I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

These are things that have recently happened, just some little stories. A few miles away from the St. Louis airport there was a gas station where I stopped to get gas. I had just fetched my mother from the airport after sitting in the Cell Phone lot for an hour, burning beneath the intense and inescapable heat of the Missouri sun. While in that lot, there was a man who was doing speedwalking laps around the Cell Phone lot. He was shirtless and wearing flip flops but he was quite serious about his routine. I marvel at the many ways people let their unique qualities shine. After six laps, he was picked up by a person in a gold Plymouth and the moment felt pretty perfect and I felt thrilled to have witnessed it.

So while I was filling my car up and my mom was standing a few feet away from me sipping her smoothie, this guy walked up to me in a wifebeater and some dirty jeans. He had driven up moments earlier in a beat up pick up truck blasting slow jams but not the ones we might be familiar with. They sounded like off brand slow jams made by artists who never succeeded beyond selling their homemade CDs out of their trunks and at beauty salons and barbershops with synthesized loops you could make on a Casio and suggestive lyrics that were more sad than salacious. He was what can best be termed as a black redneck. He whistled and said, “Damn you’re thick,” and I didn’t know what to say to that at ALL so I focused very intently on the gas pumping, willing it to hurry which it did not. He said, “You gotta man?” I said the first thing that popped into my head: that’s my mother standing right there, as if she were a man repellant I could spray myself with and he would POOF be gone. I was right! But first he had to express his surprise. “She don’t look like your mother. Damn!” And then he put his toothpick back in his mouth and ambled back to his truck and my mother said something funny. Her smoothie was tart but delicious.

I took my mom to her hotel. She doesn’t believe in staying with adult children. She has lots of little rules and maxims. She has been killing my brother, sister in law and I with the SCIENCE she has dropped over the past four days. Her theories are simply divine and yesterday while we were out, I turned to my SIL and said, “we should just be recording her all the time.” She agreed. Once my mom checked in, she promptly began to disinfect the room with wipes. “Any surface someone else may have touched!”

She brought my nephew and I vuvuzelas from South Africa. Yeah. Awesome. I also got some wooden bowls. Anyway, my nephew had the vuvuzela taken away, that’s how much he blew that horn. However annoying you think that sound is, you’re right but it’s probably worse still. I wanted to stuff him inside that little horn at one point. The highlight was when he took an airhorn and blew it inside the vuvuzela.

I’m staying at my brother’s house and he and my sister in law are in a flurry of preparing for a baby who is due in less than a month. My niece’s name is going to be the name of a European city but not Paris, thank god. My vote was for Roxane, obvi but sadly, I was completely ignored in this matter. Rude. I have seen the nursery. It is a dream nursery. There is a mural in her bathroom with little ducks. The walls are pink. There’s a lovely crib and changing table and she has enough clothes, at this point, to never wear the same outfit twice and we keep contributing to this problem because baby clothes are irresistible.  While my sister-in-law was showing us the adorbs baby clothes she has gotten, and we removed tags and prepared to launder, her neighbor stopped by with her baby, and they talked about how their daughters are going to be best friends, doing that hopeful planning thing friends do when they have kids close in age. Very sweet. You know how at the beginning of the movie, they play that clip where different sounds get louder and louder and more complicated. I felt like that. I smiled but inside I was screaming and punching a wall and I don’t know why. I’m the oldest but I’m the least settled. It’s frustrating. I stepped out for a moment and sat in my car and called J and I couldn’t say anything. He understood, so I listened to him talk and he listened to me not talk until my nephew knocked on the window and I had to go. I need to get better about telling people what’s really going on with me. I don’t. I’m vague and annoying instead. Yesterday we went shopping for curtains for the nursery and succeeded in finding curtains that are just a dream. We also went to a charming baby store and bought clothes and browsed. We were there for what seemed like an eternity. When one of the employees offered us Capri Suns, I was so happy because it was hot and the store was full of kids and pregnant ladies and their mothers.  It was bitter sweet. No. I was a little bitter and the store was sweet but I participated enthusiastically. I am excited to meet my niece. I am. She’s going to be bad ass. I can feel it.

My brother needed some cheap champagne for a dish he was preparing last night. We bought some but as we unloaded the groceries it fell on the driveway and broke. I had to go to Walgreens and get another bottle. As I pulled up, I saw this bizarre creature jumping around and banging on that car. Shortly after, a woman walked out of Walgreens looking sort of confused and drug addled. She was followed by an employee who said, gently, “Do you know where you’re going, Ma’am?” She said, “I always know where I’m going.” I don’t know what happened to her.

See what I mean about people and their unique qualities? Life is so strange.

My brother, this is the middle child, is an excellent cook and an all around bad ass. I keep telling him to go on Top Chef. He is self-taught and loves cooking and loves narrating like he is on TV while he is cooking. He offers little tips and tells you about all the ingredients going in to each dish and the family is generally all, whatevs but he is undeterred. He tried to teach me how to properly hold a knife to chop fast but I wasn’t even remotely interested. I humored him as best I could. Last night he made, from scratch, a tomato bisque, salmon in a champagne sauce, chicken in some kind of roux for me because I can’t eat salmon, sauteed chanterelle mushrooms he picked himself from the woods behind his neighborhood, and potato croquettes. My mouth is pretty psyched to live close to him. That sounds wrong but you know what I mean.

Here he is showing off:

And here is the delicious meal. Please note that he plated everyone’s food and arranged the potatoes in a little fan and then sprinkled some green herb on everything before setting it on the table. Hilarious.

I kept it classy with my diet pepsi which paired very nicely with the meal. After dinner, we celebrated my nephew’s fifteenth birthday which is in early August. There was cake and it was delicious. You will have to take my word on his cuteness.

This little suburb is the land of desperate housewives, designer strollers, high heels, tight jeans and make up to pick up kids from football practice and blunt haircuts that are vaguely reminiscent of the Jennifer Aniston haircut (which I do so love). It’s all terribly intriguing.

When I’m at a café and they ask me for my name, I want to become someone else, offer a different name—something exotic and interesting but I never have any cash so I have to use my real name. When I call a customer service phone number, I want to speak in an accent, English perhaps, or French but when it comes time to speak, I get nervous and use my dull Midwestern drawl. I am fascinated by the idea of bloodletting, of cutting open the skin, finding a large vein, purging bad humors, all to cure something vicious but unseen. Sometimes, writing feels like bloodletting but not in a creepy way. The body is a mystery. It cannot be controlled though we do try. It is hard, I think, to accept that, to accept that there are certain things beyond our control, to accept that sometimes our bodies don’t function the way we want them to.  I think about mutes, how they must feel, to want to speak and to be unable to do so; to want to hear and be heard only to be confronted by silence. As a child, I always enjoyed confession, stepping into the dark confessional and kneeling on the velvet padded bench, listening to the priest on the other side asking for my sins before I could truly know what they were. I asked questions, treated confession like a conversation. I once asked a priest, “Will you ever tell anyone what I confess?” I was very concerned with the sanctity of the matter. He was very handsome, tall with dark hair—a good priest, not one of those deviants who make the news in the wake of their perversions. He had a comforting and deep voice. I hated having to attend mass with all that standing and kneeling and walking around and shaking hands with strangers but he was interesting to look at. He answered, “Only God.” I confessed something once, but it wasn’t my sin. The priest offered no penance but he told me something I will never forget.  I exited the confessional and knelt at a pew anyway and said three rosaries. It felt like the right thing to do. When I’m with them, I want to be prettier, patient, more successful so that at a glance, I might look like I belong.