Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I)

by Lennon, Carole J

  Catherine moved on in another direction. Where Richard had parleyed his acting skills and ebullient personality into a job in sales, she had gone back to school and obtained a Master's in Interior Design, got herself ASID certified and became fairly successful. By successful, we mean she did not go broke, and by fairly, we mean she had enough clients she could send off the clients that made life miserable for people such as herself. Gone were the price takers, bargain hunters looking for free advice under the guise of shopping. Gone were the clients (or at least a lot of them) who had more dollars than sense. Some of them thought good design was wild and gaudy, encouraged by Hollywood made for TV movies who showed wildly gesturing Designers (Gay working best, but feather boas on a woman were sufficient), flinging exotic, but highly commissioned and highly expensive, art, colors and furniture about the room. Catherine could see little difference between their design and the vibrant Crayola pictures stuck to the refrigerator with magnets, other than the price and that quite often the pricey items stayed within the lines, but not always.

  Some time after Richard had gone, Steven came into her life. This was the man she should have married first. He was gentle and smart, clever with his hands and devoted to her. She gave him two children. Or perhaps it might be more appropriate to say they inflicted (Let's not be mean about this. The kids were alright, but they were kids and there is never enough patience in most of us parents) two children on each other. The two, a boy and a girl were imaginative and active. By the time of this story the two had moved on to college and out of the house. It amused her to think of how the standards for success changed over the years. When she and Steven first peered into the cradle, the thoughts ran along the lines of the children getting straight A's, being valedictorians, 2-3 letters in sports, getting full ride scholarships to Harvard or Yale. By the time the two children had left for college, the fulfilled desire on Catherine and Steven to be alone was the triumph, and an additional success was marked by the short list of: no one died, no one got pregnant, no one was addicted to drugs, no one landed in jail, and there were no visible tattoos. As a further plus, their children's credit ratings were not pre-ruined by bratty credit cards and rolling balances at Best Buy for CD's, TV's and sound systems.

  Steven came as a surprise to her. A friend from high school mentioned his name, sometime after her divorce from Richard, and found a way to get them to exchange phone numbers. At the time, he was working in Kentucky, crawling endlessly through the books in a company that either was not expecting them to be seen, or hoping for the story not to be told.

  She wrote a letter of introduction about herself and two days later panicked and called him to tell him not to read the letter when it came. Of course, this just happened to be the time when the US Postal Service had its series of fortunate events and had delivered this particular letter, this particular time very quickly. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while. Steven had read the entire rambling mess and had seen the beauty of her within. He asked if he could call her right back so she wouldn't have to pay for the long distance charges, and he did so, and they talked that first night for four hours. By the end of the call they were in full love. It took weeks for them to meet. He had sent her a picture of himself, a thin, athletic looking man with a full, but neat beard, blazing blue eyes and, this was her favorite part, very large hands. She could not take her eyes off the photo of those hands. She wondered if he was as graceful and kind with his hands as he was with his voice on the phone. For her own part, she did not choose to send him a picture of herself as she tended not to take good photos. Almost every camera had the uncanny ability to find the wild dog red retina in her eyes. She told him she would meet him at the airport gate (Such things were allowed back then.) and she would be the willowy blonde. If she was late, she would meet him at the baggage claim.

  We wonder why she used the word: "If." She was preternaturally late to everything and should have said: "When I am late, we will meet at the baggage claim area." She was wise enough not to describe her clothing, as she knew she would she would not decide that until the last moment. As it happened, she was, in fact, late. Steven deplaned to discover that approximately 50% of all women at the Tulsa airport are willowy blondes, and a good portion of them were willing to look him in the eyes. But though he was such a nerd that uncertainty was his enemy, as frustrating as it was, he was good enough at reading between the lines to realize that Catherine would almost certainly be late. Besides, he was 20 pages away from finishing the Sci-Fi novel he had brought for the trip. After retrieving his bag and vainly searching every blue-eyed willowy blonde woman for some sort of recognition, he sat down and started to read. As he finished the last page, an act of good luck as it turns out; he looked up to see a wide eyed blonde woman staring at him. He smiled hopefully, and she stomped her foot and exclaimed, "Where have you been?" He smiled, knowing there was no good answer and allowed her to save face. Her eyes moved to his hands and back to his face and she smiled sheepishly. He hugged her and gently kissed her lips.

  Things moved fast after that and they both knew they were destined to marry, but his burgeoning career as an audit CPA for a multi-national company kept him on the road a lot and her newly minted career as an interior designer kidnapped a lot of her energy. She found out that, not only could he dabble in the garage arts of wood working and yard maintenance, but he had plumbing, electrical, wallpaper, and masonry skills. The mother lode husband for an interior designer! She felt pride and comfort in the fact that anything she could conceive, he could build.

  And often it came down to such events. Many years later, once she found a need of a kitchen table of a size not commercially found (66 inch diameter), she had looked in a book for oriental design screens and in the section for octagons, found a sample that she liked and asked if he could build it. He looked at it, asked if he could convert the octagon to a 16 sided polygon, so it would be less likely to poke someone in the hip, and took the design to the garage. There he laminated two sets of plywood for the base, calculated and cut the shape to perfect geometric proportions and began handcrafting the design. He used a walnut burl octagon in the center, radiated out in first 8, then 16 symmetrical directions using Peruvian walnut, and then he used Purpleheart triangles, Bubinga pentagons, and finished the outside in Indian Rosewood. All in all, there were 600 pieces in that table top. Each one was custom sanded with a 2% angle to hide the gap, place fitted, then a hole drilled below it. Next he would crawl under the table, hand screw in a screw to mark the exact perfect place to drill a pilot hole, which he would proceed to drill. Then he would glue the piece in place, crawl under the table and screw the part down in place, as both a clamp and a lock. 600 pieces! It took weeks, then months to build. Finally he sanded for days on end to obtain perfect smoothness and then he varnished it.

  He found a way to assemble and reassemble the base to the table top as the whole thing was way too heavy for one adult male to muscle around on his own, and in fact, would not go through a standard door. He presented this proudly to his wife and daughter, who stood silently in front of him. It was four years later before she admitted to him that she and their daughter had picked the hardest design in the book as a joke to see how frustrated he would be. When he said nothing, they thought he would just silently give up. So when he was done, they did not have the heart to tell him it had been a joke. But from this exercise she found she could trust him to find a way to do anything. And to not make jokes when designing.

  Every boy is said to look to marry mom and every girl is said to seek out a dad replacement. Her first husband, Richard found tasks such as screwing in light bulbs either beneath him, or beyond him. And, this appeared to be a trait that did not skip generations. Catherine once sat through a post Christmas gathering at Richard's parents where his parents and Richard chortled at the pathetic distant relatives that had removed all the light switch and plug plates and either cleaned them or replaced them as a Christmas gift. Catherine smiled politely as they showed
their disdain for what she thought to be a great gift of thought and effort. Richard's parents thought they could earn respect only by dint of a pen and a checkbook.

  Catherine was raised quite differently. Her fondest moments were spent either in the kitchen, watching her mother make bread or cookies or pies, or in the garage watching her father weld, drill or file. There was no sweet smell her mother could not create and no item her father could not fix.

  For their part, Catherine’s parents watched their daughter with pride. She was able to do what she saw and she saw everything. She learned to cook southern style, which meant that all recipes start with the words: "Take some bacon fat..." But her figure never turned to the large side. She drank whole milk, never used oleo, for everyone knew that butter was natural, and she had little trouble with weight control. She stood five foot 6 as an adult and weighed 116, which precipitated a diet when she ballooned to 118. The diet normally consisted of her slathering her butter on half a roll rather than a full one. She never understood the women she knew who complained about gaining weight. With her high energy, her fat cells really never stood a chance. Things got dicey when she caught the flu one year and sank to 112 and she struggled to add back 3-4 pounds. Her complaining to her co-workers about her problem gaining weight earned her unbecoming glares and she eventually realized that there was never to be sympathy among the women who lost every dietary fencing match with the breadsticks at the salad bar.

  She saw equal success in the garage and believed everything could be fixed, but really lacked the training to understand how things were put together. Once shown, she could understand it, but she had little background on how to take things apart, just so they could go back together. For this one flaw we can both blame and forgive her father. He was proud of her curiosity, but never imagined she would need to work in the garage on her own. In his mind, she would marry and the husband would do for her, what he has done for his wife.

  So her parents were somewhat stunned when she married Richard, shocked, really, that there were boys in the world who were amazed that there were tools in the garage, leave alone on pegboards outlined in magic marker for easy reference. And they were somewhat of two minds at the divorce, as that wasn't in their reference scheme except in the cases of poorly prepared and worse executors of the marital functions (Which were: he provides the income and the infrastructure and she provides the children and the home climate). Their second mind was relief that she might pick better before the DNA got diluted.

  They were quite pleased with the nearly shy and quite capable Steven. Her father and Steven would sit in front of the TV and discuss the science of a running play in the NFL and then easily go to the garage to build a jig for building a fence. For Steven had the natural desire to over-engineer everything he built, just like her father. He had no desire to rebuild anything, so he made it to last forever. She delighted in the fact that she could fearlessly stand on any furniture he built. He knew people might want to stand on the tops of cabinets to dust the ceiling, so he made them rugged enough for that.

  It was this sort of perseverance that endeared him to her. Any long task baffled her. She could not walk from one end of the house to the other to do just one task. One summer, Steven had been in the back, in the Arizona heat, laying brick on the sidewalk. He had been at it for months. She stepped outside from the din of the children and went to the side of the house where he was measuring and cutting, mortaring and cleaning, brick after brick. His sweat dripped down his face and onto the red bricks, briefly coloring the pinkish brick to a deep blood red, and then the dry heat sucked it away, leaving a little white salt ring. She offered to get him a glass of tea. "I'll get it.” He said. "Don't be silly," she exclaimed. “You have so much to do already."

  She went into the master bedroom, stooping to pick up a sock that had fallen from the laundry basket. She stopped by the laundry room, dropping the sock in the basket when the dryer chimed. Not wanting to let the clothes wrinkle, she pulled them out and folded them, cleaned the lint out of the dryer lint catcher, added the load from the washer and put another load in the washer, because as any working mother with 2 or more kids knows, on Saturday, the washer and dryer must never stop for long. She headed for the kitchen, stopping only to pick up a stray toy, arbitrate a dispute between the kids and stroke the cat lounging on the sofa back. When she got to the kitchen, Steven was standing there, his shirt drenched in sweat and filthy with brick dust, gulping down the last of a large glass of iced tea. "I was going to get that!" she insisted in a slightly hurt way. He shrugged and glanced at the clock. "You can get me another," he said patiently.

  The reason he was bricking the sidewalk was another insight to their relationship. The house was a financial stretch for them. It took all their savings for the down payment and with two young kids and being fairly early in careers, they had to wait for the upgrades and improvements. So over time each opportunity they had to free up the budget, they would do as much work on their own to stretch the thin money. So it was they who each evening would mix up bags of concrete and make another 2 foot by 2 foot square. Eventually, they had a walk around the house, threading through the trees they had planted. Paths led out to the far side, circled around large trees and led to benches to sit and meditate. Their back yard became an arboreal paradise with sweet smelling roses here and night blooming Jasmine there. Catherine felt she was in a jungle in the middle of the desert.

  Once the walk was finished, a photograph of gardens in New Orleans crossed her path and she imagined her patio covered in brick like the one in the magazine. Steven wearily sighed and said he thought it could be done; and then each night he laid 20 or so brick, cleaning the ones from the nights before. And at long last, he invited Catherine and their daughter to admire the finished product. The three walked around, the daughter asking for a party to be held in their magnificent back yard and then they got to the edge of the patio. Catherine remarked how it did not match up to a post holding up the patio cover. "Well," Steven explained, "You see the walk connects here and goes off there, but the patio connects on this one corner of the house, and perpendicular to that is where you see it ends. If I was to cover that post properly, I might as well pave the entire sidewalk." His breath caught in his throat as he recognized his mistake, hoping against hope that she had missed the gaffe. His daughter knew that no such luck was in his future and she cried, "Oh, Daddy." Catherine gaily said, "Great idea. We'll need more bricks."

  Their daughter had inherited many of her mother's skills and abilities, but not all. To a superficial eye, the genetic connection was striking. Lush long blonde hair, pale eyes and beautiful symmetrical structure graced them both. And while Catherine stood five foot six, her daughter never crested above five foot two. She loved to cook as much as her mother and took an even greater desire than Catherine in cooking desserts. In fact, it was a source of frustration to her parents when they would come home to the ravages of a pastry war. All across the kitchen were littered the hulks of mixing bowls, shards of softened butter splattered across cabinets, and smoking piles of cookie crumbs dropped to the floor. While both Catherine and Steven were meticulous in their shared tasks in the kitchen, never leaving a mess to a later meal, both children had managed to somehow leave home without discovering the location of, leave alone the wonderful use of, a dishwasher, sink or trash can. In fact, their son never needed to leave notes as to whether he ate before he went off to work as they knew he had and what he had. Often, it was macaroni and cheese (full box), and a coke or at least three quarters of a can, no ice.

  Apples and oranges could lie unmolested in the fruit bowl for days at a time. The children, to this day, are convinced their mother had plastic fruit in the house. The daughter, for her part, managed to stay thin by the same high energy level Catherine exhibited, despite the copious quantities of baked goods she produced. This was due largely to the fact they she seldom ate many of them. Once the recipe was fulfilled, the mission was accomplished. Plastic containers of cho
colate chip cookies grew dry and hard next to the thickening Saran wrapped mixing bowls of Texas sheet cake batter. Eventually, with a sigh, Catherine would discover the orphan sweets and if it was not too late in their lifecycle, she would make a handful of hot cookies or cupcakes to finish off the dinner. But too often, she would send the batter to the disposal and clean the dish for the next round.

  Catherine and Steven never suffered the illusion that their kids were special in any way. Their children were no more or less careless or cruel, thoughtful or timely, fun or funny than other children in the world. But they loved them enough so that they were special to their parents and that came through. In this regard, Catherine and Steven were great parents. As exasperating as they could be, the children were loved and knew they were loved.

  It was odd what a checkerboard of skills the children seemed to inherit. The daughter had an eye for design to match her mother. Steven, one Saturday, was putting the last brushstrokes on a new coat of paint in the master bedroom. Catherine, at this time in their lives, had to work on Saturdays and so Steven would try to finish some design task or another that seemed to flow endlessly from the fount of her mind. Now it was time to paint, not only the walls, but the ceiling, the vaulted ceiling, of the space with a soft lemon color. We believe the official name was Sorbet Lemon, leaving Irish Cream to the same fate as Biscuit, French Burgundy and Forrest Green before it. Let it be known that Catherine never took the task of choosing colors lightly. She would spend hours retrieving little color swatches from the paint store, or flipping through books of them, fanning the colors this way and that, sampling in varying light, covering up this one and then that one. Laying clippings of fabric representing the draperies, the bedspread, the throw pillows, and perhaps an evening gown or pair of underwear she might wear someday to make sure she got the whole Feng Shui of the thing right. Inevitably, she would buy three quarts of the finalists and paint swaths across the wall to Steven's horror, and stand there quietly with a hand on one hip, turning her head at an angle, which surely brought new insight.