A poem.... a meditation on the possible origins of bitchiness.... a new installment of the novel.... and a recipe
What Remains
It's all a precursor to the big event,
when the final electrical impulse leaps the gap
and leaves us with whatever thought
will be our last—
And who we are is flattened into someone else’s
memory: the photograph that captures
the loving look or tender smile,
that speaks for us when we have launched
all the words we had to spend.
Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick
A Meditation on the Possible Origins of Bitchiness
Thousands of years ago, when we roamed the earth in isolated tribes, there was very little moving from one tribe to another, apart from the purposes of mating. A woman might be brought back as the unexpected bonus from a trading expedition. But it must have been rare for a woman of breeding age to suddenly show up alone and unannounced among a group of strangers.
Yes, one can see that the men would have been excited about the new girl on the block; and also that the women would eye her with extreme suspicion. What was she doing there, and why was she causing the men to look at her in that way?
Thus, I imagine, did bitchiness first enter the world.
Resources were scarce. The top guy's sperm was at a premium. She who got it had the best chance of bearing offspring who would carry her DNA into the future.
Competition was not only rampant but a necessary strategy, as far as survival was concerned. Make things unpleasant for those who might want to steal your place as woman number one, and maybe they'll just pack up and go away. Reveal and revel in the other gal's flaws.
Bitchiness made biological sense back then.
Fast-forward to the 21st century.
A woman is about to start a new job. She's an attractive sort of woman, who keeps herself in good shape. She feels nothing but goodwill toward all the people she'll be working with. It's not a competitive work situation—she wants to do her job, not take away anyone else's.
And yet, as she contemplates her first week of spending eight hours a day among strangers, she finds herself worrying about things a man would never bother with. Should she wear loose, concealing clothes, at least until the other women in the office get to know her and, with luck, come to like her?
A heterosexual man revving up for his debut in a new office situation would never think about the advisability of making himself look worse. He would probably give little thought to how he looked at all, apart from being clean and perhaps shaving. But he wouldn't mentally review his wardrobe, agonizing, "Gosh, do those pants make me look too sexy? Will some colleague of mine who hasn't been to the gym lately find my waistline threatening?"
Our woman finds herself thinking, "Maybe no red lipstick for the first week or so."
Women still care a great deal about how they look—scan the ads on your Internet feed if you doubt me. Look at the unflagging consumer enthusiasm for everything having to do with the beauty industry.
And yet, as women, we find ourselves in this weird bind of caring greatly about something that we're not supposed to think about at all in the context of our work lives.
No woman I know cares a tinker's damn about the boss's bodily fluids. We may be thinking about an I.R.A. when we start a new job, but DNA isn't anywhere on our radar screens.
But there's still some beneath-the-surface barnyard behavior going on when a new woman comes on the scene in a corporate situation. If her feathers look too shiny or she talks too much about how many eggs she lays, the other females will make sure she's fully informed ASAP about just where she stands in the pecking order.
Perhaps, as relative newcomers to the professional world, we're still trying to figure out how our womanliness fits in with working in an office.
Maybe bitchiness in the workplace is nothing more than what psychologists call an obsolete coping strategy—an adaptive behavior whose reasons for being no longer exist.
There's no doubt about it that bitchiness happens, and it's something that happens exclusively among women. Straight men may notice it, but they stay out of it.
As the survival value of networking and cooperation asserts itself, bitchiness is surely on its way out. Younger women, it seems to me, partake of it much less than the older ones do. (But, as a young friend of mine pointed out, a woman will still spot the run in her co-worker's stocking from way across the room, whereas a man might not notice his cube-mate's newly amputated limb.)
We're left with the amazing power of perception honed by 50,000 years of thinking competitively. It's an evolutionary door-prize of the highest order.
***
Boardinghouse Reach
(the story continues)
I couldn’t help but notice around this time that something odd was going on between Allison and Camille. The ambient temperature dropped a couple of degrees whenever they found themselves together in the same part of the house these days. Camille was often tearful and distraught, experiencing a series of one personal setback after another. One day she collected $200 in tips for being purple, only to have her money-stuffed backpack stolen. Other days found her red-eyed and weepy in reaction to the meanness of her boss at the salon or the recalcitrance of her father or the catty comments of the other “colored people” in Union Square. She was having trouble paying her room and board, which I allowed her to give me in dribs and drabs throughout the month.
Allison seemed to have hardened her heart against her friend, now that Camille’s energy was no longer “good.” If Camille felt any sense of recrimination for this sudden change in attitude, she kept it to herself. Far from showing any anger toward Allison, she followed her with the wounded eyes of a rejected but still hopeful puppy.
Even as Allison turned from Camille, she ardently and conspicuously pursued a friendship with Daniela, praising her at every opportunity, suggesting joint outings together, leaving Camille out in the cold. It frightened me how easily Allison was able to extinguish the light in those gorgeous blue eyes of hers. She reminded me in a most unpleasant way of myself—how I’d hardened my heart against my devoted and kind first husband, so long ago, against the man I left him for, against the brilliant maniac I’d married the second time around, and, most lately, against Stewart, once I’d made the decision to exile him from my bed. How sure I’d been in every instance of rejecting love that I was justified in doing so!
Colby and I watched Camille with growing concern, both convinced she’d be better off in a cheaper, more accessible place across the Bay, but uncertain about the extent to which we could communicate this to her without making her feel even more rejected or insecure. The more things went downhill, the more she ascribed every setback and quirk of personality to astrological vicissitudes. She confided to me that she’d begun seeing her old boyfriend again, the one she’d left just before she met Allison. Had there been some sort of pact between the girls about staying celibate? Both of them were close-mouthed about whatever it was that was allowing Allison to act so mean and was keeping Camille from expressing any righteous indignation.
Meanwhile, despite the gap in our ages, Daniela and I were finding a growing sense of mutuality and common ground. We talked about writing and about life; we took to taking long walks straight uphill to the edge of Tilden Park, and along a wooded pathway to Kyle’s school. She joked about her inexperience in the kitchen. I learned all about the woman who had for years cooked and cleaned for her family, and about the maid’s grown daughter who had a phobia about thunder and lightning that kept her from coming to work whenever it rained—and I thought about how we’re all ruled by our fears, even though, most of the time, we keep them much better hidden.
Daniela kept me company while I cooked, ready to help with any small task I assigned to her, which she approached with the slow caution and thoroughness of someone on the bomb squad. She ate sparingly of what I cooked—she ate like the proverbial bird I’d once been compared to; but what she ate she ate with appreciation. Because she ate so little and was so thin, I found myself trying to tempt and cajole her into eating more, in much the same way that I tended to shovel extra forkfuls into Kyle’s mouth at every opportunity.
None of the girls had cooking skills, although Allison was a champ at cleaning the kitchen (she said that this had been her job while living at home). I wondered what life would be like for their families, if they wound up having families. Would they eat nothing but take-out food? Would they cook as my mother had cooked—had the pendulum swung fully back again? Women my age had taught their daughters to focus on education, on careers, on self-fulfillment, on fun. But no one seemed to be learning basic domestic survival skills—which I myself consider essential lessons to teach to any child, male or female. I hoped that Allison, Camille and Daniela would eventually be rich enough to be able to hire other people to do the housework and cooking for them; or that they’d at least find partners who’d made more of a study of homemaking skills.
It occurred to me in the middle of chopping onions one evening that each of these young women might have been one of the babies I’d aborted. The ages were just right. Here I was nurturing them, cooking for them, hoping they would learn to get along, worrying about their survival once they’d grown their adult wings and flown the nest I’d made for them.
I don’t know whether it was this thought or the onions, but my eyes teared up. Each of these young women came to me for her own reason: in Allison’s case because she was very close to her mother and needed a transitional mother before striking out on her own again after an initial romantic disaster. In Camille’s case, because she hadn’t yet been adequately mothered and she could get a taste of what she needed from me, both because I was ready to give and vividly, personally understood her need. And Daniela because she was a stranger in a strange land and I could be her mentor and friend. But greater than their need, I realized, was my own need to evoke my lost babies, to hold them once in my embrace before letting go of them forever.
***
It’s true that birds are not yet adults when they’re pushed out of the nest. Like teenagers, they’re something in-between. Is there a right way—a just, kind and loving way—to shove a creature that has never yet tested its wings out into the air from a dangerous height?
You can teach them everything you can about flying. But when the time comes to really put their aptitude to the test, there’s nothing really to do about it but shove and hope and pray. It’s the emergency of the situation that transforms a nest-bound creature to one that can spread its wings and go anywhere.
The boardinghouse was born out of an emergency: the dissolution of what I had hoped with all my heart would be a life-long partnership. I had to invent a solution as fanciful, as unlikely, as flying must have seemed to the first creature that thought of doing it.
Well, probably there wasn’t much thought involved. It was probably more of a split-second reaction involving a predator about to attack, maybe a cliff edge and a light breeze. This proto-bird raised its webbed little arms in a pitiful attempt to look bigger or maybe just to ward off the blow. A puff of wind and then—the unvoiced “Oh my God!” as it soared away out of reach. The animal equivalent of thumbing its nose at the no-doubt astonished face of the would-be predator watching its dinner float magically away. “Bye-bye!” our sudden bird would have said, if it had the means, waving farewell and finding that the motion actually served to make her go higher.
Like that character in Balzac’s novels, Trompe-la-mort—she has cheated death through a facility that she finds, to her astonishment, to be her very nature. “I can fly!” (“I can break the rules/defy the stereotype/go from being one sort of creature to another, altogether better one, at least better for me, and certainly better than finding myself in the maw of that horrid monster with the heavy jaws that would have clamped down but once on my delicate bones and crushed me, macerated me, sucked up my life and destroyed me!”)
Life has wanted to crush me many times—to tell me that I am nothing and all is hopeless and every good thing I’ve dreamed of is no more than an illusion.
I can recognize those moments, as I look back—when, perhaps because I came into an unsafe world and early on learned to fend for myself: those moments when there has been a choice between giving in to the despair and gathering up whatever strength and resources I can muster for a face-down with whatever predator (poverty, failure, loneliness, self-doubt) was bent on destroying me. When sensible people told me, as they still do, to get a job. When there’s only a month’s worth of money left in the bank and no immediate prospect of more money coming in. When the ache of being without that one special person—that true life’s partner I’ve imagined again and again, with endless optimism, feeling that I sense his presence in the heart, mind and body of a man who turns out to be on quite a separate journey from my own, with no hope, in the end, of journeying side by side. When that loneliness wants to suck the will to live right out of me.
Life, looking back at it, can seem like a series of such moments. Maybe the clearest definition of who we are comes from the story of how we react to them. A natural death only comes when we say, “No more! I’m done being strong and resourceful and endlessly optimistic. I just want to rest now.”
***
Life as an Education in Miracles:
A Recipe for Paella
Paella is one of those dishes that seems to involve a miracle of the loaves and fishes variety: no matter how much I cut the recipe down to suit the number of people I’m serving, I always end up with enough to feed at least a few more.
The paella pan itself is a very specific cooking vessel used for only one dish. Made of thin, enamel-coated carbon steel (finished in a characteristic black-and-white speckled pattern that reminds me of college notebooks), the pan always has two handles and comes in a great variety of sizes, from paella for just a handful of friends to enough paella to feed a village.
Buy the pan and some of the specialized ingredients online (www.spanishtable.com) if you don’t have a Spanish cooking store in your area.
So, this is my recipe for six—but it will end up feeding more people. This is handy when you have an open-door sort of household, where friends or exes or neighbors will just happen to pop by around dinnertime, drawn by the heavenly smells wafting from your windows.
Heat up 9 cups of chicken broth. “Toast” a big pinch of saffron in a little frying pan, adding half a cup of white wine when the saffron releases its fragrance (a few minutes). Allow it to boil and then remove from the heat and keep in reserve.
Put the paella pan over a medium flame. The pan can straddle two burners (in which case you’ll have to turn it occasionally during the cooking process). I’ve read that the process works beautifully well over a barbecue grill, in which case you wouldn’t have to turn the pan at all.
Cut a few tomatoes in half and grate them so that you get the juice and flesh and seeds but not the skin. You’ll need a cupful. (If the season isn’t right for fresh tomatoes, you can use canned tomatoes instead).
Add 4 tablespoons of olive oil, heat it up, and add 6 pieces of chicken with bones and skin intact. Fry these in the oil, adding some salt and pepper, until the juices run clear. This will take longer than you want it to and will splatter oil and fat all over your kitchen—but the results will make the mess worthwhile.
Life will be easier if you temporarily remove the chicken to a platter at this point. Turn the heat down and add 6 cloves of minced garlic and 1-1/2 cups of chopped onion to the oil in the pan. Sauté until translucent. Cut up 6 little Spanish chorizos (Bilbao or Palacios) and cook until heated. Add 3 cups of Bomba rice, stirring until it is well-coated with the oil. Add 1 tablespoonful of Spanish sweet pimentón (smoked paprika) and your cup of grated tomato. Stir, then add the saffron and wine.
Bring to a boil, scrape the bottom of the pan, put the chicken back in, and add two or three red piquillo peppers cut into strips and some well-rinsed artichoke hearts. You can also put in any kind of cooked broad beans at this point—about a cupful.
Turn the pan so that the rice cooks evenly. The challenge is to keep everything from overflowing and not to burn the rice while still letting a crust of it develop on the bottom and sides of the pan during the last 15 minutes or so of cooking.
After all your new ingredients are heated through, add the shellfish combination of your choice: clams, mussels, shrimp—enough so that each person will get at least two of everything. If you didn’t add beans earlier, you can throw in about a cupful of frozen peas at this point, just for color.
If your paella pan will fit in your oven, you might want to finish cooking the paella in the oven for the final 15 minutes. It’s easier to achieve an even heat that way.
Everything is done when the shellfish is cooked and most of the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. Serve with lemon wedges and sprinkle with chopped fresh parsley.
Granted, this is a labor-intensive dish with a lot of specialized ingredients. But once you have them on hand—along with the paella pan—it’s not all that hard to pull together an amazingly festive main course, worthy of any celebration.
Celebrate the abundance and the timelessness of the dish you will make that will evoke the paellas cooked in Valencia thousands of years ago. Remember, as you cook, that your grandmother and her grandmother performed the magic of feeding and nurturing the human beings that led to you and yours, and that you are feeding and nurturing the human beings that will lead to the future. You’re all bound together, steeped in one another’s reality, as surely as the ingredients of your paella. Eat and defy the boundaries of space and time.
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