I put my salad down and look for a bucket.
All I can find is a fancy hexagonal gift box full of bath bombs from the cosmetics store Lush. I empty the box in a whoosh of lavender dust and approach the tottering baby mouse. I am making high-pitched screaming sounds in my head.
I try to upend the box over the mouse. But he(?) suddenly develops some unexpected thinking skills and eludes me, darting behind the piano. I close the pocket doors of the office and call Fabian. He tells me to transfer one of the glue traps under the stove to the living room.
Now, I am a proud feminist, but to me, this all falls under a category called “MAN.” So when Charlie comes home twenty minutes later, I assign him to it. Charlie ducks down to pull a glue trap out from under the stove and says, “Whoa.” Never a good sign. One of the glue traps is already occupied by a larger dead mouse. Oh God. The word “infestation” is flashing across my brain pan.
He picks up the second glue trap. I open the pocket doors to the office. From out of nowhere, the baby mouse darts toward him—my mind flashes to the killer bunny in that Monty Python movie.
Charlie screams—that’s a first for him. I swiftly close the doors.
“He’s just sitting here, looking at me,” Charlie narrates, in growing disbelief. “He’s not that smart. Whoa! He just came up and sniffed the trap! He was an inch away!”
“This is horrible!” I exclaim, now actually envisioning the mouse baby’s slow gluey death. It’s so very opposite of Ratatouille, or any other Disney movie.
I open a door and hand Charlie the fancy hexagonal gift box from Lush. He upends the perfumey pink box over the mouse. Under it he slides a record recently pressed by his tirelessly productive indie musician friend Tex. “Vinyl, man, ‘everyone’s’ going back to vinyl,” Tex said. How very true. Particularly when “everyone” has rodents.
Charlie carries the baby mouse outside and releases it. As we are just ten feet away from where Rico the feral cat lives, we’re essentially a meal delivery service. But at least we won’t witness actual violence.
The next night, Sally, Charlie, and I have made a fortress of pillows on our bed upstairs, enjoying Sally’s current favorite show Supernatural. All of a sudden, she exclaims, “Oh no, look!”
And, at our bedroom door, on the second floor, another baby mouse! Staring at us!
“This is a big house!” I yell. “This mouse could go anywhere! We are three humans shrieking aloud in fear as we watch a very noisy TV show about ghosts and demons. Shouldn’t mice be scared off by the sound? Like bears?”
Charlie and Sally grab the Lush bath bomb box, slide another of Tex’s indie records under it (it’s suddenly nice we have so many of them) and carry the mouse downstairs, with the plan to, as usual, liberate it onto the front porch. But at the bottom porch stair, the baby mouse, who managed to get up twenty-five stairs with absolutely no problem, does a belly flop onto the concrete and stops moving, stone-cold dead. Sally begins wailing. Gawd! It’s like a horror show!
I put my arms around her to comfort her, and . . . what? These are the Parent/Child Conversational Moments where I literally have no idea what to say. My usual route is to immediately go meta-philosophical, changing the topic so entirely that I confuse the child. I follow that up with simple lying.
“It’s just, honey— Don’t be sad! You understand that babies aren’t fully cooked yet, brain development-wise. They need several months to actually become individuals. Think human babies. Mice babies. Kittens. Oh, remember at our other house, when we had those oceans of feral black kittens. Furry, blinking, cute . . .”
And hell-bent on suicide, I now horribly remember. These seemed to be their tiny trains of thought: “Swimming pool? Let’s jump in! Who’s next door? Pitbulls! Yay! Can we run faster than this car? Apparently, no! Splat.”
So I just skipped the talk and pulled out ice cream. Rocky Road and Elephant Tracks. It seemed fitting.
“February”
Rebirthing Shoots of Grass in the Ice
“cheese therapy”
Pema Bollywood/The Goddess Within/Fifty-Sixth Birthday/My Goddess, Myself
MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE every time “Miracle Cure for Belly Fat!” appears on my computer screen, I click on it. Maybe it’s the suite of Pandora stations I’ve created—“jazz flute,” “soothing solo piano,” and yes, no apologies, “James Taylor.”
Fact is, the algorithms have found me—a middle-aged lady with a VISA card! So through every device now I’m being pelted with ads for “Christian singles over 50,” colorful plus-sized “Zulily” clothing, Zoloft, Cedars-Sinai arthroscopic knee surgery (the male announcer is so soothing I’m tempted to just have the surgery), and even . . . promotional e-mails from life coaches eager to help fiftysomething me become both a bold warrioress and a joyful goddess. Recent example:
Hello Beautiful Sandra Loh,
I want to help you break through the things that are holding you back so you can create more of the life you want and less of the life you don’t want, now!
We’ll work together to:
Clarify what you want to change
Foster self care
Honor your inner “no”
Bloom into your True Self
Find joy, joy, joy!
Beautiful Sandra Loh, welcome to Goddesshood!
SURE, WHEN WE were in our thirties, I suggested to my sister that as we got older and our ages became emotionally unwieldy, I could just give her a cake that said, “Happy Goddess Day!” on it. To which she said, “If you ever do that, I will kill you first and then I will kill myself.”
But really. What’s so wrong with the goddess thing? It is my birthday. That’s right.
After everything horrible that’s happened in our country and on our planet, more welcome news. I’m turning fifty-six! I’m now closer to sixty than fifty. Gah! What’s to celebrate?
I mean, by fifty-six, I’ve had career ups and downs. I have kids, a partner, and a house. In the main, I am fine. At this point, no single phone call is going to radically change my life, except for medical tests results, and those are not likely to be fantastic. (“Congratulations! You’re pregnant!” “Our scanner reveals that you have magically lost seventeen pounds!” or “We’ve literally found a million dollars inside of your body!”)
I’m trying to imagine what I’m going to become next. I’ve been a twentysomething ingénue, thirtysomething career girl, fortysomething mom, fiftysomething . . . what? Dame? Matron? Queen Mother? (Bella Abzug?)
Why not goddess?
Why not silvery goddess?
SUNDAY EVENINGS ARE not pretty. First, I think Sally is acting out because at 8:30 sharp I snapped off her TV show—always a traumatic event.
But no, the wailing continues over the fact that—of course—she hates all her pants. I have inadvertently dissed some of her stuffed animals by facing them in the wrong direction. She also misses her dad.
On the phone to him, as I wait just outside her door with her hot chocolate, Sally rails on and on about her miseries, in an escalating pitch, until finally, in real alarm, Ben asks, “Did something happen today?”
And out it comes, her youthful cri de coeur: “I HATE MONDAYS!”
“Well, everyone hates Mondays,” I say afterward, rubbing her skinny shoulders. “In winter, BLUE MONDAY is said to be the most depressing day of the year. It’s part the dark weather, part time elapsed since Christmas, part failing one’s New Year’s resolutions. God, now even I’m getting depressed.”
Her face still in her hands, Sally cracks a little smile.
So she can still be comforted, at least temporarily. But sometimes I worry about these huge storms of feeling that come over her. It’s not just her stuffed animals. She will weep over a seashell broken in a box. Or a snapped bird feather. When she was eight, a toothpaste cap disappeared down the bathroom sink drain. Wailed Sally, “That toothpaste cap was my best friend!”
Hannah, thank God, is the rock.
But the next day
during lunch, Hannah texts me from school.
Mom, please pick up. I thought I aced my test in AP World History but I bombed it. I’ve dropped to a low C. I’m so scared and sad. ;(
Until now, Hannah has always sailed through school. But now that it’s sophomore year, she has three AP classes and it’s the first time her GPA actually counts. It’s like her grades are pinging around in a pinball machine, hitting every different letter of the alphabet. Plus her sleep/study habits seem like they were birthed in a jungle. Every morning at 5:30 a.m., when we have to get up, I find Hannah dead asleep, face smashed into her open history book, earphones still blasting (death metal—still even a thing?).
Having apparently missed her, I now call and call and she doesn’t answer. When I pick Hannah up after school, with great purring empathy, I ask whether we should resume EdLine—where parents have online access to their children’s grades. “Hell no!” Hannah says, completely refreshed, and reconfident. It’s like she has forgotten her woes already. “Wallace is allowing me extra credit, and so is Ms. Said in chemistry, which brings my GPA up to a 3.75.”
“Oh!” I exclaim. This is the first I’ve heard a GPA of any number.
“Uh-huh,” Hannah says, more obliquely. With an almost reptilian blink of her yellow-shadowed eyes (yellow? is that some Japanese thing?), the portals close again. It sometimes feels like my fifteen-year-old is auditioning multiple personalities on me. She’s alternately sassy, then vulnerable, then needy, then secretive . . . and I, her mom, am always one wrong step behind in the cycle.
Which is to say, between these two girls, I’m shell-shocked every day. The waves of their emotions batter against me. But I have to be a calm mom. I feel I literally have to not spasm, to keep my body soft.
As the Goddess Project says, to heal pain points: “Ice to water, water to vapor. Ohhhhm.”
Julia calls—she wants me to join her in a 6 p.m. Groupon cardio barre class.
Cardio barre.
Goddess-like, I dig within my True Self and find . . . the inner no!
IN THE MAIL, I get a catalogue from a company called Softer Seasons and I like it. I like it a lot. It features serene women of a certain age smiling secretively to themselves as they move glamorously alone through gauzy abodes. There is:
A single wine glass holder for personal tub soaking. (Note: nothing is for two.)
A kind of bathrobe/kimono that—it’s hard to explain—looks like you can take it on or off in one simple tie.
A pashmina blanket—wait, no, Snuggie—a specialized Snuggie for people who apparently find regular Snuggies too complicated.
I love all of it. From now on, I want everything around me to be soft. I buy a discounted pillow from Target that says, SWEATPANTS ZONE. Also, socks just for the house, fuzzy socks.
I see walk-in tubs advertised in AARP Magazine and think, What a great idea!
I CONTINUE MAKING online forays into goddesshood, from a menu of options that come to resemble a kind of Angie’s List, if you will, of personal transformation. This voyage does not proceed entirely smoothly.
I do a five-minute online meditation. It’s a video of a peaceful forest, with Tibetan bell sounds, but I’m bothered by a faint buzzing sound in the background. Is that a chainsaw?
I try an online webinar in goddess energy. The goddess energy is, unfortunately, being summoned from a rather dingy looking attic. Louise Wellman, the webinar leader, an addled older lady with a shock of gray hair, is having a lot of technical problems. “Is it on?” she keeps murmuring, in her trance voice. “I think the camera’s on now. A red light is blinking. Isn’t it?” But we can only see her from eyebrows up.
I study an online brochure for a seventy-two-hour women’s spiritual retreat. I am tempted—the surrounding countryside looks gorgeous. But it’s hard to figure out whether the cabins are nice or dumpy. There are one too many enigmatic close-ups of hands reaching out to plates of fussily arranged fruit. There are one too many soft-lit photos of lumpy women in sweatpants with closed eyes, holding hands in a circle.
Where is the wine—?
Ah— Possibly no wine, because the retreat is about “women’s emotional healing, addiction recovery, trauma relief, personal transformation, midlife reinvention.”
This sounds too intense. I’m breaking into a sweat just thinking about it. Ice to water, water to vapor.
I think I’m going to have to do this goddess thing my way. Sort of an à la carte thing. Compare goddess fabric swatches. I drive to the Third Eye Bookstore I’ve always been curious about, in South Pasadena. VISA card in hand, I strike gold. Granted, at first I get a little snarled in the Wiccan section. I’m visually drawn to a “Know Your Elves” calendar with daily magickal practices. But as I page through it, I realize there are too many kinds of elves—wood ones and air ones and water ones. It requires too much constant gardening of little herb pots and then buying special stones like lapis lazuli to place into the little pots. Instead of “self-care,” it is “elf care.”
I pick up another book: The Warrior Goddess Way: Clarity, Creativity, and Inner Power for Women—Birth a Path of Authenticity and Honesty. Blood red cover. No.
But look: here’s The Pocket Pema Chödrön that fits into a felted saddle bag with a peace sign, 40 percent off! A tarot deck . . . totally made of cats! “I love it!” I hear myself crow. An essential oil (chamomile, frankincense) car air freshener! Something called The Green Goddess Cookbook, featuring stunning sunlit photos of olive oil, peaches, soft cheeses, and—look at this sultry chapter title: “A Passion for Ramps.” Ramps! I think, shimmying my deliciously plump shoulders. “A Passion for Ramps!”
I see an Ayurvedic Goddess Massage advertised and, while it’s pricey, for my birthday, I book it! Then I turn the corner, and there it is: the Himalayan tie-dye section. The colorful drapey hangers invite and fling their musliny arms out to me. And I see them: blossomy purple harem pants, in a style I might call “Pema Bollywood.”
I look at the tag and see those four magical words: “One Size Fits All.”
MY BIRTHDAY ALWAYS falls around the time of Mardi Gras.
A rabid New Orleans lover, Charlie always observes Mardi Gras. However, Mardi Gras is a very hard party to throw. “Fat Tuesday” is also always a big fat school night. Anyway, most of our friends in L.A. think Mardi Gras is kind of weird, like some kind of skanky Bourbon Street boob-flashing thing. As opposed to having deep mystical/Native American/Zulu tribal roots, according to Charlie.
So, in the past couple of years on Mardi Gras, Charlie has started having just three friends over who I’ve dubbed “the Gentlemen Callers.” Let me describe them to you this way. Picture a yin/yang symbol of polar opposites. If on the left, Sheryl Sandberg and her flotilla of Type A female leaders are leaning in in snappy A-line skirts, to the right, Charlie and his brethren are leaning out, in colorful dashikis and tinfoil hats.
Which is to say, theirs is an artisanal (aged in small batches) definition of maleness.
These brethren all met at Columbia in the late 1970s, when you could practically get in with a C average. (A simpler time, Charlie wrote his AP English essay on a work of literature he totally made up called “Apartment House Raga.”) The Gentlemen studied everything arcane and fascinating and useless, from English to erotic Japanese statuary to eighteenth-century horticulture. Passions include Hinduism, Sun Ra, Afrofuturism, vinyl, free jazz, and home cannabis delivery. You may also see antique globe collections, matchbook collections, and, hanging above a snarl of out-of-tune electric guitars, a broken tin whistle. By day they make small livings (manager of an apartment building, used-books seller, freelance luthier), not typically discussed.
The Gentlemen have a swath of put-upon wives and girlfriends. Many of us are on the spectrum—we are science fiction novelists, library scientists, oboe professors. Financially independent, we suffer our Gentlemen’s eccentricities and fiduciary problems, because, unlike many alpha males with real jobs, they are amusing company.
So, celebrating Mardi Gras here today are:
Tex, Hawaiian shirts, has some family mystery money, collects vinyl.
Jerry, Utilikilts, has a professional background in dance, mime, and clowning. Jerry married very well, to that gal on TV who plays the astrophysicist on that thing (one of the Star Treks?).
Bradford writes opera librettos. I have to say, Bradford has really blown up over the years. He is now almost obese, but never not in a blazer, the buttons practically popping off. But he is happy with himself. As he has said comfortably, stretching his arms out: “I am a perfect size fifty-two.”
All four Gentlemen, including Charlie, have lived, at various times, in New Orleans. (Most went to Burning Man once, but were too lazy to go a second time.) They all understand Mardi Gras, the history, the legacy, the various parade “krewes.”
So here it is, 2 p.m. in the afternoon. WWOZ New Orleans is streaming from the big living room computer. Charlie is standing in the kitchen, drinking a Bloody Mary and swirling a roux.
Tex is texting his NOLA musician buddies to see what’s going on. “They’re at St. Ann’s now!” he calls out. “With Jewlu!”
Bradford is unpacking bags of essential NOLA ingredients: “I had to drive all the way to Altadena to find the Crystal hot sauce. And pickled okra. And of course we’ll need Peychaud’s Bitters”—he waves a bottle—“for the Sazeracs.”
Jerry is “warming up” by doing tai chi on the back deck.
On one of my four-time-a-week shopping rounds, I’ve picked up Mardi Gras beads at the Van Nuys Party Store. Charlie refuses them for their inauthenticity. Truth be told, the gold, green, and pink just looks tinny and sad. The plastic bags sit on the back porch unopened. More successful is the authentic King Cake I’ve bought, somehow effortlessly executed by Porto’s Armenian Bakery in Glendale. And for a time, all is festive. Cocktails clank, gumbo is engorged, Jerry and Charlie spar—with (relative) good humor—about the correct way to turn the shrimp on the barbecue. Charlie and Jerry always fight about the barbecue. This segues into drunken bro dancing in the backyard to a Cajun beat and singing that sounds like “Hey now! Hey now! Hey now! Hey now! Waikowaikowaiko!”
The Madwoman and the Roomba Page 3
