Letter Delivered As A Dream: Short Short Story

Following is an excerpt from Love and Other Illusions, my recently published short story collection.  “Letter Delivered As A Dream” is a short-short, as they call them, so I’m giving my loyal blog readers the entire story. It was originally published in Hot & Bothered 3: Fiction on Lesbian Desire, ed. Karen X. Tulchinsky. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001. Love and Other Illusions can be purchased as a Kindle on Amazon.

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Letter Delivered As A Dream

Do you remember that summer when our biggest problem was ants?

We who were so well versed in the habits of the cockroach were astounded by the rapidity with which ants reproduced.  By mid-July it had become impossible to leave any kind of unpackaged foodstuffs anywhere. It became a religion with us:  our lives revolved around maintaining a crumbless kitchen.

We bought dozens of round red traps, nearly identical to the ones we used to capture roaches in the city.  The ant population diminished, but by no means disappeared.  I suggested my mother’s method of smoking them out of their holes; you remembered your fifth-grade ant-farm-in-a-fish-tank and wouldn’t let me do it.

It rained a lot that summer, and no one had told us about muggy country air, from which you with your allergies suffered terribly.  We’d planned to go hiking and antique-hunting, but ended up playing Scrabble, venturing outside only in the cool moist evenings.  We held hands walking into the small village for Haagen-Dazs ice cream cones eaten on the walk home.

Meanwhile, the ants kept on coming, an army of ruthless marauders.  When I brushed one from your leg you confessed you liked the feel of them  tickling your skin.  And so I discovered another way to delight you: like an ant I crept lightly up your calf, past the hollow behind your knee, more lightly still up your thigh, until you pulled me into you.

Ah, summer.  How old were we then?  How young?  What were we thinking when we rented that little cottage in the mountains, knowing so little of the country, anthills, each other?

By late August we’d given up on ant control; they traipsed freely through the mound of spilled sugar, or clustered around a cake crumb on the floor.  Our truce was such that when one got squished beneath the heel of my sneaker, you stunned me with authentic tears.

The morning after Labor Day we washed the linens, packed our unused tennis gear and retrieved odds and ends from beneath the bed.  What about the ants? I asked you; won’t the landlady be horrified if we leave them? Against your protests I bought a can of Raid, and while you waited in the car, I carried out a search and destroy mission.  When I emerged, you looked grim. I turned on the engine and we headed back to the city–me to Brooklyn, you to the Upper West Side. As expected, both apartments were overrun with cockroaches after a summer of neglect.  That night on the phone you admitted you had no qualms squirting and smashing the nasty little creatures, so much more repulsive than our industrious country ants.

Over the years I’ve developed an aversion toward killing ants.  But this morning I discovered one already dead in the sink, a victim of cockroach poison.  Hastily I flushed it down the drain, feeling a sudden sharp pain as I thought: where are you?

Related articles

• Love & Other Illusions: Short Stories by Marcy Sheiner (marcys.wordpress.com)

Love & Other Illusions: Short Stories by Marcy Sheiner

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Finally! A collection of deep, delightful stories on love, friendship, joy and pain by… oui, c’est moi!

For decades I’ve been editing stories by other writers, and in between I’ve written a few myself. Now they’re ready to face the world as a collection. And no, they aren’t sex stories, which some readers expect from me, since I’ve published plenty of those. The eleven short stories in Love and Other Illusions are mainstream literary fiction, some sexy (I hope) but nothing explicit.  I’d like to think they still generate heat and passion: I was feeling passionate when I wrote them.

As I say in the introduction, I’ve always been drawn to novels—both reading and writing them—more than to short stories, just because I always want more, and I’m sorry when a story ends. But in the time I spent preparing these for publication, the genre began to grow on me, and I developed more respect for the form. I’ve even been reading more of other writers’ short stories.

I’ve edited a dozen collections of women’s erotica, wrote the self-help  Sex for the Clueless, and a memoir, Perfectly Normal. I also ghosted eight books of nonfiction under other people’s names. These stories, however, are a different breed: all were written by me, are credited to me, and are being promoted by me. (My publisher, the brilliant Jean Marie Stine, says the time for humility has passed!) The point is, you never know if and when there’ll be more where these stories came from,so don’t miss reading them.

Brief story synopses:

SAVING MY LIFE: In which Uncle Yernie pulls his little niece out of the crashing ocean, and saves her life in more ways than one.

LO SIENTO: Martha leaves her live-in boyfriend at home and goes to Mexico to ponder their relationship. Will she leave him? Will she stay? I’m not telling!

(Lo Siento means “I’m sorry” in Spanish.)

WHAT: The anxieties of commitment are overcome and love conquers all—doesn’t it?

LETTER DELIVERED AS A DREAM: A couple share a summer idyll with a colony of ants in this short-short story.

A TRAGEDY OF CHILDHOOD: An older woman is hurtled back to her past when she befriends a young mother and toddler, and helps the child overcome her fear of escalators.

THE UNIVERSE WILL PROVIDE:  Will it? The answer would be a spoiler, so you’ll just have to read it to find out.

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: What makes a woman beautiful? How do her looks affect her life and personality? Her loves and her friendships? Even her career is affected in one way or another, especially if she’s extremely beautiful or extremely not. Every woman privately knows—even if she won’t admit it—that what she looks like is one of the most basic yet complicated issues in our lives.

THE COUCH: Q: When is a couch more than a piece of furniture? A: When it’s sold as part of a self-improvement plan.

A woman’s decision to sell her couch brings the house of cards she’s built, and the man who’s in it, crashing down around her.

BAD AIR DAY: What begins as another bad air day for asthmatic Sharon ends up just the opposite when someone new comes into her life. Caution: This story might Feed your Head with its mind-reading and other psychic phenomena.

THE SOUND OF ONE HEART BREAKING: As war breaks out in the desert, two people on the precipice of a relationship discover they  are also breaking out—with herpes!

NEVER LOOK BACK: The most popular story among baby boomers these days seems to be the loving reunion of high school sweethearts, years or decades later. In this case he’s a Vietnam vet, she’s an anti-war ex-hippie. Can they find each other again?

THE FOURTH AND FINAL MARRIAGE OF SADIE NUSSBAUM:  When octogenarian Bernie Solomon has a heart attack, his adulterous affair with Sadie Nussbaum is exposed. After he dies, his agoraphobic wife doesn’t even notice he’s gone, while Sadie plays the role of grieving widow and his daughter finds out about them.

Great Guilt Trip With Babs

It’s not that there’s anything astounding or remarkable about Guilt Trip, the new comedy with Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen, mother and son on a road trip through hell. What’s so good about this movie is how utterly REAL Barbra is in the role of Joyce Brewster, a 60-something widowed mother. Most women of our generation will recognize themselves and their friends in the character–but when I say Streisand is real in Guilt Trip, I’m referring to more than characterization. Her acting is real in Guilt Trip; it’s possible she’s never done so well in any previous film. Anne Fletcher, who directed Guilt Trip, seems to have known exactly what to do with her.

I’m assuming direction makes the difference: in so many of Barbra’s movies–from Funny Girl to Prince of Tides right on up through Meet the Fockers–she has a tendency to overact, but in Guilt Trip I didn’t see a single instance of her usual emoting. Every smile, tear, conversation, and subtle reactions are conveyed in a way that is seamlessly real, and if I’m overusing that word, it’s because nothing else can better describe Streisand’s performance and persona here. Maybe it’s just, as Mick LaSalle says in The SF Chronicle, “Maturity has released something in Streisand, who, having gone beyond trying to sell herself as a babe (as in “The Mirror Has Two Faces”), has a new warmth.”

Seth Rogen is Streisand’s son, Andy Brewster, an inventor hawking his organic cleaning fluid on their road trip. Andy’s humorless presentations doom his product before it can get off the ground. He rejects Mom’s advice to zip up his performance, and who can blame him when it’s thrown at him amid  600 other pieces of advice to drink more water, visit his high school sweetheart, see a shrink, yada yada yada. Sounds like a stereotypical Jewish mother, but it doesn’t come off clichéd. I saw the picture with my son, and we both related to the mother-son dynamics. Besides, Mom is vindicated in the end, when Andy finally takes her advice and it pays off. In between rejection and triumph, of course, they have to travel a long long road. It’s great fun for the audience if not the riders.

(Above: Barbra as Joyce Brewster eats a humongous steak dinner in an hour, thereby getting it free.)

As an old Barbra Streisand fanatic who’s been watching her since 1963, hasseen every one of her movies, most of them multiple times, owns most of her recorded work and had a personal Streisand adventure of sorts (see my post on meeting her in a New York HoJo), I have the right and the credentials to criticize or praise her (though so does everyone else, come to think of it!). I say this because when I checked out  Rotten Tomatoes to see what film critics and ordinary viewers are saying about the movie, I was disappointed–even kind of hurt, since so many of them dismiss GT as crappy drivel for little old ladies. You know, us old fuddy duds who don’t know a thing about le cinema but adore false sentiment. Oh, boo hoo and a big boo to you too! I laughed my way through most of Guilt Trip, was emotionally moved, and saw a two-hour sliver of truth and beauty. I don’t expect every movie to transform my life. A lot of them don’t even transform my two hours of watching! This one had side-splitting laughs and the whole thing was fun. Which is enough for any piece of entertainment to deliver.

 

Related articles

• ‘Guilt Trip’ review: It’s a fun trip (sfgate.com)
• Barbra Streisand Talks Guilt Tripping With Seth Rogen (contactmusic.com)
• Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen Talk The Guilt Trip (reellifewithjane.com)

Who Won What? A YA Story

Below is the beginning of a Young Adult novel, the first I’ve ever tried to write. It began life as a short story based partly on an experience I had as a teen. Not only did it naturally expand into a novel, but the voice that keeps pushing out through my typing fingers seems to be my younger self–or somebody’s younger self!

I would really appreciate feedback, so if any readers out there want to give me some, do not hesitate to put it into the comment box or email me at msheiner07@gmail.com. I’m primarily interested in two things: first, is the voice authentic? and second, do you as a reader have any idea as to where you expect to see this story go, or where you want to see it go? I ask the second question because I’m up to Chapter 6 and having trouble deciding which of two different directions to take it.

Anyone who gives genuine feedback gets a free copy of my book SEX FOR THE CLUELESS so help me god.

Oh, and Happy Holidays. I’m not much of a Holi person myself.–MS 

Who Won What?

I was thirteen and too smart for my own good. A high school sophomore before my time, I was exhausted just keeping up with my classmates, all two years older. I’d skipped kindergarten (too crowded so they sent me right to first grade), and later on I was put into New York’s S.P. (Special Program), combining seventh and eighth grades. When we moved to Long Island I was 12 and went right into high school—I knew something was wrong with this plan, but I guess nobody else thought so. It was embarrassing to be so young. I just couldn’t tell the other kids, so I pretended to be 13 when I was 12 (still young for a freshman) and then I had to keep lying for the next four years. I’m not that great a liar to begin with—my grampa says I have “an honest face” like my great-grandmother, who I’ve only seen in pictures (she might’ve looked honest but she was no great beauty). Maybe that’s why I chose to hang out with the tough crowd, the kids my parents called hoodlums, the ones from the other side of the tracks. I don’t know if or why I thought I’d fool them any easier, but I sure liked them better than the goody-two-shoes kids, who in L. High School all seemed to be rich. The school is divided that way, by rich kids and tough kids  from not-so-rich families. Maybe even poor.

Mr. Blaine, my English teacher, scribbled cliché in red over hoodlum and the other side of the tracks and gave me a C, when we both knew I deserved an A. I stood in front of his desk after class until he looked up and noticed me, and then I asked politely, I swear, what I should’ve used instead of those clichés. He didn’t answer, just kept shuffling papers around on his desk, so I tried again. “That’s the trouble with clichés,” I said, trying not to sound smart-ass but afraid I probably did, “sometimes they fit better than anything else so you have to use them.” I mean, it’s the truth, so why would he think I was being a smart-ass? Ya got me—but he always thought I was. I guess it was my personality. Also maybe that I came from the city.

“If you know so much,” he finally said, “then you should know the words to use.”

Why would I know what to use if I thought a cliché worked best? Why was he mad at me all the time? I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Blaine smiled as if he’d won an argument and told me to go home.

English was 8^th period, so maybe he was just tired, like that guy we read about last week who had to keep pushing a big boulder up a hill while it kept rolling back down. That’s how tired Mr. Blaine sounded when he said Janessa, go home.

My teachers in Queens never would’ve said that, not in a million years. Mr. Evans would’ve been ecstatic if a student stayed after class to talk to him! He would’ve told me to wait till the rest of the class left so we could sit down and “discuss this fascinating topic of clichés.” I used to avoid getting roped into Mr. E’s “fascinating” conversations. Still, he came off a lot more teacher-ish than Blaine, who just wanted to go home.

Margie was waiting in the hall for me. She showed me her paper, the one I’d written for her, with Mr. Blaine’s red A on top and “Excellent” scribbled underneath. When she saw I felt bad, though, she promised to tell everyone I’d written it—except, of course, for Mr. Blaine. “And my parents?” she asked in a whisper. She didn’t want to tell them the truth, but if I asked her to she would.

“I don’t really care,” I told her. “He gave me a C.”

“What? Is he crazy? Your essay was great!”

“He said I used too many clichés. Maybe he’s right.”

“Don’t listen to him! YOU are a great writer, and he knows it. He’s just jealous because he knows you’re going to be famous someday.”  I could always count on Margie to stick up for me. She looped her arm through mine and pulled me closer. “You think he ever wrote a sentence as good as yours?”

I had to smile. Margie was always analyzing people, and once she decided something about you, that was it for the rest of your life. She had it in her head that Mr. Blaine was jealous of any student who could write, and I was one of the very few in our class who could. She imagined he had a trunk full of unpublished books moldering in his basement like some Old Maid’s Hope Chest. Sometimes I thought she would make a great writer, but though she had terrific ideas, like Mr. Blaine’s moldy trunk, she couldn’t write them down for anything. Anyhow, I think she had Mr. Blaine pegged—I could tell from little things he said about writers that he felt like a failure for not writing. I guess he had no time, what with four kids and a wife, and having to teach us. No wonder he hated his job—and he probably hated us for getting in his way.

“Come on,” Margie said, “Let’s cut 8^th period and go to Mickey D’s.” I hated MacDonalds’ rat meat, as I called it, but I’d go wherever Margie or any of the kids went, like I always did. Even if I hated their burgers, I could scarf down their greasy salty fries like I didn’t have to worry about calories or fat. Hah!

Margie was my first friend in the ‘burbs, the first person I liked I mean, and I was hers. Our families had moved into the same housing development—ours from Queens, hers from Buffalo, which might as well have been Antarctica to me, it sounded that strange and far off. It was June, so we had the whole summer to check out swimming holes and public pools, pizza places and candy stores. By September we were experts about town, and without any real planning we pulled together a bunch of kids, the clichéd type of course, with ourselves securely in the center.

The only periods we got to see each other were study hall and English—Margie took business classes and I got tracked with “the college bound.” I swear that’s what they called us: “THE college bound.” This meant I had boring classes like chemistry and algebra, and I was stuck with the kids we called collegiates.  They had brains, and a lot of them had money—but they weren’t any fun. Just like when I skipped grades, nobody bothered to ask me what I wanted—which was to learn shorthand and typing so I could get a secretarial job after high school. Plus, if I did become a writer, I needed to know how to type didn’t I?  I didn’t want an extra four years of school, but I guess my mother, who must’ve expected me to go to college, was the one who enrolled me as “THE college bound.”

Margie wasn’t happy with her classes either, for the opposite reason: she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, which meant she had to go to college, and she wrote it down on her enrollment form. For weeks after school started she bugged her mother to go talk to someone and straighten it out, until Mrs. Kontini finally went to see the guidance counselor. His “advice” was something like, “Based on Margery’s past performance, it’s doubtful she could make it through college…if she gets into college in the first place.”

When Margie told me what the counselor said I was furious. I could just see the bastard, the Big Authority with the whole school system on his side. I was as mad as Margie’d been when Mr. Blaine gave me a C. “They’re not giving you a chance!” I sputtered, my cheeks burning. “I think you’d make a great kindergarten teacher! Kids love you!”

Margie smiled and gave me a friendly peck on the cheek, but shrugged.  “Oh, it was just an idea. I don’t really care that much.”

“Bullshit! The first day we met you told me you were going to be a teacher.”

“Did I? I don’t remember that.” We were on our way to lunch, and the hall was mobbed like always in between classes. Margie had less than half her attention on our conversation—she was looking up and down the halls like she was trying to find someone. “Who are you looking for?” I asked.

“Is it that obvious?” She wore a guilty smile.  “There’s this guy I met in the candy store…wait’ll you see him, he’s so cute…” Just then she poked me in the ribs.

“Hey, that hurt!”

“Ssh,” she whispered from the side of her mouth, smiling at a boy who slowed almost to a stop in front of her and just stared, not saying a word. He had the hugest pair of eyes I had ever seen, and a color I had never seen in eyes before—deep green. Not hazel like characters in books or light green like you sometimes see, no, these were as honestly green as a crayon. Besides that his eyelashes were long and dark, the kind any girl, including me, would kill for—we always said it was unfair when a boy had long eyelashes. The only bad thing about his looks is that he’s fat, well, chubby, but definitely on the way to fat. You know how they say about fat girls that they have “such a pretty face”? (In my case they say “honest”!) You could say that about Danny.

After he passed by, Margie leaned over and told me he was the guy, the one she’d met in the candy store and had been looking for. His name was Danny O’Day. “You like that guy?” I asked, surprised. “He’s fat!”

“He is not fat! Maybe a little chubby… I can’t believe you of all people said that!” She aimed a deadly look at me, and I knew why—I was always saying people were too finicky about their bodies and I felt fat because of the way they talked about fat and skinny. Now here I was putting down the poor guy for being fat. I was embarrassed and told Margie she was right.

She calmed right down and said dreamily, “Did you notice his eyes?”

“Yeah. I’ve never seen real green eyes like that.”

“I know. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“To tell you the truth,” I giggled, “the way he was looking at you like a lovesick puppy dog, I thought he was gonna burst into tears.”

I expected her to maybe laugh, but I pissed her off again. Jeez, she was sure being sensitive about a guy she only met once!  Just then Rosemary, one of the girls in our crowd, was coming down the hall. Margie grabbed her hand. “I saw him again!”

“You’re kidding!” Rosemary squealed. “Did he say anything?”

Without so much as a goodbye or a see ya later, Marge did a one-eighty and walked off with Ro, talking a mile a minute about Danny Boy. I felt like dying then and there, but I pretended nothing happened and stepped into a nearby girls’ bathroom. The air was thick with smoke and hair spray, the perfect cover-up for my teary eyes. I looked in the mirror and silently told myself I’d better learn to get along with Danny Boy or I’d lose Margie to him—hell, at this rate I might even lose her to Rosemary!

On Friendship: Sex and the City (Film)

 This was written a few years ago and posted on my memoir blog, which I took down about a year ago. I thought I’d moved it onto this blog, but apparently I didn’t. I’m putting it up now, and if it seems out of date, that’s why.

I just saw SEX AND THE CITY, and it was the best two-and-a-half hours I’ve spent since I rented the TV show’s DVDs. Fashion, beauty, love, sex, laughter, The Big Apple…plus, it’s a very secure feeling to know, when everything falls apart, it’ll all be made right at the end. The movie was panned, mercilessly and unfairly, in the NY Times. Hey, nobody’s saying this is high art. For what SATC  is, it was well done. A lot of scenes had me tearing up, especially at the tender way Carrie’s friends take care of her, and I realized that a big appeal of the show lies in its romantic view of friendship. In an age when we’re not supposed to romanticize romance, the romantic impulse in SATC is superimposed onto friendship instead. Maybe that’s what I always liked about the series.

Friendship is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot this century, almost as much as I think about aging. In the last century I had dozens of friendships, ranging in longevity from three to forty-five years. I’m talking close friends, not mere acquaintances, mostly women, some in California, some in New York. Today I have almost none. I lost a few people to the Grim Reaper, but the others either drifted away, intentionally dumped me, or I dumped them. Some of the dumpings were as dramatic and painful as the deaths. I’ve spent much of this century trying to figure out what happened.

Before I could figure out the breakups I had to look clearly at the relationships as they were. One reason I’m so moved by the friendships in SATC is that I’ve never in my life had friends who treated me the way these women treat one another. Charlotte sat on the bed and spoon-fed Carrie during her meltdown. Miranda the attorney saved her apartment, and Samantha arranged to move all her belongings back into it—all accomplished while sitting on a veranda in Mexico, where they’d gone to nurse Carrie back into a reasonable semblance of human. Who has friends like these, much less three of them? I wish!

I used to say that the women in SATC were like no women I’ve ever known, that the show was a gay man’s fairy tale…but I suspended disbelief because I love fairy tales. What I was talking about then was the clothing, the clubbing, the fabulous life they led, the money. Let’s be real: no New York columnist at Carrie Bradshaw’s level, writing three times a week, makes enough bucks to pay New York City rent, much less buy Manolo Blahnik shoes with regularity. Now I realize it’s the actual friendship, the heart of SATC, that’s the real fairy tale. Contemporary women are beyond the myth of Happily Ever After with the Prince—but we still believe it can happen with girlfriends.

I used to consciously and seriously believe in friendship. It was one of my core values. Back in the 70s, when I got into consciousness-raising and the women’s movement, one of the first illusions that got tossed, along with the bras and leg-shaving gear, was romantic love. We actually held seminars and workshops on the subject. You’d be ridiculed if you believed that coupledom, as we sneeringly called it, could save you. It wasn’t just theoretical, either—I’d been married, I’d done the whole husband-kids-picket fence routine, and found it wanting.

We believed in forms of group living as a Solution, an antidote to the nuclear family, a phrase as loathsome to us as coupledom. Maybe a variation of the Israeli kibbutz would save us, maybe Chinese Socialism. We read up on these things, studied them. The hippie commune is now an old joke, but many of them were serious efforts to forge a better way of life, to raise happier kids. I lived in two or three group situations, all disastrous in one way or another. Still, though I came to the conclusion that communal living was my own worst nightmare, I didn’t stop believing in friendship as the key to a good life. I put a lot of time and energy into my friendships, as much as I put into my kids and each of my serially monogamous relationships—maybe even more, to my everlasting regret. As an investment in the future…better stick to blood, it really is thicker than water—though I haven’t had much luck in that department either.

You’d think by now I’d be done idealizing freindship, but, while I may be disillusioned, I’m not completely cynical. If I were, I wouldn’t  be so enamored of Carrie Bradshaw and Company. Somewhere deep inside, I still believe that do-or-die freindships exist. I imagine that a lot of other people, or at least women, have them; in fact I know that some women do. I’m always reading stories by older women who say it’s their friends who pull them through. Just this year I read a memoir by Isabel Allende and another by Lilian Rubin, both praising their glorious friendships. I know a San Francisco woman whose birthday parties I used to go to—the last one I attended was her 70^th—where dozens of devoted women come to honor her with gifts of poetry and love. These aren’t casual acquaintances, either, but intimate friends, nurtured during four decades of living, working, and political activism in SF.

I don’t want dozens of close friends. One or two would suffice. At a relatively late age, in my forties, I began a new friendship that turned out to be far healthier and more positive than previous relationships. Andrea’s primary life work was collecting people, and when we met, through a mutual friend’s death, she signed on for life. (People in New York tend to be that way—whomever you stumble into can end up a lifetime connection from which you can’t opt out without major drama. Californians, I’ve found, are more transient, drifting in and out of each other’s lives with little fanfare). During the eighteen years I knew Andrea, I learned what had been missing in previous friendships. I also faced up to my own failings as a friend, and learned how to do better. When she told me she had lung cancer, I confess that my first selfish reaction was self-pity: I’d finally found a real friend, so of course she was going to die. And she did.

Until 2003 my longest lasting friendship was one that began in high school. We gave lip service to the depth of our love and loyalty, but the truth is, our friendship came nowhere near SATC quality. In addition, vast gulfs of differences existed between us: she was the stable housewife and mother, and, like so many Americans, assumed hers was the normal life, mine aberrent. Once, after our kids were grown, she said it was a miracle that mine turned out so well despite my lifestyle. I wanted to say, maybe it’s because of our lifestyle, but my inability to defend myself was by then ingrained in our relationship.

Despite our differences, we had an intense emotional bond, a gut-level connection that was, at certain times and under certain circumstances, deeply satisfying. Our conversations could be profound, often spiritual. The odd thing was, while in some ways I was invisible to her, on another level she knew me better than anyone else. I loved her, and I love her still—but sometimes love is not enough.

The friendship ended during a health crisis that put me into the hospital seven times in one year. For the next two years I was sick, poor, and profoundly dissatisfied with my life, and she got tired, she said, of my “negativity.” At this time other friendships also fell by the wayside. Not only didn’t people help me when I was sick, they couldn’t even tolerate me. Yes, I was whiny; yes, I cried and complained a lot—but I don’t care how negative or insufferable I might have been at that time…what the fuck are friends for?

One friend in New York who I held onto happened to call a few minutes after I arrived home after four days in hospital. I was all alone, frightened about taking care of myself, and was trying to figure out the medication instructions the nurse had given me. Unable to make head or tail of them, feeling utterly lost, I answered the phone crying. From 3000 miles away, Joani called the hospital and got the information, then called me back to deliver it. At that time I had friends in San Francisco who told me, “Gee, I wish I could help you, but I’m all the way on the other side of the bridge.” So, yes, Joani is a keeper.

Unlike four or five other alleged friends.

For almost 30 years I’d been helping S. with her health crises—taking her to doctors, writing bureaucratic letters for her, giving her a television when hers broke, always making her musical compilations. I never expected much from her because of her own health problems, but she did manage to go out to a play or movie from time to time…so why couldn’t she visit me just once? Another friend stuck it out for a few months, even drove me home from the hospital once, but then she decided we were “going in different directions.” She was trying to be spiritual and kind, she explained, while I was becoming bitter and negative. After fifteen years of friendship, she walked out the door because I wasn’t being spiritual enough for her.

I’m aware that in reciting this litany of complaints against others, I’m opening myself to judgment and disbelief: when we hear stories like these, we automatically wonder what we’re not hearing—the other side. We read between the lines, imagining the awful deeds this person must have done to deserve so much bad treatment. It’s true my ex-friends have their own points of view, and for sure I’m no angel. But from my point of view, this is what happened. At the age of 63 I’ve become someone I never in a million years thought I would be: a lonely, isolated senior with few resources and no support system.

It’s a cliché, isn’t it—the notion of fair weather friends,  the old saw that in times of need you find out who your real friends are. The only thing is, I should have found it out long ago. I’d led a life full of crises as the single mother of a son who had seizures and surgical procedures. I felt quite alone with all that—and it wasn’t just a feeling. I see now that I just couldn’t bear to face the truth: I’d already given up on romantic love and the nuclear family; if I gave up on friendship, what would be left?

My mother used to tell me, “You can never count on anyone but yourself.” I scoffed at her cynicism. My generation was different. We’d care for one another. All you need is love and so forth. But as it turns out, to employ another cliché, Mother was right. My life has shown me that all I can count on is myself. I loved watching Sex and the City because it offered a momentary escape from that harsh reality, a few minutes or hours to pretend that life can be the way I used to think it should be.

Now, when my son or daughter do something especially kind or helpful for me (and they do) it makes me happy…but I don’t expect it. I try not to expect anything from anyone.

My next lesson is to learn not to be bitter about it.

Related articles

• ‘Friendkeeping’: The Close Relationships We Could, But Can’t Easily, Let Go (wnyc.org)

Stella Dallas: The Movie (1937)

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

I finally forced myself to watch Stella Dallas, a movie I’ve occasionally ranted about sight unseen. I did see the Bette Midler 1990 remake, though, and was so appalled it took me all these years to rent the original—which differs subtly but substantially from the remake. Maybe it’s because Bette Midler as trailer-park trash sails over the top with little effort, or maybe it’s the melodrama inherent in almost any part she plays—but her version of Stella has a definite POV, while the earlier film leaves space for the viewer to decide if Stella does right by her daughter.

At its heart the film is about class warfare. Stella is a young woman living with her dirt-poor family of Massachusetts mill workers, the only one among them with ambition. She’s taking business courses while Dad and baby bro work as mill hands and Mom schlepps around their tiny shack. Mom’s always hunched over, her hair a mess: the only thing missing from her slutty image is the dangling cigarette. Stella daydreams and watches the people come and go to the mill, her sights set on big shot “swell” Stephen Dallas (John Boles), whom she cleverly arranges to meet and manipulate into marriage. Trouble arises when Dallas realizes he took the girl from the mill but can’t get the mill out of the girl. Stella has a “vulgar” side she’s not even aware of herself. Imagine Midler as vulgar: piece of cake, right? Stanwyck’s Stella, though she talks tough and loves to dance, comes off so sweet it’s hard to sympathize with Stephen. I’m sure I’m not the only person who couldn’t stand his smug, weak-chinned visage—which is just as well, since he’s gone most of the time, all but abandoning Stella after their daughter’s birth when he moves to New York, ostensibly for business purposes.

In one scene Laurel (Anne Shirley) is a toddler, and in the next she’s a teen. In the intervening years, Stella has all but given up her partying ways to devote her life to her daughter. She sews the kid’s clothes by hand, monitors her social life, and pushes her to be like the snobbish bluebloods Stella used to want to know herself. At a Hampton-like resort, Laurel’s friends—spoiled brats one and all—cruelly mock Stella, not knowing she’s their pal’s mom : “That wasn’t a person, it was a Christmas tree,” they say, referring to her allegedly tasteless fashion sense (which isn’t half bad in black-and-white 2012). Stella wears heavy makeup, has a loud mouth, a brassy style, and…you get the picture. While Midler pulled this character off without a hitch, Stanwyck, except for the Brooklyn-ish accent, seems fairly “normal.”

Whether Stella’s vulgar or not, when she hears the rich kids making fun of her she has an epiphany: Laurel, she fears, will never be able to get very far as long as she’s stuck with her mother as an albatross around her neck. She hatches a brilliant plan, and asks hubby to let Laurel come live with  his new family; by now he’s married the woman he loved before he met Stella – a boring uptight blueblood who knows a salad fork when she sees one by god (crucial information for a mother dontcha know). When she tells Laurel what she’s decided, however, the kid, bless her gold-digging little heart, finally rises to the occasion. She declares undying loyalty to Stella,  and refuses to leave her.

This is the Big Moment in Stella Dallas, when Laurel acknowledges her mother’s devotion. Laurel doesn’t give a shit what the bluebloods have to say about Mom, she’s going to stand by her in love and loyalty. As I recall, this does not happen in the Bette Midler version.

Unfortunately, Stella subverts Laurel’s attempts to stay with her by feeding her a heroic lie, making it seem as if she wants to get rid of the kid and be free to have fun at last. Laurel buys the lie and moves in with Daddy, into the kind of household that makes her appear ever so presentable. She eventually marries the blueblood man of her dreams and lives happily ever after. Oh, yeah: She never sees Mama Dallas again.

I’ve compared the Stella Dallas story to the movie Spanglish, an immigration tale in which the mother refuses to let her daughter become “someone so different from me.” The values presented in each of these movies express directly opposing viewpoints of  the mother/daughter relationship. Stella Dallas declares that the daughter is better off gaining entry into the upper-class, even if it means cutting off the most important, loving relationship of her life. In Spanglish, by contrast, the mother-daughter relationship is paramount and worth preserving, even if it means giving up what might be a superior education and other so-called opportunities. Guess which reflects my own POV?

 Barbara Stanwyck was some terrific actress. Below is stuff about her from IMDB that I thought worth posting.

Everything You I Ever Wanted to Know About Barbara Stanwyck

• In 1944 she earned $400,000, and was listed as the nation’s highest-paid woman.

• She was nominated four times for Academy Awards, including for Stella Dallas, but never won any of them. In 1982, however, she was given an honorary Academy Award for “superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting.”

•When she died on January 20, 1990, she left 93 movies and a host of tv appearances.

• Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire is a TV biopic ( 1991) directed by Richard Schickel that takes a look at her life and career. Stanwyck’s life seemed to mirror many of her famous roles.

• Stanwyck was frequently cited as a role model by such women actors as Sally Field and Virginia Madsen.

• Her stormy marriage to Frank Fay finally ended after a drunken brawl, during which he tossed their adopted son, Dion, into the swimming pool.

• Despite rumors of affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford, Stanwyck wed Robert Taylor, who had gay rumors of his own to dispel. Their marriage started off on a sour note when his possessive mother demanded he spend his wedding night with her rather than with Barbara.

• Marilyn Monroe, who worked with Stanwyck in the 1952 film Clash by Night said that Stanwyck was the only member of Hollywood’s older generation who was kind to her.

• Her Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement was presented to her by John Travolta, who later confessed that the experience was his supreme Oscar moment, and that Stanwyck had been a Travolta family favorite for years.

• She is the Godmother of Tori Spelling.

• Her favorite role, she said, was Stella Dallas.

• A Grand Dame. Alas, she was a staunch conservative Republican.

Related articles

• Saturday Night Cinema: Stella Dallas (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)

Parent and Child: The Eternal Relationship

Just because I hardly ever write about my kids doesn’t mean I don’t have stuff worth writing about in that department. There are, I think, two main reasons I don’t: the

first is my frequent paraphrase of the recently departed Adrienne Rich, who said in Of Woman Born that she didn’t write much about her children (3 sons) because writing was for her a vacation away from motherhood.

The other reason is simply force of habit: unlike today’s Mommy bloggers, my generation was tacitly and sometimes overtly forbidden from giving voice to “negative” feelings about our kids or about motherhood period. This drove me crazy, and I did a lot of screaming about it, but over time I became, like a good Stepford Wife, subdued. It’s another aspect of that “whiplash” label Erica Jong gave to our feminist generation, women who did such a quick attitude change midstream we got a permanent case of whiplash.

That’s a long roundabout way of saying I want to speak up. It ain’t easy even now: as implied by my title, the kids are in my life, they’re now in their 40’s, and while each of these relationships is very different, both are complicated and neither is trouble-free. Not that I know many parent-child relationships that are; sometimes the stories mothers tell me make me think I’m doing comparatively well with mine. In terms of writing, however, and especially here in the No Privacy Internet, I’m concerned lest anything I say become another source of trouble, and almost anything can. Even if the relationships were  trouble free, nobody reads a portrayal of themselves by someone else without reacting, and rarely is the reaction fully positive.

But hey, my hits are down–I gotta find an angle to pull in new readers (and motherhood is soooo popular in the mainstream…Not!

If I do end up writing a lot on the subject, I’m considering starting a new blog (a new book?)

titled Grandma Speaks. To read what Grandma had to say yesterday, click on Summer in Spain.

With daughter Stacy, aged 8:                                                                                                                                                                                                            With son Daryl, 10:

Related articles

• The Impossibilities of Motherhood (inthesetimes.com)