TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 64

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 19, 20000000006


Dear Tree,

	It is Sunday morning.  The house is 
unusually quiet.  I don't hear Meyshe bouncing 
around and groaning, and my mother isn't up yet. 
So I'm essentially alone at the keyboard, hacking 
out my message to you.

	Today, my old house is offered up again 
at the open house tours on Sunday afternoon. 
They've fixed it up and staged it, and all that's 
left that's mine in the house is the piano, that 
beautiful lady who's a hundred thirty years old. 
People will course through there and maybe 
someone will want to buy it.  If that happens, 
I'll have a lot of money in the bank for a while, 
until I buy another house.  Two hundred people 
went through there last week.  No one could park 
on the street.  I wanted to see it, but I didn't 
want to run into villainman and his wife, 
Rebecca.  So I stayed away.  I did make an 
arrangement to see the house on the Thursday 
brokers' tour.  Again, there were cars parked all 
up and down the street, and there was a swarm of 
agents coming in and out.  But when I pulled up, 
I saw a severe woman sweeping the stairs, and 
thought that must be Rebecca.  Then I saw 
villainman coming down the stairs.  At first, I 
berated myself for wanting to turn tail and run, 
but then I got kinder to me and decided to take 
care of myself.  Why should I put me through the 
torture?  So I turned the car around and went 
home.  Now I've got an appointment to look at my 
own house at 11:00 on Monday morning.  The 
realtors have conveyed a message to villainman 
that he and Rebecca should stay away from the 
house that morning.

	You know there's something that bothered 
me about seeing that woman sweeping my stairs. 
Since we moved out, I get the feeling that 
villainman and she have nearly moved in.  Here I 
am held hostage by the fear that they will be 
there if I show up.  It's a sorry mess.  In fact 
the whole damn thing is a sorry mess.

	Tuesday, we entertain bids.  According to 
the realtors, villainman said he couldn't be in 
the same room with me, so we'll have to sit in 
different rooms and the brokers will have to 
present the bid to me and then go present it to 
villainman.  The next bidder will do the reverse, 
i.e., present the bid to villainman first and 
then to me.  Did I say it was a sorry mess?  I 
imagine villainman is ashamed of himself and what 
he's done, including how he's treated me since 
the separation and divorce, and just can't be in 
the room with me.  I'm surprised that I'd said it 
would be all right with me as long as Rebecca 
wasn't there.  This is probably because, as 
uncomfortable as it would be to have to share the 
room with him and confer with him about offers, I 
am not ashamed of my behaviour in any way.  I've 
done the whole thing ethically and kindly and 
have caused no one undue travail.  I haven't 
hounded villainman, nor lobbed barbed complaints 
about his fitness as a person.  I haven't had my 
lawyer badmouthing him over and over again the 
way villainman has done to me.

	I think I told you that at one point, in 
the midst of one of his pre-settlement conference 
literary tirades, he proposed I be examined to 
determine my fitness as a mother.  It was 
ridiculous on its face, and it didn't go any 
further than his assertion, but it hurt 
nonetheless.  Even though I could have a room 
full of specialists, people who have worked with 
Meyshe for years and know me thoroughly, people 
who have Ph.D.s and are authorities in their 
fields testify that I am not just a fit mother 
but an exceptional one, the suggestion that I be 
subjected to scrutiny to decide whether I was 
indeed fit, cut me.  It rattled me.  The judge 
just passed over it, as she's passed over many of 
villainman's pre-settlement conference tirades as 
just so much OCD behaviour.  It's taken a lot out 
of me dealing with this divorce.  I feel stalked, 
and I am.  But my lawyer has protected me from 
most of this, as well as anyone could.  The fact 
that I'm not ashamed of my own behaviour is an 
enormous comfort to me.  I can live with myself.

	Live with myself.


                               ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß


Making myself disappear

	When I split up with Dweller, I was 
already enamored of Harry Lum, that diminutive 
Chinese art teacher.  My mother and I were taking 
his evening painting class twice a week, and I 
had developed a first class crush on the man. 
What bothered me was that if I imagined making 
love with Harry Lum, if he were on top, I would 
be showing all around him, and if I were on top, 
you wouldn't have been able to see him at all. 
My weight bothered me.  I'd grown to think of 
myself as fat, even though the photographs of the 
era clearly dispute that.

	It wasn't so much that I thought myself 
fat, as that I thought myself too large in other 
ways.  I was blessed and cursed with a lot of 
talent.  I played the cello very very well.  I 
could do artwork and construct odd art objects. 
I was a terrific cook.  I could write poetry and 
prose.  If you'd told me to sit  down right here 
and write a meaningful poem, I could have done it 
in a trice without any writer's block.  I could 
analyze handwriting in a way so accurate and 
perceptive it was scary.  I wrote music, 
beautiful music, interesting music, avant garde 
songs that caught the music business smacking its 
lips.  I played the guitar with facility and 
difference, nearly classical, as was my music.  I 
was highly intelligent and very quick witted.  I 
had a personality that shone.  I was filled with 
energy that burst out of me in every creative 
way.  I had a sense of humour that soared above 
the rooftops.

	And I felt sorry for myself, too, because 
all these gifts made it hard for people to take 
to me.  I would find out from people I'd known 
even in high school that they never approached me 
because it seemed that I had everything taken 
care of.  What did I need another mere mortal 
for?  Time after time, men would run from me, or 
try to disassemble me, because they found me 
intimidating.  Who was going to feel sorry for me 
and my awful burden of talent.  No friendships 
for me.  I would have died to have the 
friendships.  I did nearly die to have the 
friendships.  That's how lonely I was.  I had 
Yvonne, and she has been my only true companion 
throughout my life, since I was fourteen.  Oh, 
for Yvonne, I would lay down my life.  Yes, I 
would give her one of my kidneys.

	With all the attributes I've mentioned, I 
was too powerful for most people, especially men, 
to stomach.  I couldn't help it.  It was what I 
was.  But in addition to all that, I had a 
voluptuous figure and a beautiful face.  What was 
I to do with me?  What I wanted was to be tiny, 
just to take the edge off of me, make me more 
palatable.  Maybe I could even become invisible. 
That would have been preferable.  I wanted to 
disappear, remove my loud self from the unwanted 
stage.  And of course the last thing I wanted was 
to be thought of as sexy.  That was a poison my 
father had fed to me since before I grew breasts. 
He was always chasing me down, bumping into me 
accidentally, making lewd comments, eyeing me 
with his pornographic mind.  My body was not my 
temple.  My body was a pain in the neck, a pain 
in the soul.  How could I get rid of the 
unnecessary, obvious, problematic body?  And the 
odd thing was, that getting rid of my body was 
actually possible.

	Harry and I went out one evening with his 
friend Jo Ann Bourgault.  She was another artist, 
former student of his.  She painted what was 
familiar to her.  She was raising three girls by 
herself.  The father had run off when they were 
very little.  So she was in the house a lot being 
a mother and homemaker.  She did series of 
paintings with steaming irons and ironing boards, 
bath tubs, sinks, douche bags in settings inside 
a humble household.  She was a forthright 
character, a bit abrasive with a mean streak 
about a mile wide.  When I told her that in 
answer to her question, she let out one of her 
laughs.  She had a laugh that could have gotten 
her arrested, deep, throaty, coming from the pit 
of the diaphragm.  And untamed.  She laughed from 
the id and the libido combined.  The three of us 
went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in 
Oakland's Chinatown, not as extensive as San 
Francisco's Chinatown, but just as authentic. 
Harry always ordered from the Chinese menu, and 
the dishes we added on to it were down home real 
Chinese food.  None of this honky stuff for us, 
no sir, and no ma'am.  We sat there at the table 
and gorged ourselves on the splendid repast.  I 
ate hearty and I ate enthusiastically.

	And when we got back to my parents' 
house, as I was living there then, I said to my 
crowd of friends.  "Oh.  I'm so full.  I ate too 
much.  It's uncomfortable.  I just want it to go 
away."  Harry said, "Well why don't you go stick 
your finger in your throat and throw up."  This 
thought had never ever occurred to me.  I found 
it an appalling and appealing suggestion.  I 
believed in Harry and everything he said, so I 
trotted upstairs and hung over the toilet, 
sticking my finger down the back of my throat. 
Up came the majority of what I'd eaten, very much 
in the same state as I'd swallowed it. 
Recognizable chunks of the meal lay floating in 
the toilet.  I flushed it and cleaned up, went 
into my room and put a blue bathrobe on, came 
back downstairs to the applause of Harry and Jo 
Anne.

	"Look at you," said Jo Anne, "You've got 
a blue bathrobe on and your skin is white, but 
your knees and cheeks are red.  You look so 
patriotic,."  And she gave one of her trademark 
laughs.  Harry asked how it went, and I said I 
felt very much relieved.  The relief in fact was 
so great that I employed the technique on a 
number of subsequent occasions.  When I got on 
the scale, I was surprised that I'd lost ten 
pounds.  The technique became a habit, then an 
addiction.  And that is how at 28, I became 
bulimic.  It was to last for five long years, 
encompassing nightmares of food frenzies and 
unmentionable marathons.  At the worst of it, I 
got down to 78 pounds.

	So you see, it WAS possible to disengage 
from my body, to make myself disappear, to rid 
myself of the unwanted curves that attracted so 
much unwanted attention.  I'd solved so many 
problems just with my index finger.  I could eat 
all I wanted and remain rail thin.  It could have 
been the death of me.  I was willing to die for 
it.  Suddenly people steered clear of my body. 
No more leers and no more smacking of the lips, 
no more obscene comments.  Even my father was 
frightened of me.  I had achieved what I'd never 
thought possible.  I was safe.


                               ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß®®®®ßßßß
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net