TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 218

[Tobie Shapiro]

May 12, 2000000000000000000000007


Dear Occupant,

	Feyna's cat, Mint, was not getting any 
better.  She ate a little, then stopped eating 
again.  Our vet got married and is on her 
honeymoon.  Their recording says, "This is 
Shattuck Cat Clinic.  Our office will be closed 
from May 7th to May 30th.  We are referring 
patients to Campus Veterinary Clinic 
at.........."   Well, this was fine.  The trouble 
was that all of the test results and the X-rays 
were at the Shattuck Cat Clinic.  Campus Vet 
would have no history or documentation of Mint's 
condition.  My mother had the bright, very 
bright, idea to find out at which laboratory 
Mint's blood work was done, and get the results 
from them.  But how do you find out which lab 
that might have been?  I decided that we had to 
bring Mint in, anyway, to be seen.  No time to 
waste.  So, we made an appointment and brought 
her in yesterday afternoon.

	The vet said there were two main 
laboratories where most of the local work was 
done.  He called both of them, and found out 
where the test results were.  He had them FAX it 
all over to him.  Thank you, Mom!  Dr. Yen found 
Mint to be very dehydrated.  I could see that in 
her fur.  And she'd lost a little bit more 
weight.  She was still feisty enough to give her 
deep growls when the vet went anywhere near her, 
and she refused to come out of her carrying case, 
even when Feyna opened the hatch and tipped the 
case over at a 90º angle.  How she clung to the 
sides of the carrying case was not evident.  We 
finally got her out when Feyna reached in and, in 
spite of the warning growls, dragged her out as 
she meowled and rumbled.  If Mint were well, we 
would all have been cross hatched with red bloody 
scratches.  The vet examined her and decided that 
it was best to keep her over night, while she got 
I.V.s of hydrating solutions, and they would run 
some tests again to see if there had been any 
change since the last round.  We're supposed to 
pick her up some time today.  They close at 
three.  It was a great relief to Feyna and to me 
to have Mint in the care of a veterinary hospital 
overnight.  There was no worry about her eating 
or not eating, her getting worse, her dying in 
front of us while we stood helplessly by wringing 
our hands and crying.

	Feyna took the opportunity to go out to 
Pleasant Hill and spend the night visiting her 
friend Alex.  By the way, Alex is no longer going 
to Mexico to work as an accountant in a bank for 
a hundred thousand dollars a year (I deemed that 
a crock at the time he told her about it).  Soon 
after, he said he'd been accepted to Reed College 
and M.I.T., so was choosing between them.  This 
from the kid who says he has not enough money to 
go to a state college, and couldn't afford to get 
a student loan.  Another crock hidden in there 
someplace.  Then, the story was altered.  He was 
going to go to San Diego to some school there, so 
that he would be closer to his family in Tijuana. 
Now, that story has been changed.  He isn't going 
to go to school at all.  He is going to be 
trained to be an air traffic controller.  They'll 
train him for a few months, out in Oklahoma.  He 
says he'll get paid two hundred thousand a year. 
Funny how all his prospective salaries come in 
increments of a hundred!  Does anyone know how 
much an entry level air traffic controller gets 
paid?  I have serious doubts about this latest 
edition of the Alex chronicles, too.  Feyna 
swears that he's never lied to her, and can 
document all the things he claims.  (What other 
people need to document so many of the things 
they claim?)

	The young man makes me tired.  I try to 
avoid discussions about him with Feyna.  Just 
steer clear of the whole subject, so I don't have 
to do double takes and say, "Not likely, Feyna." 
It would be just another futile, strife producing 
argument.  I can do without those.




 
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Domestic Programming in the Young Human Female


	Even if your parents raise you right, you 
have received your inculcation from society: from 
radio, television, winking at you from out of 
Dick & Jane, from advertisements, other kids, 
words that are slipped into a conversation, left 
over pieces of bygone eras that fall into place 
and complete the portrait.  A parent is not the 
only influence.  So, even if my parents had 
raised me to think of women as heads of 
households, independent, self-supporting 
entities, secondary to no man and no one's 
servant, I still would have gotten the bad news 
from the culture.

	I was born in 1947.  Back then, women 
went to college primarily to find husbands, not 
to forge careers.  A woman's career was assumed 
to be that of a homemaker:  mommy to children, 
helpmate to her husband, member of the PTA and 
the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Men's Primary 
Association.  She is paid in compliments, 
occasionally flowers, room and board, sometimes 
dinner and a movie.  She gets the joy of being a 
parent to children who will be parents of 
children who will be parents of children.

	Even though my mother never took me aside 
to teach me that I was destined to be subservient 
to my future mate, even though she didn't lecture 
me on the importance of cleaning, cooking, 
sewing, ironing, lying still for sex whenever he 
wanted it, even though she didn't give me the 
sorry announcement about a woman's expected role, 
all of it was branded into my wrinkly brain.  I 
knew what I was supposed to do.  I knew by what 
skills I would eventually be measured.  I 
rebelled against the inevitability of begetting 
children as a commandment and reason for being. 
Early on, I argued with my mom about the pros and 
cons of fecundity.  Rebelling against cleaning, 
cooking, sewing and ironing, all the pleasures of 
wifehood, was easy.  I just didn't do those 
things.  I left my room a tumble of chaos, the 
cat box reeking in the corner, staining the 
hardwood floor a dark warped brown, my clothes 
crumpled, smoothed out with the flat of my hand 
if they were smoothed out at all.  Sewing was 
ruined for me in the eighth grade when all the 
girls had to take sewing while all the boys took 
shop.  The teacher was a beast.  I was not 
teacher's pet and I failed to pass my zipper 
installation exam.  The only wifely thing I 
learned to do was cook.  I thought the motivation 
of my revolt against the other wifely tasks was 
laziness.  But it was more than that.  It was 
philosophical.  I didn't want to be a man's 
lackey.  I had more to define my existence than 
the hem of a skirt, the glistening polish on a 
floor.

	Oh universe, bound by eternity
	Oh rushing galaxies and flaming fireballs of stars,
	If you wonder where you are going,
	If you wonder why,
	Can you take your eyes off my perfectly made bed?

	I considered myself above it all.  I 
would create music, invent art, form new 
sentences  from 100,000 words.  Did this speak of 
my facing and accepting mortality, or was this 
sociological?  Casting off the chains of 
millennia of servitude to the male of the 
species?  Or was it just what I suspected of my 
lousy self: laziness.

	"I just don't want to."

	Still, when the test was upon me, the 
lessons from the culture were the instinctive 
dictate.

	I had a daddy crush on my seventh grade 
English and Social Studies teacher, Mr. Garcia. 
I wanted him to be my father.  Boot out the guy 
who lived at our house and shared a bedroom with 
my mother.  Install Joe Garcia.  For some reason, 
Mr. Garcia and a few students in the English 
class had come over to my house for a meeting.  I 
was careful to cut up a store bought cake and put 
it out on a plate with some cookies.

	"Would you like something to drink?"

	"Can I refresh your water?"

	"Shall we retire to the living room?"

	Where did that come from?  Who spoke 
those lines?  I knew, inside, at the core, that I 
was the temporary hostess;  I was designated 
wife.  So I embraced the role with fervour and 
dedication.

	When Mr. Garcia and the students 
attending the meeting reseated themselves in the 
living room, I bussed the dishes, rushing into 
the kitchen with an insistent sense of purpose. 
I took a sponge from the counter, wet it with hot 
water, took a can of comet cleanser from under 
the sink, and marched back into the dining room. 
I shook the cannister of Comet until the table 
was coated with the green powder, maybe an eighth 
of an inch thick all over.  I worked the sponge 
through the cleanser, squeezing it to expel water 
back onto the table.  I scrubbed methodically, 
energetically, intensely, studying the surface of 
the table for dots or blemishes.  What I had 
produced was a blanket of gritty cleanser that 
was going to be hell to remove.  If this dried, 
it was going to have to be done with a chisel.  I 
went back into the kitchen and filled a large pot 
with hot water.  I brought it back out, submerged 
the sponge in it and sloshed hot water all over 
the table.  I sponged it off again.  When I ran 
my hand over the surface, it came back caked with 
green grit.  I repeated the rinsing job over and 
over, and was about to go back to the kitchen for 
a clean pot of hot water when Joe Garcia, my 
perfect father, requested my presence in the 
living room so we could start the meeting.

	Oh no.  I had to be a better, faster little woman.

	"Okay.  Okay.  Sorry.  Let me just dry this."

	I removed the pot and sponge to the 
kitchen, got a flour sack towel out of the 
drawer, went back in and polished the comet into 
the formica.  What went through my mind when I 
launched that project?  I had been carrying out a 
very serious trust.  Regardless of my rebellion, 
philosophy or laziness, I knew what I was meant 
to do when I was called.  There was a 
complication, of course:  I had never done that 
before and could only mimic what I'd seen on 
television, read about in books, watched my 
mother or our cleaning lady do.

	How to clean off a table.

	It's not as simple as it sounds.  It is 
even more complicated when your primordial 
identity is mixed up in it.  I finally made it 
into the living room to join my classmates and 
Mr. Garcia, encrusted with cleanser, being 
bleached by Comet as I sat there attending to 
business.

	This incident taught me nothing.  At 
nineteen, more mature, more directed, more clear 
about the constraints and injustices of a woman's 
lot in life, I fell for Arthur Glickman, orange 
haired clarinettist, my first true love.  What 
did I think of when I found myself in love?  Did 
I analyze the place that Arthur might take in my 
life?  Did I think through our life goals, 
ambitions, desires?  Did I consider long term 
compatibility issues?  Of course not!  I was no 
robot.  I was dizzy in love, giddy in love, 
upside down in love, and thinking was out of the 
question.  Thinking would have dampened nature's 
plan for Arthur's and my chromosomes.

	My guide was the primordial ooze.  In a 
grand gesture of domesticity, I heard myself 
offer to do Arthur's laundry.  I hardly did my 
own laundry.  Why had I done this?  I had done 
this because I'd been taught what a woman should 
do.  I thought I was my own person, but deeper 
programming took over and I found myself in the 
laundromat, plugging quarters into the washer, 
dimes into the dryer, folding my passionate 
lover's under shorts, arranging his shirts on 
clothes hangers so they wouldn't wrinkle as 
badly.  And when I brought the clean clothes back 
to Arthur's flat, I actually stocked his drawers 
with his freshly washed, freshly folded clothing, 
and saved out the long sleeved shirts.

	Then liberated, I took out the ironing 
board, fired up the iron, took his shirts one by 
one and pressed his drip dry shirts.  I was 
anxious to prove something, probably displaying 
my tail feathers for the rooster.  I took one 
shirt from its hanger and arranged it over the 
flat of the padded board.  I pressed down hard as 
the iron glided over the back of the Oxford blue 
shirt.  I stretched the front of the shirt out 
and worked the iron around the buttons.  I 
smoothed the sleeves out with my hand, ironing 
both sides at once.  Carefully, I laboured over 
the collar.  I hung the finished shirt on a 
hanger and placed the next shirt on the board.  I 
followed the same order.  I ironed four shirts. 
But on the fourth shirt, the iron would not 
glide.  It would barely move.  This resistance 
had been building up over the successive shirts. 
I lifted the iron off of the task at hand and sat 
it, upright, to examine it.  There was some 
fibrous residue stuck to the surface of the iron. 
I couldn't figure it out.  Where had this coating 
come from?  The coating started to melt into 
beads of blue plastic, something like the exudate 
from a rubber plant, oozing up and out.

	Oh no.

	I examined the shirt I'd been ironing.

	Oh no.

	I had melted it with its synthetic hybrid 
cloth: 50% cotton, 50% polyester.  Drip dry meant 
no need to iron.  There was a path of burned 
material wherever the iron had travelled.  In 
obeying my primal urge to impress the man with 
what domesticity I had, I had melted four of his 
long sleeved, easy care, button down Oxford blue 
shirts.  It could be, I worried, that I'd also 
ruined the iron.

	"No, you don't have to," he had said when 
I offered to press them.  "No, you don't have to."

	I'd insisted.  If I'd had prescience, I 
could have asked him, "Arthur, would you like me 
to melt all four of these shirts for you?"

	"No, you don't have to," he'd say.

	"Really.  It would be no trouble at all. 
If I turn up the iron to the cotton setting, the 
heat will scorch and liquify the very fabric 
they're made of."

	Arthur came by to check on my progress.

	"You melted my shirt!"

	"I didn't mean to.  I didn't know.  I'm 
sorry.  I'll get you new shirts."

	"You melted all of them?!"

	I stood there with my proof of 
domesticity crumpling around my ankles as if I'd 
dropped my drawers.  All my hard work and 
dedication, my efforts to show Arthur what a good 
little wife I would have made, wasted, worse than 
wasted, made ridiculous.  I, and my life of 
gender conditioning, a bad joke.  I was not 
prepared to be someone's wife.  And I was not 
prepared to be my own woman either.  It was my 
privilege to be born when I was, caught between 
the mommy machine and the women's movement.

	I'd learned the lesson, but it would be 
too late to apply it.  This ship was bound to 
sink.



 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net