrote for school—the first short story I wrote for a fiction workshop, even the three-page poem on
Beowulf
that I wrote in medieval verse.

I didn’t say the stuff was cool.

They say nothing in this electronic age is permanent. I had many an English professor bemoan the lost art of letter writing, journaling, etc. But my in-box holds a more prolific record of my work, worries, laughs, and loves than I ever could’ve committed to paper. It doesn’t offer a mere glimpse into my life at the time, it draws a map of my universe.

Looks like I’ll be buying more storage.

Spoiled

By Lisa

Francesca and I love to go to the movies, though we disagree on everything about movie-going except the movie itself.

We generally love and hate the same movies, usually for the same reasons, and after the movie, we spend the evening deconstructing the plot and analyzing what worked and what didn’t and why, which might be an occupational hazard.

But that’s where our agreement ends.

Our differences begin before we even leave the house, because I like to go early to arrive at the theater at least forty-five minutes before the show. I hate to miss the beginning of the movie, even nowadays, when the movie doesn’t begin until after the previews, Coke commercials, local Realtor commercials, cell phone and texting warnings, then the little man driving a go-kart on a filmstrip.

Francesca thinks we should miss all of this, and of course, she is clearly right. But she indulges me, which is what filial duty is all about. Moms are entitled to be humored from time to time, as payback for all the little-kid rainbow drawings we said were great.

Please. How hard is it to draw a rainbow, anyway? Open any old-school Crayola box, and get busy. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. We get it.

Plus they owe us for labor, too. I mean, really. And I had
back
labor. As far as I’m concerned, that child should go when and where I say, forever.

Anyway at the candy counter, we continue to disagree, though I don’t concede I’m wrong so easily. I like to get a Diet Coke, a small popcorn, and Raisinets, and eat it all myself. She likes to get a bigger popcorn and share.

She knows I will not share my Raisinets. Half the reason I go to the movies is for the Raisinets.

I don’t like to share because I’m a fifty-six-year-old woman, and as such, have spent a lifetime sharing. Now I want it all for myself. It’s my turn, and my popcorn.

So I coerce Francesca into getting her own goodies, and we enter the theater, where we disagree over the seating. I like to sit close, in the front third of the theater. Francesca likes the back third. You might think that the easiest thing to do would be to compromise on the middle third, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

Why?