Learning To Be a Better Navigator
Another installment of "Boardinghouse Reach" ... another one of those retro, faux-scientific essays about human behavior ... and a movie recommendation
It was all downhill at the boardinghouse after the Brazilians left. I didn’t want any more bratty North American teenagers with behavioral problems. I had left it too late to sign up with the home-stay organization—and, anyway, I just couldn’t cope any longer with the idea of cooking for guests seven nights a week.
And so it seemed—as really stupid ideas sometimes seem, when they first appear on one’s horizon—that the Baldwin family was simply a godsend.
Sophia Baldwin was a big, slow, thoughtful sort of Earth Mother type who had grown up in the Berkeley Hills. She and her husband, Ned, and their young daughter Laurie were temporarily in need of a place to stay while Ned was remodeling Sophia’s parents’ house, where they’d all lived together until Sophia’s surviving parent, just recently, passed away.
They seemed like very sweet people. Sophia would usually take a deep breath before she said anything, as if any social interaction actually cost her a great deal of effort—but what she said was quite intelligent and sometimes humorous, in a wry sort of way. Ned was—well, Ned seemed to be, as Kyle later remarked, a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. He was missing one ear—it was a birth defect. And so it was hard to tell sometimes if his seeming cluelessness was the result of this or some other, less visible impairment. Tall and skinny and boyishly good-looking in a way that I could see must have been irresistible to the large and lumbering Sophia, Ned had the enthusiasm of a puppy and the quickly changing moods and fragility of a child.
They were both amazingly thrifty in a way that I found to be altogether unattractive (and downright weird after I found out that Sophia was in possession of a small fortune). They gave Laurie powdered milk and bought everything in bulk from one of the discount grocery stores where dented cans are sold. Eight-year-old Laurie would stand around the kitchen while I was cooking, wearing the craven expression of a hopeful and hungry dog. I swear, when I cooked bacon, she would practically drool.
I always gave her bites of whatever I was making. But the arrangement with the Baldwins, who were naturally interested in paying as little as possible for the two rooms they were renting from me, was that they would do their own shopping and cooking. In the course of a few days after they moved in, the entire garage was filled with their boxes and sacks and oversized cans of provisions, so that it looked like a municipal bomb shelter. Sophia also set up a stair-climbing machine there. I told her that I thought the garage would be a pretty cold place for exercising, but she said it would be fine. I would always have to signal her before I was going to say something to her, because she kept a headset radio tuned to NPR clamped over her ears.
Laurie was just as pretty a little girl as one could imagine—big and healthy-looking, with bright blue eyes and a lovely singing voice which she used, at top volume, all the time. I guess between her father’s one ear and her mother’s two ears, which were nonetheless always covered, Sophia felt she had to make a lot of noise if she hoped to be heard.
Laurie loved Kyle and was always hugging him, wanting to take baths with him, and finally got so physical with him in a weirdly inappropriate way that I always insisted on being there to supervise if they were naked together. Kyle liked her at first and then pronounced her “annoying.”
The upstairs room had a student in it. And I was on a crazy schedule, promoting my newest nonfiction book. Sometimes I’d have to get up at three in the morning to do a commute-time telephone interview for an East Coast radio station. On bad days, there would also be a 10:00 live interview that same evening at a station in San Francisco. I never said no to any interview. I was still under the illusion that I was going to earn a living from these books—that they would comprise a sort of day-job for me, so that I could continue to write poetry and fiction.
So I would set my alarm for twenty minutes before whatever time the telephone interview was scheduled. I’d put on my robe and fuzzy slippers, go up to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea. And then I’d practice talking a little, because one doesn’t want to get on the radio and make a lot of throat-clearing noises. One wants to sound as if one is sitting in a production studio somewhere, dressed in a business suit and a string of pearls—and certainly not in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
On one of those mornings, while I was talking to myself and waiting for the water to boil, I opened the door to the garage to let the cat out. And there was Sophia, completely naked, on her exercise machine. Her ears were covered by the headphones. Her breasts—large, pendulous, and bouncing around as she climbed imaginary stairs—were uncovered. She waved at me. I waved back and quietly shut the door.
It can be a difficult process figuring out who you want to be in the world. Sometimes it seems more like a process of elimination.
I had the opportunity to consider and then toss out a whole bunch of possible destinies during those two years I ran the boardinghouse, both for myself and for Kyle. I didn’t want to raise up a brat who would go out into the world and make other people miserable. Nor did I want to bring up a child in such an atmosphere of deprivation that he would be looking everywhere for a way to patch the hole in his bucket. I didn’t want to be anyone’s doormat or mired in someone else’s chronic misery. I didn’t want to be partnered to a boy masquerading as a grown man.
I was more than willing to work hard. But I also wanted to have time to think and write and dance—and I wanted to live with eyes and ears wide open, to be able to give and take in equal measure. To treat myself with respect and compassion without deluding myself into thinking that I was the center of the whole frigging world.
I wanted to do good, to give love, and to be loved, too.
I hoped to find my way by myself, even though I have just about the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. The usual signposts that seem to work for other people often just don’t work for me. I can get lost trying to find my way out of a parking garage. I can’t tell where you’re supposed to turn right onto the freeway, even if there’s a sign that says turn right: I overanalyze everything. I turn too early or miss the turn altogether and then have to go around the block and try again.
But I do, eventually, find my way. I’ve probably made a thousand wrong turns in my life—but I’ve really been trying to pay attention to what I got wrong each time, so that, when confronted with the next crossroads or freeway entrance or romantic decision or what have you, I can choose the path that’s right for me. And I’m never too proud to stop and ask for directions.
Another One of Those Retro, Faux-Scientific Essays from My Files
Your sweetie kisses you and the kids goodbye and says he’ll see you when he sees you. You watch him recede into the distance, thinking you might as well go off and root around for some roots and bag some berries to go with whatever piece of meat he eventually drags home.
Meanwhile, he gets to his favorite hunting spot, waits behind a bush until he sees something move, and gives a great heave-ho with his spear. Then the real work begins.
Like a commuter easing into rush-hour traffic, he’s fully resigned to the uncertain duration of his travel time. His wounded prey might take hours or days to run to ground. And if he ever wants to find his way back to his cozy little cave, you and the kids, he’d better pay close attention to where he’s going.
Fast-forward 50,000 years or so. A man is riding in a taxi to a business meeting from his hotel room in a strange town. Does he passively take in the sights as they fly by the window? Does he look down at his notes, going over what he’s planning to say? He might if he were a woman. But because his genetic programming has been handed down from hunter to hunter, he’s making a mental note of every turn the driver takes—just in case he has to find his way back to the hotel on his own.
Is there a connection between this time-honed skill and the famous male aversion to asking for directions? Is there also an explanation here for the mostly female tendency to pay no attention whatsoever to the route when someone else is in the driver’s seat—a phenomenon I call “passenger-side oblivion”?
As I see it, Paleolithic women probably moved slowly and in groups away from their caves as they watched the kids and gathered whatever edible plants there were to be found. If they felt any uncertainty about the way back, they could discuss the matter among themselves. For us modern-day descendants of the gathering gender, asking directions comes naturally.
But hunters worked solo. You didn’t want to stop and ask another guy where the hell you were because he might grab your meat. You just had to keep going and hope you’d paid enough attention to find your way back again.
I loved hearing your thoughts about the last one of these I posted! Have you seen the 2018 French comedy about gender roles (available on Netflix), “I Am Not An Easy Man”? It will make you laugh and might very well change your life, no matter what your gender.
Thanks for the fun read about the boardinghouse. :}