TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 138

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 1, 2000000007


Dear People that Count,

	I was downstairs five minutes ago, 
opening cans of salmon.  Little round cans.  I 
opened up five of them, then went back to squeeze 
the juice out of them, leaving the dry meat.  I 
emptied the dry meat into the plastic 
refrigerator box, and added mayonnaise.  Then I 
stirred.  I stirred some more.  This is what 
Meyshe has for his lunch.  A sandwich made of 
salmon meat.  Every day of the school week.  He 
has a salmon sandwich on whole wheat bread with 
tomato slices and lettuce on it.  I've seen him 
eat this.  He opens up the sandwich, takes out 
the lettuce and eats it, then the tomatoes and 
eats them.  Then he puts the thing together again 
and eats the salmon and bread.  I get his 
sandwich ready for him, wrap it up, put it in a 
plastic bag, tape it shut.  Lower that into a 
lunch bag (plastic) and fold up some paper towels 
for him to use to wipe that face I love so much. 
Then his lunch is ready except for the banana 
which he gets from upstairs in the garage.  If we 
kept bananas in the kitchen, the smell would make 
me sick.  I have this thing about bananas.  I 
don't know whether I would survive a lunch that 
was the very same every day.  Even when we were 
in the caves, we didn't have the same thing for 
lunch every day.  One day it would be berries 
picked from a bush.  The next day, a scrap of raw 
meat from a recent kill.  The next day, grubs, 
the next day nothing.  But Meyshe does quite well 
with it.  He is habitual.  Just recently, the 
breakfast cereal magically transformed from years 
of Cheerios, to raisin bran, and it was as if a 
new addiction had been born.  Cheerios were 
forgotten utterly in favour of the raisin bran. 
I now buy raisin bran by the truck load.  That 
and milk.  We go through six gallons of milk in 
as many days.  I remember when villainman's boys 
were coming up, we had a separate refrigerator, a 
little one, for the milk products, because we 
just couldn't fit them all in the regular fridge.

	And as I think about our dearths and 
girths, I note that we are due to go to Costco. 
We're out of so much.  O-bla-dee. O-bla-dah.


 
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Another milestone

	When I fell in love with Arthur Glickman, 
it was the first time I'd fallen in love.  It was 
all new to me.  I'd spotted him in the hallway in 
the music department at the University of 
California at Berkeley, on the first day of 
attendance.  Another music major.  He was talking 
animatedly to a cluster of his friends.  He 
bounced up and down on the balls of his feet and 
gesticulated with his arms.  He had a high laugh, 
a head full of shocking orange hair, a full beard 
and moustache.  Right then, as if I were a 
duckling hatching out of my lonesome egg, setting 
eyes first on him, I became imprinted with his 
looks, his voice, his rhythm, his gestures.  I 
could not get him out of my mind.

	It turned out we had the same piano class 
together.  This was the dummy piano class for 
those of us who didn't have familiarity and 
proficiency on the keyboard.  We would learn to 
read simple piano pieces, practice scales and 
chords, all twenty of us in a room full of 
electric keyboards with the headphones in our 
ears.  We both arrived early for the class and 
sat on the floor outside the designated room, our 
backs against the wall and our legs sticking 
straight out.  He told me he'd just returned from 
Bogota, Columbia where he'd been an exchange 
student.  Other than that, I cannot remember what 
we talked about, but the rapport was 
instantaneous.  We made each other laugh and we 
made each other reflect.  We were in sync.  It 
got to be habitual, meeting before class in the 
hallway, and then it got habitual walking off 
together after class.  It was the last class of 
the day for us.  We both lived south of campus, 
he in the upstairs of a house that the owner, a 
woman in her sixties, rented out to students, and 
I in a duplex on Parker Street.  We stood on the 
corner where we would part in different 
directions for home, and we talked.  The talk 
became a marathon.  An hour or two we stood 
there, ignoring our homework, our roommates' 
expectations and all our other responsibilities. 
We couldn't say goodbye.  So it was, that one day 
Arthur would come down to my apartment and 
another day, I would go with him to his.

	When we went to his place, we had to pass 
the landlady as we climbed the stairs to the 
upper floor.  She sat in her living room, 
reading, her eyes bugging out of the back of her 
head as the new girlfriend ascended into the 
hedonic den.  If she weren't reading, she was 
standing at the window making sure no students 
from the junior high school came by to steal 
fruit from the tree in her front yard.  She 
shooed them away loudly, running to the front 
door and leaping to the porch, waving her arms 
around, telling, "the darkies", to disperse.  She 
had no qualms about using the word, "darkies," in 
front of us.  We were all white, so in her mind, 
we must all be members of the National 
Association of Superior White People.  No one 
dared call her on her bigotry.  After all, Arthur 
and his roommates needed a place to stay.

	I got along with his roommates well 
enough, though Arthur and I didn't pay much 
attention to them when I came over.  We spent our 
time in his room, leaning out the two windows and 
talking to each other like that, close to the 
tree that flourished on that side of the house. 
We talked.  We talked some more.  We laughed and 
stared at each other and the air was so heavy 
with sexuality that it was on the verge of 
precipitation.  But we did not kiss.  We were 
working up to it.  When Arthur came to my place, 
there was more interaction with the room mates 
because I shared a room with Patty.  We'd 
actually gone to junior high school together. 
And when I showed up having answered the ad for a 
roommate, we looked at each other saying, "What 
are you doing here?"  This is how I got the job: 
prior connections.  I had a bed along the outside 
wall, and Patty's bed was at diagonals to mine, 
in the other corner.  We had our furniture 
arranged to form two separate areas, but it was 
all so close that we could hear each other sigh. 
This is why Arthur and I chose the living room to 
do our courtship dance while Patty slept in the 
bedroom.  We sat on the couch, likely as not 
getting stoned on grass, and fixating on each 
other, every inch.  On one such evening, we wound 
up falling over on the couch crushing a newspaper 
photograph of Pierre Mendes France drinking a 
glass of milk.  We kissed then for the first time 
and decided to hang the clipping of the Frenchman 
with his glass of milk on the door to his room.

	Each time we kissed we kissed more.  We 
kissed until we were sore.  We kissed until our 
chins were red from abrasive action.  We kissed 
until we were exhausted from it.  We talked about 
sex, but not about having sex.  I was very much a 
virgin, an outspoken one.  My history did not 
include a healthy attitude about sexual urges, 
and so I chose to advertise that I was a virgin. 
I didn't do those things.  Maybe I didn't even 
want those things.  But I started to let up on my 
announcements because I could sense I wasn't 
going to be a virgin that much longer.  I was 
nineteen, and barely been touched.  This was 
different, however.  Everything with Arthur was 
different.  We swore our love for each other as 
many times a minute as we could, making our 
tongues twisted from reciting, "I love you more," 
"No, I love YOU more," a thousand times at a 
sitting.  Arthur was not a virgin.  He told me 
he'd had sex with a prostitute in Italy, and that 
he, "sort of came".  He had difficulty finishing 
the act.  I had difficulty beginning it.  This 
went on for three weeks at least, and our piano 
playing was getting no better.  Our singing 
voices were being exercized, though, and we sang 
together, everything we could get our hands on.

	What I remember most about Arthur in 
these first soaring stages of our tragic 
relationship is that I trusted him.  I abandoned 
my caution and allowed myself to blend souls with 
him.  I had never done that before with a male. 
I hadn't thought it possible.

	He was over at my place, and it was a 
Sunday morning, early.  He'd spent the night in 
my bed, a single bed, so we were awfully close to 
each other.  I had decided between me and myself 
that I was going to donate my virginity to 
Arthur, but I was scared to death of pregnancy. 
That morning, we were kissing in bed, rolling 
around in each others' arms.  I excused myself 
and went off to the toilet.  When I sat down, I 
saw the blood of menses in my underwear.  I 
cleaned up, put on fresh underwear and climbed 
back into bed.  I looked over at Patty, who was 
still asleep or doing a fine job of faking it. 
As I climbed into bed, I said to him, "It's all 
right.  I've got my period.  I can't get 
pregnant.  We can make love."

	There wasn't much more preamble to it 
after that.  I crawled on top of Arthur and we 
managed to put the male plug in the female 
socket.  He didn't move much.  Suddenly an 
overwhelming feeling of consummate dizziness came 
over me.  I was transported with deep gasping 
breaths to another world, and then it was over. 
I cleared my head.  Where had I been?  Arthur 
looked up at me and said, "You came didn't you." 
He said it like an accusation.  I reacted 
defensively.  I was being scolded.  I said, "What 
makes you think so?"  And he answered in that 
same accusatory tone with a bit of denigration 
tossed in, "I could tell by the way you acted." 
Then he looked away from me.  It all made it seem 
like he'd caught me at something I should not be 
caught doing.  I was shamed.  I swallowed my 
sexuality in that instant, and for the next 
twenty years could feel nothing at all when I 
made love.  I kept looking for that same 
pervasive, ecstatic feeling that I'd experienced 
with Arthur that first time, but I never found 
it.  I was numb from the waist down.

	I used to wish I'd experience good sex 
before I died.  But there wasn't much chance of 
it.  Arthur had reinforced what my father had 
started out teaching me: that sex and desiring 
sex was crude, incestuous, demeaning and a 
violation.  It was like a wash of some vile 
liquid that you couldn't get off of your skin. 
The scent would stick to you forever.  I feared I 
stank of sex.  I had done something nasty by 
wanting it.  I would never recover.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net