Another new poem--and the fourth installment of Boardinghouse Reach
Exclusively for my SubStack readers
From Now On, Whenever I Am Put on Hold
Once again, in my bid to speak to a live human being on the phone,
I was put on hold.
Instead of placing my device far enough away
to dull the inexorable beat of the mindless music
but close enough so I’d know when the music stopped
and a person came on the line, some underpaid person
at a call center somewhere in a country where he or she was working
two or three jobs, committed to helping support
his or her desperately poor parents and siblings while trying—
in the wee hours, on breaks, late at night—to study for that super-hard-to-get,
wildly competitive government job with a salary,
benefits and a pension: a job with a future—
I turned up the volume.
Understanding, of a sudden, what an act of ingratitude
to waste my time on hold sighing or fuming—
just sitting on my butt and waiting,
allowing some corporation’s cost-cutting strategy
to suspend my still-intact vitality—I put in my ear-buds
to better hear the beat and—joyfully, defiantly,
sassily and sexily—
I dance.
Copyright © 2023 by Barbara Quick
Chapter 4
Men Who Live on Sailboats
It was just around this time that I popped into Peet’s Coffees on Solano—it must have been right after a dance class at the studio next door called, with some irony, “No Sweat.” While waiting for my latte to come up, I asked a handsome guy sitting at the counter whether I could look at part of the newspaper he was reading.
He had the sort of blue eyes you sometimes see, a color that reminds you much more of starlight than water or sky. I could feel their heat when he looked up at me. He was wearing an Alpaca sweater, had a deeply dimpled chin and a beautiful smile. I didn’t so much consciously catalogue these facts as file them away in my brain, should they be of interest later on.
I glanced at the paper until my latte was ready, skimming the headlines. Colby—that was his name, although I wasn’t to find out until a few weeks later; Colby says that he told himself as he watched me pop a plastic sipping lid on my latte and start out the door, “I should go after her. I should run right after her and tell her I want to see her again.” But he refrained, fearing I’d think he was a stalker or some other variety of nut. He sat and watched me cross the street, telling himself (he told me later) that he would see me again: I would come walking back into Peet’s another time.
***
This was without doubt a difficult time for Kyle, not yet five years old and undergoing such major upheavals in the life he had known up till then. He had a lot of Stewart’s reserved ways—people almost always commented that he was shy.
Why do adults always feel so unfettered about making such highly personal and judgmental comments to youngsters when it comes to matters of personality? No one outside of a Dickens novel would even think of saying, ‘What an ugly child!’ to a child’s face. And yet people seemed perfectly happy to remark on Kyle’s shyness.
It’s true that he never had the in-your-face style that so many little kids have. His conversation was polite and precocious, and yet not too many people outside our immediate circle could readily understand him, as he was still mispronouncing some of his consonants. He’d always, from the get-go, seemed to understand much more than a child his age was supposed to. My friends from my mother’s group used to lower their voices when telling some marital or extra-marital secret around Kyle, even when he was a tiny baby.
Right before bed one night, he asked me for the umpteenth time why I no longer wanted to live with his dad. I gave him as straight an answer as I dared—I always make an effort to tell Kyle the truth—about the choices people make in their bid for happiness. He looked at me with his eyes the color of San Francisco Bay when it’s all whipped up by the wind and said, “You make choices that hurt your child.”
Well, after I’d taken the knife out of my heart, I held Kyle close and told him how sorry I was that he was hurting.
I have strong feelings about people who keep their unhappy marriages together “for the sake of the children.” Children who don’t grow up seeing healthy love between adults have a terrible time inventing the concept from scratch—believe me, I know! I think it’s basically a cop-out on the part of people who are too scared to try something new even though the life they’re leading is completely hopeless and miserable.
My mother did it, for twenty-three years, until I announced to her at the age of fourteen that I was going to put myself up for adoption if she didn’t leave Daddy. It took a couple of decades out of my adult life trying to get over all the damage it did to my heart and soul growing up in such a dysfunctional family. Of course, my mother was also terribly damaged by it all, so life didn’t exactly become a picnic after she packed us up and we moved back to the house in Crestwood Hills. It was all still sick and miserable, but in different ways.
No, I subscribe to the saying that a happy mother makes a happy family. Kyle at the age of four, almost five—however precocious, however intuitive—did not necessarily know what was best for our family. I swallowed my sense of guilt toward Kyle, and my sorrow for Stewart, and tried to do what I hoped would prove to be best for all of us in the long run.
***
The next time I dropped into Peet’s, I saw Colby—who was at this point, in my mind, the Alpaca sweater guy—reading his newspaper at the counter, drinking a tall cup of tea. We talked and joked around and exchanged names. He told me that he was an electrical contractor by trade. I asked him if this was where his office was, at Peet’s—he seemed to always be there. A day or two later, I stopped in with Kyle, whom I’d hauled along to a dance class (he sat on a pile of exercise mats in the corner and watched or colored or, inexplicably, considering the loudness of the music, dozed). Anxious to shift my attention away from this smiling stranger, Kyle untied the short dress I was wearing over my leotard and leggings, and Colby offered to tie it up again. I wondered later, after the two of them became such devoted buddies, whether there hadn’t been some signal that had passed between them then: “Okay, kid, untie the dress. I’ll buy you a gumball.”
Anyway, I was struck by how good his hands felt, even though he hardly touched me as he gently tied up my dress. It was another one of those things that a woman files away for possible later use: This man’s hands feel wonderful. It was almost as if, true to his trade, his hands carried a gentle electrical charge.
The next time we talked, I asked Colby where he lived. “On a sailboat in the Richmond Marina,” he said without the slightest notion of the bombshell he’d just dropped on our budding flirtation.
“Colby,” I said, looking him straight in his hot blue eyes. “I can’t talk with you any longer.” With this poor excuse for civility, I turned tail and walked out. I felt as if I must have some sort of sign posted someplace on my person, invisible to me, that said in large black letters, “Flirt with me if you live on a sailboat” — just like the bumper stickers that say “Honk if you love Jesus.”
It was a curse, I decided. My mother had reacted in much the same way when I’d told her a decade earlier that Stewart, the man I loved, lived on a sailboat. She hadn’t been able to stop laughing. Bitterly.
You see, my father was a nut about sailboats. He and she used to ride the bus down to Newport Beach when they were first married, before they owned a car, carrying the mast and sails for their dinghy. We always either had a boat or crewed on somebody else’s boat. Our in-house nickname for Daddy (when he wasn’t around) was Captain Bligh. You not only had to know how to sail and rig the boat: you had to know the correct nautical name for everything. At the height of some crisis, when we were about to run aground or into the breakwater or to have a head-on collision with another boat, my father would be shouting, “The jib is hung up in the port halyard, you idiot! Head up, head up! We’re going to jibe. Hard a’ lee!” Of course it would have been ever so much informative, as well as head-saving, if he’d said, “Heads down, loved ones—duck!”
My mother, who was about the last person on earth you would want to be with in an emergency, fared very poorly in these situations. Usually my father refrained from hitting her out at sea, mindful, perhaps, of the watchful eyes of other families out for a bit of weekend fun.
So between my history with my father and later with Stewart, I had an overall noxious reaction to the idea of men whose lives were intimately associated with sailboats. Poor Colby, of course, couldn’t make a bit of sense out of it, other than to say to himself, “What makes that bitch think I’d invite her out on my boat, anyway?”
***
It may come as a surprise to anyone participating in a Brazilian dance class for the first time to hear the teacher shout above the cascading conga drums and pulsating intimacy of the Portuguese lyrics, “More hips! I want to see more hips!” As North American women, we are taught that the opposite is invariably true: everyone wants to see not more, but less in the way of hips. The ideal all-American butt is one that doesn’t show.
Not so the Brazilians, God bless them, who teach their daughters—and sons, for that matter—to shake their butts proudly. Who dance in direct imitation of the act of love. “Show your butt!” my haughty teacher regularly yelled at the gringas, black and white, who took her classes. “Be proud of it!”
All the women in this country, whether their butts are big or small, need to take such classes, which make one feel proud to be a woman and glad to be alive. I discovered, about four months in to studying samba, that the best way to really dance rather than merely try to learn the choreography, is to pretend that one is with one’s partner of choice working toward orgasm. No doubt, this wouldn’t be the best advice to give a sixteen-year-old dancer. But for a seasoned woman, it’s just the ticket for reaching the state of rhythmic frenzy; the trancelike, out-of-body state achieved during Carnival. Your body—but most particularly your butt and hips, your breasts and shoulders—are a tribute to the Goddess. At these moments, it’s propitious to ask the Goddess for what you’ve been wanting, whether love, or good health, material success, or even a new place to live. At these moments, the Goddess is poised, listening. She’s disposed to grant what you ask for.
To be continued…
