Area Woman Blows Gasket

by Patricia Pearson

  The Mexicans have managed to evolve a highly complicated naming custom, wherein a woman grows up with her father's last name followed by her mother's last name, which in my case would be Pearson Mackenzie. When she marries, she loses her father, adds her spouse, and moves her mother to the middle: Mackenzie Pottie. Partly for that reason, Mexican women generally prefer to go by their first names only, as in Dona Flora or Dona Sofia. Maybe that's what I should have done. I was born in Mexico, so I could appropriate the convention and walk around demanding to be called Dona Pat. Why not?

  Or I could hyphenate the combination and show respect for both my lineage and my husband. From now on, I'm going to sign all documents "Mrs. His Wife-Dona Pat." What do you think?

  The Illusion of Choice

  Lately I've been wondering, whatever happened to that press conference that Bill Gates gave a few years ago, in which he announced his intention to develop software that could connect my oven to the Internet? No further explanation was proffered in any of the news accounts that I read at the time. Nevertheless, for some reason, in the exciting near future, if Gates carries through on his vision, my oven will download recipes directly from the World Wide Web to itself.

  Well, if Bill Gates doesn't mind me asking, what the hell for?

  Can my oven read? No. Does my oven have opposable thumbs? No, I have never caught my oven in the act of holding measuring spoons or assembling a cup of flour. Maybe I'm misunderstanding Gates s dreams for the future. Maybe he also plans to develop a smart oven with thumbs. That way, oh bless the gods, I can come home from work and have an oven-ready meal, prepared lovingly for me by a large appliance.

  Did I mention what the hell for?

  What's wrong with lifting frozen lasagna out of the freezer and sticking it in the oven myself? Am I so strapped for time, so physically enfeebled, that I can't even transfer objects from one appliance to another?

  What all this amounts to is a perfect encapsulation of the tizzy that the information technology revolution has got itself in. As I see it, the world divides into two groups: There are those who, like Bill Gates, are nine-year-old boys at heart, saying, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could attach giant springs to our feet, so all we had to do to get to school would be to jump off the roofs of our houses and land in the homeroom in one bounce?" And those who reply: "Not really, no."

  Belonging to this second group, I am cringing at the thought of the impending, home-based software revolution. What do I need in my kitchen and bathroom that isn't there already? Did I need an electric toothbrush? Did I require a K-Tel automatic hamburger patty stacker? Do I sit around pining for one of those things that instantly seals plastic bags? Have I ever once used more than ten percent of the available functions on my VCR remote control? I'm still figuring out the efficacy of household technologies from the 1970s, like the butter temperature switch in my fridge, which never seems to have the faintest impact on the relative solidity of my butter even though I occasionally change it, out of curiosity, from "medium" to "soft."

  My mother-in-law, an inveterate watcher of infomercials, once acquired a remote-control camping lantern, which could be turned on and off from twenty yards away. Somehow this eased her anxiety about what might happen if, at the age of seventy-eight, she suddenly needed to sleep in a tent in the woods and had to go to the bathroom and a fairy stole her flashlight while she was more than twenty yards from her sleeping bag . . . just as the sun set and plunged everything into darkness.

  At least she didn't have to upgrade the technology on her never-used lantern. I, on the other hand, buy a perfectly useful computer and discover that its parts are obsolete within twelve months because the "wouldn't it be great?" crowd are at the helm of computer companies. My office has become not so much a graveyard for electronics as an orphanage. I have three computers in my closet that I was simply forced to abandon when I discovered that their makers would no longer supply me with replacement batteries. There are entire cars out there on the road putt-putting around that are older than my parents, and I can't keep a computer operating for longer than the shelf-life of cold medicine.

  God forbid that anyone should still own a tape deck or a VCR. When DVDs began slinking onto the shelves at my local Blockbuster, just innocently presenting themselves in nonthreatening clusters beside the videos, my heart sank as I fingered the change in my pocket. How long, I wondered sadly, how long until I had to buy a DVD player in order to see movies? How long until I had to throw out all my cassettes because no car I rented would play anything but CDs?

  There is a shift, I feel, and a wildly disconcerting one, between the days of being asked by wildly hopeful advertisers to buy stupid things on late-night TV and a market that makes you spend new money on products by undermining the value of what you have. The market, and the choices, are ever so slowly growing less free.

  Let It All Come Down

  Eight thirty at night and I've just received a call from Alba, who works for a credit card company.

  "Patricia," she ventured, in a soft and almost tentative voice, "I'm concerned that you haven't made your minimum payment this month, is everything all right?"

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it in puzzled disgust. The tone of her question was so intimate and so worried that I imagined her asking for an update on my marriage.

  Are you all right? Have robbers stolen your wallet? Did a tornado whirl through your house? Is there anything I can do?

  "Oh. Right," I said. 'Til pay right away."

  And I did. The next day I mailed a check. But still I received two more phone calls in as many days inquiring about my personal state of mental health. By the weekend I lay in bed imagining the conversation I really ought to have had with Alba.

  "I hesitate to be rude, Alba," I should have said, twirling the phone cord between my fingers as I felt my pulse speed up, priming for the challenge, "but I feel like maybe you're behaving a bit oddly. Has that occurred to you? Do you not think it's odd to phone someone at home, at night, whom you have never met, and inquire about her personal mental health? Is it possible that you don't feel concern for me so much as for your job, which would at least render your concern plausible? Is it okay for me to say that? Is your job at risk if I don't pay my minimum payment? Like, are you on a minimum-payment commission or something? I could phone your manager and explain that you and I are concerned about each other and that we are going to work this out privately. I could say: Back off, this is between me and Alba."

  I imagined her falling silent for a time, and then stonily falling back upon her point: "It would be helpful if you made a payment."

  "Okay, Alba," I would say, sadly and reflectively. "Okay." I actually have no objection to paying my bills, although I sometimes forget for a while. What alarms me, however, is the sequence of behaviors that credit card companies engage in as they transform you from potential client to serf. Is it not slightly creepy? At first, they court you aggressively. The other day, for instance, I was writing about being driven daft by consumer choices, when the phone rang, and incautiously I dared to answer it. Without further ado, I found myself listening to an impenetrable monologue from a department store sales rep about some sort of insurance plan that could be applied to my card right now, this minute, provided I digested everything he was babbling about on the spot, whereupon all I had to do was say "yes."

  "But I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," I pointed out. "Can't you just send me something in the mail?"

  "No ma'am, this offer is only available now, bla de bla." And off he went again, explaining something that I had neither the time nor the patience to deconstruct, while the pleasant task of . . . well . . . damning hucksters just like him swiftly faded and I had to take a break. Go to my corner Starbucks. Order a no-whip, decaf, grande mocha latte with a shot of Thorazine. Dream of escape.

  Came home to find credit cards flinging themselves through my mail slot with offers of preapproved cards and extravagant compliments about my spe
cial status as a recipient. A friend's four-year-old son was preapproved for one of these cards, which we thought was interesting, given that all he would think to do was use the card as a diving board for his Rescue Heroes.

  Essentially, these are cards that you would otherwise never think to apply for— because you're fine. Doing fine. But after ignoring eighteen that come through the mail, you look at the nineteenth and start to think, Wow. Seven thousand dollars' credit preapproved! Consider how much microwave popcorn, Primordiale Nuit lotion, and funerals you could buy!

  Ah, what the hell. You get the card. The low interest rate strings you along for a while until it evaporates and you're laying out roughly twelve times the bank rate in interest just to pay off new shoes. Hello quagmire of debt. Then, this is what credit card companies do. They dog you with their weird pseudo-intimate inquiries when you find yourself a week past due. It's scary, because this does not happen with the phone company or the furnace guys. They send you reminder notices in the mail, and then eventually just threaten to cut you off. They don't pretend they care. And thus, they don't betray you in the way that credit card companies do when you still fail to pay, for whatever reason, and the nicey-nice credit card people drop the temperature in their voices to frigid and kneecap you with a baseball bat.

  I know this, because in the space of six weeks, one memorable time, I moved houses and gave birth to a son, with the predictable result that I entirely forgot about a rarely used credit card whose minimal billings no longer arrived at the correct address. Busy as I was, swaying back and forth and back and forth to Bob Marley tunes as Geoffrey bawled in his Snugli, I was taken off guard one day by a phone call from a "Mr. Hobbs." He left a number but no explanation as to why he had called.

  Unlike Alba, who didn't give me her last name, Mr. Hobbs refused to give me his first name, when I got back to him, in a spirit of perfect reversal. Alba was my friend. Mr. Hobbs was not. He informed me that I owed the full bill to this credit card company immediately, and then he told me to phone him back when I had made payment. I took note, scrawled out a check, and then resumed sleep deprivation and reggae staggering, planning to mail out a bunch of stuff on Friday. But, earth to new mother Patricia! No, no, no! Once you are in Hobbsian hands, you cannot wait until Friday. What are you, a freak? Less than twenty-four hours elapsed between our initial conversation and the time that Mr. Hobbs felt free to leave a message at Ambrose's office, pretending that he needed to reach me urgently and could not get through. At the same time, he went after Doug.

  Doug.

  Doug was my neighbor, a morgue technician at a nearby hospital who spent hours in his garage at night listening to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and tinkering with his proudly acquired second-hand Jaguar. Doug— he of the pale green scrubs— had a preternatural George Hamilton tan, a receding hairline, and two boisterous blond sons who played road hockey in the alley. He also had a wife— a lean, curly-haired woman named April who was constantly and tensely engaged in the weeding and pruning of her postage-stamp garden.

  "Oh, for God's sake," April would mutter loudly on her side of the fence, knowing that I was on the other side, "I am so sick of this."

  I was left to presume that she meant my cats, who were probably pooing in her troweled rows of compost, but she wasn't the sort to say it directly, just glared at me whenever we chanced to see each other over the ivy.

  I never saw April and Doug at the neighborhood cafes and bars or the chic shops that lined our street. They shunned the funky downtown core in which they were inescapably trapped by the convenient walk to their hospital jobs, and their unhappiness was palpable, and toxic. The day that Mr. Hobbs saw fit to call Ambrose's workplace, Doug came over and twisted our old-fashioned doorbell.

  "Hi," he said, staring wildly over my head and using a tone that barked / am not interested in you or your phone calls, "I got a message for you to call someone named Mr. Hobbs." He handed me the phone number.

  I gaped in astonishment. "That is bizarre!" I exclaimed. Then I asked, as an afterthought, "Did Mr. Hobbs phone you today?"

  Maybe this was from before Hobbs had reached me, I thought, maybe he was not deliberately trying to portray me as a delinquent slut unfit for the neighborhood, while shaming me at the same time in front of my husband's work colleagues. Maybe . . . ?

  Doug nodded. Today He still wouldn't make eye contact. I understood that it was part of Doug's tangled and waterlogged fate to share this neighborhood with writers and artists and Vietnamese people when he was, simply, Doug. He just wanted everyone to go away. His wife, with her brittle snip-snapping about not stepping on the tulips, his bouncy children, the dead bodies, the breast-feeding neighbors with collection agents on their case. As I perceived it, Doug wanted to relive the successful part of his life that had taken place in a garage somewhere with Aerosmith and a car. Over and over, he wanted this, like the movie Groundhog Day, but played out as a fantasy rather than a cautionary tale.

  I took the number, thanked Doug, and retreated inside. I phoned Mr. Hobbs and flared with outrage that he had done what he'd done. Was he insane? Had the rules of civilized conduct changed? Mr. Hobbs calmly passed me over to his manager, proforma. You could tell he did it all the time. And as God, the sleeping Geoffrey, and Ambrose are my witnesses, this woman, his manager, dressed me down with such fervor and vitriol that I felt like a suspect in serial homicide.

  "Don't you ever, EVER, talk to one of my employees that way," she bellowed.

  "Your employee called my neighbor!" I protested.

  "My employees are professionals who do whatever is required to make people like you honor your outstanding debts." People like me. I was a mother in a bathrobe and detachable bra flaps.

  "You are to MARCH down to the nearest Money Mart," she commanded, "do you understand? And WIRE the entire amount that you owe, RIGHT NOW."

  I tried to argue with her, but she interrupted me with verbal thumps against my chest. "Do you want to go to JAIL? Is that it? Do you want to go to JAIL?"

  Berated and screamed at until I finally capitulated, I left the baby with Ambrose and obediently went off to wire the full amount I owed to the collection agency from a nearby Money Mart, only later confirming that nothing like that— NOTHING— was mandated under Ontario law. You do, in fact, get to send a check by snail mail. You do not, in fact, face the prospect of imprisonment for doing so.

  I have never hated anyone in my entire life as vehemently as I hated Mr. Hobbs and his army-issue boss. For weeks I plotted my revenge, a la Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. But ultimately, there was very little that I could do, other than file a complaint with the relevant government ministry. Instead, I signed up for a course, entitled "How to Hide Your Assets and Disappear."

  It's not the government you need to worry about in terms of invasion of privacy, the instructor said, it's the private sector. Just so.

  CONSOLATIONS FOR THE

  NEUROTIC MODERN PARENT

  Shakespeare's Nanny

  When my son was eleven months old, the question arose: How do I get somebody else to stand around, stupefied with boredom, while he drops a rubber duck into the toilet, fishes it out, drops it in, fishes it out, cries, spies a stray bit of Kleenex, drops that in, discovers that it has disintegrated, cries? In other words, I wanted to go back to work.

  Do I pack him off to day care as I did my daughter, or do I hire some sort of nanny, preferably one who, through a rare genetic disorder affecting the cerebral cortex, cannot be judgmental about the catastrophic state of my house?

  Nothing in the world makes women more insanely neurotic than having a nanny. It doesn't matter who the nanny is. She could be Mother Teresa, in which case the mother would start worrying that her nanny was more concerned about world poverty than toddler gymnastics. What if, as a result of Nanny Teresa's neglect, baby Jimmy grew up to be uncoordinated? What then? As soon as a woman hires a nanny, she's off and running with outlandish paranoia. One of my sanest friends recently confided in me that she thoug
ht her nanny was putting poison in her son's Cheerios.

  "Whaddya mean— like rat poison?"

  "Yeah, I'm not kidding. He's been getting really sick after breakfast."

  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you think that your last nanny was slipping him Quaaludes?"

  "Yes, but that was just a misunderstanding. This is different. I think she has a lot of repressed hostility."

  There is no reasonable response to this kind of frenzied maternal fretting jag, and I've heard it so many times that it makes me lean toward day care. There's the occasional Satanic abuse worry at day cares, of course, but for the most part mothers don't tend to get into weird psychotic turf wars with day care staffers. Instead, they just feel guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty, alllll the time. "Bye sweetie, I'm just dropping you off here— please stop screaming and clutching my leg— because it's important that I permanently undermine our attachment and warp your development, according to several new studies, and also MUMMY HAS TO GO TO WORK NOW, PLEASE LET GO OF MY PANTS."

  I try to follow the day care vs. Mommy debates, but the logic seems to travel in small vicious circles. At some point you get to wondering: "Well, what is seriously going to happen if my children go to day care, or have a nanny? Like, are they going to become contract killers, or are they going to be somewhat more argumentative in adolescence? Exactly how damaged a future are the experts envisioning as a result of substitute care? This led me to think about the child care arrangements of history's most accomplished men and women. Maybe history could frame the debate a little more concisely. For instance, did Shakespeare have a nanny? Because if he did, then, end of conversation, as far as I'm concerned.

  So I perused a few biographies in the local bookstore, and here are my preliminary notes: