Working Girl, or, My Mother's Daughter

I'm barely through the door home from work before I'm peeling off my tights, juggling the day's mail while I wriggle free of my bra without taking my blouse off. Following the trail of restrictive underthings discarded down the hall you'll find me, crouched at my computer desk with all available buttons unbuttoned and ties loosed, absently tugging bobby pins from my hair while I check my email. The very opposite of a woman circa 1954: for all I might covet her clothes, my husband is lucky to find me in anything other than pajamas by the time he arrives home from work.

In the parking lot of the grocery store the other day I embarrassed myself utterly when I realized that I was tugging the hem of my shirt free from my skirt, balancing reusable grocery bags and abandoning decency, trading discomfort for tactless and slovenly. My first mistake had clearly been in thinking I could go out in public after a day in the office, when even lounging is strenuous enough to require a drastic rethinking of the day's outfit.

Why do I want to write about an impulse to undress that has almost nothing to do with sex and/or feeling sexy? I feel like my mother; I remember her in the mornings before my brother and I left for school with her ponytail more Pebbles than parental, in the afternoons and evenings when we came home and she did, too, from a day serving heavy German food and heavier beers, when she seemed to race out of her uniform in favor of almost nothing else. I remember being uncomfortable with how free she was with her body - as a teenage girl one's body is the enemy, hell, mine often still is - but I never thought her behavior strange, assuming everyone's mother walked around the house naked. I can't have had the only one, as my husband can't abide my stockinged legs for memories of his mother dressing for an evening out.

My mother was my age when I was eight and scolding her for a recklessly low cut blouse. I can see now how she might've wanted to give the girls a little room to breath.

All I Won't For Christmas

You throw up after your second half-slice of cheesecake, and feel lucky to find an aged bottle of generic mint mouthwash under the bathroom sink. The whole act feels as illicit as having had sex in your host’s bed, and you exacerbate the situation by stripping off your winter boots and jean skirt to stand on the scale. It’s old, stuck on a figure you hope isn’t accurate, and you’re groaning as the needles might under the weight of so much Christmas dinner and regret. Footsteps creak past the door, and you shimmy quickly back into your clothes.

It’s only grandma, fortunately, who would never imagine you were doing anything other then usual business in there. Talks of weight loss only lead to her boasting that she doesn’t need to lose or gain, but only, at eighty years of age, get back into shape. Your bone thin massage therapist cousin promises yoga and a detox diet in the new year, your husband refuses dessert and any humoring of your mania, and the chubby children dig into thirds. God, how you hope you won't have chubby children, and hate yourself for hoping.

At least the posh aunts in their skinny jeans are going home soon, and you can feel guilty and cruel in relative peace. Your metabolism can’t be to blame when they’re around. It’s just you.

Humbug

Knowing that I am not the only person ever to feel slighted by an unwanted gift does not alleviate any of the guilt that I feel. I remind myself that it is the thought that counts, but in the same mental breath I am thinking that thoughtlessness requires very little effort. I chide myself, too, for pride in the handcrafted gifts I have given, for I take as much pleasure in their creation as I do in the gifting, and it isn't like I wouldn't be doing something while watching episode after episode of The Office anyway. It's just an excuse.

"I'm working, really. JAM is just a happy coincidence."

Perhaps like all tactless young married folk, M and I have begun our collection of white elephants and re-gifts, shoved into a cardboard box in the basement like things we never cared enough to unpack. Worse still, something a loathsome roommate left behind, requiring a hit-and-run of the Goodwill lest better Samaritans of the world realize just what you're trying to pawn off on the unfortunate.

Besides, I shop there, too. One woman's trash is another's hand-painted resin seasonal showpiece, yes?

How I Could Just Kill A Man

There was something illicit about the sort of socializing that went on in the wings when I was in theatre in high school, all of us, or perhaps only me, thrilling in our roles offstage as much as on. Gathered around the couch that reeked, as a more daring actress commented, "of pepsi and sex," we would gossip, we would posture, we would rehearse - if clutching our scripts and tugging our collars and shirt sleeves in nervously mixed company could be called rehearsal.

Perhaps I was made more daring by my dance costume that flattered from hip to ankle, or perhaps I had simply seen too much Saved by the Bell in my formative years, but a Sadie Hawkins dance seemed to me the ideal moment to confess my desire to attend with a handsome boy on my arm, particularly, one with whom I shared a mutual appreciation for Rage Against the Machine. I knew who Tom Morello was and used his name in context of their greatness, hadn't he laughed when I'd done so? I quoted Zack de la Rocha in my creative writing assignments. Surely this warranted some attention?

Or a polite refusal, if toying with the brim of his baseball cap to keep from looking me in the eye as he explained his wanting to wait around for someone else to ask him could be considered polite.

The next year I wouldn't be conquered on that couch, but I would suffer hands on my breasts and sloppy kisses; I would climb the ladder to the costume loft and lay myself down in taffeta and crushed velvet, chintz, and polyester. The body of a lesser man pinned me above the stage lights, or so I like to think now so I can remember the ones that I did not know, that refused to know me, better.

I won't say they were all the same. But I'm thinking it.

The Far End of the Spectrum

Driving sometimes late at night the reception is better at the far end of the FM spectrum. You stop at a stop light turning left and there's no one you're stopping for, just following rules, and you've found a sweet spot where the signal comes in so clear the big band could be in the back seat with your reusable grocery bags and spare umbrella. You don't want to go when you've got the green light, not with the slide of the slide trombone like a lover's hand on your neck, not with the crooning soprano begging you to stay, stay, stay just a little bit longer.

When you go anyway, because you must for other rules and greater wants, her voice slips back into static. She is a fiction that flared only for a moment, though there's always a chance that it was she who was tuning just then into you, and not the other way around.

Controversy

In sickness and in health is open to interpretation, isn't it? In marriage we abide and tolerate because we love, not because our spouse is an image of flawlessness while retching into the toilet after a few too many beers, or because when they are fevered they are not whiny and prone to outrageous demands; for rich or for poor does not mean we will not complain when the rent is late, or consider ourselves fiscally responsible enough to tell our partners how to spend their tax return. We do it because our good times are really good, not because we haven't any bad times, because without bad times, without doing it not because we wouldn't rather be doing something - or occasionally even someone else - making such vows are empty.

It's about what's hard, not what's easy.

I got into a car accident today. It will be expensive to repair my - my husband's - car. It was an accident, but I was cited at fault. The absence of injury of either party, myself or the other driver, makes it easier to be angry and point fingers, to talk about carelessness and catastrophe. When my tears have stopped and there's room to start worrying about things like tow trucks and fines, I am afraid to draw attention to the guilt that I feel, the desire I have to be comforted. I want to be tough, I want to take responsibility, I want to be loved for not having fucked up in the first place.

I don't expect to be coddled when I've made mistakes, but goddamn is it hard when I'm not.

Petals like Pinwheels

I've finally parted with my bouquet. When we returned from our honeymoon and it was hanging on by a thread in a vase of stagnant water, I dumped the water out and returned it to the window. In the past week the stems had begun to mold, white threads like spider's silk cottoning between the withered heads of roses and chrysanthemums. I held it where it was bound still by the ribbon from my wedding dress, lifting the wilted purple sprays and letting them slump again where they had dried.

So I took the bouquet outside and up the little slope of our backyard, which is more like a thicket than something suited for mowing. I stepped through the maple saplings and honeysuckle heavy with berries to the hollow tree stump and tossed my flowers inside, feeling like a girl inventing superstition again, burying something in hopes that it would grow into a new mystery.

It was harder to do than I thought it would be.