To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (10 page)

This gave the catalog time to rest, to regenerate, before I picked it up again. The second reading was a little more intent. Ostensibly, I was just doing the same thing all over again—flipping through the pages. But this time, I was choosing items. If I could pick one item from each page, which would it be?

That was fun. Some day soon I might have money to buy something, and it was good to be ready, wasn’t it? To take advantage of an opportunity before it slipped away. Picking only one thing from each page, whether it was something I wanted or not, made it a fun little game. Like the time limit that keeps the game show shopping spree from getting out of control. A necessary balance.

I liked to try to do the whole catalog in one sitting. If someone needed my attention while I was performing this ritual, my one bit of fun and relaxation of the day, I’d sigh, fold down the page’s corner to save my place, and hurry through my duties as quickly as I could. I tried to schedule my catalog games during propitious blocks of time, while the baby was nursing or, later, when all the kids were mesmerized by their favorite television programs. Once I got through the whole thing, the catalog was hidden away in a drawer until the third reading.

The third reading was an additional process I developed over time, something
extra
fun reserved for when I was feeling particularly stressed by the demands of motherhood and household management.

The scenario was that the catalog company had awarded me a thousand-dollar shopping spree. Or five thousand dollars, depending on the scale of its merchandise. Or a hundred dollars if the mailbox had been infuriatingly barren that week and I’d had to resort to pulling drugstore sales flyers from the Sunday paper. I had to pick items that totaled as close to that limit as possible, even if it meant pretend-purchasing eighteen butterfly-shaped napkin rings in order to do so. Then I was the winner and all the time I had spent adding up the prices was well spent.

The third reading took longer than the first two, since I had to add the figures in my head and wasn’t allowed to use paper or even to write down the subtotal when the baby cried. When the baby cried, I’d just keep that subtotal in my mind until I could resume the game later. I’d chant it in my mind.
Four thirty-seven fifty-three,
over and over again. Sometimes I’d say it aloud when someone asked me a question.

Because of this side effect, I tried to save my third readings for late at night, when everyone else in the house was asleep. But it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I had to do it during late afternoon or early evening, when my husband unexpectedly was working late. The most frustrating thing was when he came home at a critical point of the game—such as right in the middle of the buy two-get one-free pages. You see, he didn’t know about my catalogs and our special games. So, he would say, “What have you been doing all day?”

I may not always have been truthfully able to answer, “Cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, all day long,” like a good little housewife should. But I never implicated my secret friends, the catalogs, either.

On those evenings when he’d come home unexpectedly, right in the middle of our time together, I’d run and hide in the bathroom. When he banged on the door, I would plead digestion difficulties and beg him not to open the door. All the while, I furiously added up my prices, as fast as I could, until I reached one thousand. Then, I’d hide the catalog and calmly emerge to see what everyone needed me to do.

I know how it must sound. But try to understand—a young mother living out in the middle of nowhere needs to have her fun.

The Dishes

I never liked doing the dishes. Washing my own dishes is okay because I usually rinse them right after using them, so nothing gets crusted on and needs hard scrubbing later. Ever since, I was nine years old, though, I had to wash other people’s dishes, which were usually encrusted with Velveeta and surrounded by floating bread crusts, cigarette butts, and cellophane juice-box wrappers.

The only way I could stand to do it was with the radio on, because the music soothed the savage dishwashing beast. If I was alone, I would sing along to the songs in harmony or counterpoint and sometimes dance a little with just my hips or my shoulders while the water swished around. When I couldn’t listen to my radio because it would be turned off in in favor of the TV, I would resort to fantasy.

The fantasies were usually about rock stars. But sometimes they were about other things, too. Like how weirdly different my life would have been if I’d finished school instead of dropping out to start a family. Or how life would be in a real city or town, instead of in the middle of nowhere. Or how it would feel to have friends.

Something about the mechanical wetness makes fantasizing easy. I lingered over the suds, making the most of my sinkside sentence.

Keeping in Touch

Dear Letty,

We got a new van. It’s large. It used to be a daycare bus. It’s solid white. The kids love it because they can each have their own bench seat. It has AC vents all along the headliner.

The old van has to sit in the back yard now. It cries a little at night but I just scream “Shut up, damn you!” out the window at it. No one likes that stinky, sweaty, striped van anymore. No one likes a whiner.

Just kidding.

Last week I was thinking that I wanted to write a poem about Spiderman. I wanted to talk about his relationship with his wife because I always thought that the way he neglected her was shameful.

Now, however, I wonder why she never left him. Was the secret prestige of being Spiderman’s wife just too irresistible? Did she feel that she deserved to live that way? Could she think of nothing better to do with her life than sitting around waiting for her jerk husband to get home?

So I went to a couple of comic book web sites to do some research. I found out that Mary Jane, Spiderman’s wife, had grown up in a dysfunctional family. Before she hooked up with Spidey, she had all the classic man-needing issues suffered by women with low self-esteem.

So now I don’t feel like making fun of her anymore.

I need to take a nap. I stayed up pretty late last night, thinking about Spiderman and important stuff like that.

Everything else is the same. Nothing new.

Write me back, okay?

Recreation, Part I

I didn’t like camping, but I’d go along anyway to prove my love and devotion to my family.

I think trailer trash people like camping because it gives them a chance to escape from their trailers for a while and be a little freer out in the wild. While I certainly could have appreciated that motivation, I was too distracted by the bug infested showers and fish-smelling dumpsters to discover it at that time.

During our long drives to the campsites, we’d pass towns even smaller and duller than the one that contained our own sky-blue trailer. Although I hated our small town, I would look out the window and imagine what life would be like if we moved farther out in the Middle of Nowhere.

I would fantasize that I was an important part of the alternate small town community. I would run a shop that sold exciting new things to the bored housewives. Things to enliven their lives. I would make our trailer into a retroswanky palace and hosted soirees that had all the neighbors hoping for invitations. “There’s Gwen. Hi, Gwen!” people would say as I walked down the street.

Something was
wrong
with our particular small town, I realized. Somehow, it kept me from doing anything at all.

Recreation, Part II

I liked to go to the karaoke bars because, before I became trailer trash, I used to sing. I sang Broadway musicals in a little performing arts troupe, songs of my own composition in a crappy little rock band, and whole Catholic masses at the neighborhood church. I even studied opera for a while. The only thing I’d never really sung was country.

Once we drove by a ratty little bar, or “watering hole,” as it proclaimed itself to be, and I noted a sign that said “KARAOKE HERE: MON, WED, FRI”. I begged my husband to take me there. Eventually, he did. We went to celebrate our anniversary.

There were about 500 songs on the KJ’s list, and most of them were country. I managed to find “Bewitched,” an old standard I knew pretty well. But I was too nervous to sign up to sing. Bothered and bewildered, my husband drove us home.

Although I had been on stage many, many times in my youth and had always loved the attention and the applause, something had changed. I didn’t have my old confidence anymore. My voice was out of shape, for one thing. But, also, I wondered what people would think. “Who the hell is this frumpy chick, and why do we wanna hear her sing?”

The other trailer trash women, frumpy or not, seemed to have no such hesitation. They fell into three main types: those who sang in Baptist choirs and were proud to show off their God-given talent, those who obviously practiced for hours each day until their voices were indistinguishable from Patsy Cline’s, and those who were too drunk to care what they sounded like. Most of them took advantage of the KJ’s $5 recording service and went home with taped memorials of their successes.

We went back to the bar on subsequent occasions. Eventually, an amaretto sour gave me the courage to choke out song. The KJ whispered basic vocalization techniques with his hand over his microphone. “Breath! Sing Louder!” Shamefully, I imagined what any of my old voice coaches would have said if they’d seen.

All the way home I sang the song as I should have, anger and determination giving me back my voice. “Okay, that’s enough,” my husband finally said.

The next time we went, it was my twenty-six or twenty-seventh birthday. We’d dropped our three kids off at my mother-in-law’s for the evening and I was ready to make the most of it. After two amaretto sours, I slammed the big book open to my dream karaoke song, “Last Dance,” by Her Disco Highness, Donna Summers.

“I don’t think these people are gonna wanna hear that,” my husband said.

“I don’t care,” I replied. I put my name on the list and, before I had time to chicken out, it was my turn.

I got up on stage and told myself that
this
was
my
last chance. Last dance, last chance for love. I sang my freaking heart out. Everyone in the bar hooted, whistled, and danced. I nailed the high note so beautifully, the KJ played it back on his recorder for everyone to hear again.