this is not my beautiful house

Yes. I am a girl. But I mostly interact with men. It just ends up that way. I remember the first school dances were in the 8th grade, and girls were on one side of the auditorium and boys on the other. It weirded me out! It felt wrong. I started griping about it right away. I’d marched right over to the boys’ side and started talking. That felt right, just not to the other girls.

In the school yard, I hung mostly with The Consolidated Raspberry Smashers, a very Beatles-like band that could play three whole rock songs. Even at that, there was the thick mystique of the intensely hip about these guys, and while cognizant of it, I ignored it, and we ended up staying asshole buddies in high school and even on into middle age. I was the only girl. I am the only girl in this ring of childhood friends.

Dinner parties: the women are all in the kitchen and the men are all in the living room. I stay in the kitchen until I can’t take another minute of recipes and babies and shopping, unerringly ending up sprawled across some lump of overstuffeditude deeply embroiled in discussion with the fellows over our thoughts on math, or politics, or music, or, heck, the interaction of topoisomerases and RNA. And, dammit, it’s not at all that these women are daffodils. They’re teachers and lawyers and all kind of capable modern women. But somehow it must be observed that we go on about girl stuff together when in social settings.

I like girl stuff! I can do female really, really well. The works. Betimes. Here and there. As the mood strikes. And I don’t mind talking about any of those things a little. But what would anybody want with being locked into that? Don’t they notice? Are they slaves to conditioning so ingrained they don’t realize it? Isn’t it fine to just be who and how we are without having to engage in all these little cultural cues so obsessively? I never signed on for them. Not from the very first did I sign on for them.

I’m remembering a little Russian girl in my second grade class. Nadine. She was unspeakably shy. Her hair was always in her face. I mean really in her face. Like curtains. I remember remarking about this to my mother, and my mother hypothesizing that she was so shy and ill-at-ease because she was from Russia, her father was a defector, and many Americans viewed Russians as enemies. Why would we let her move here if we thought she was an enemy? She must not be an enemy because she’s here and in my class. So I made sure to be extra-nice to her to make her feel welcome and at home. She really did finally come out of her shell around me just a little bit when we were small girls, but only around me and right back in she went whenever others were around.

Nadine and I talked about interesting things together: how the indians must have lived here before the white man, what their lives were like; all the different kind of native plants; coming up with lines for our class play; our projects for the science fair; books, poems, pictures, paintings, sculptures, museums, croquet... hiking all over the Fairfax hills, dawdling around on a rock outcropping with a nice view or with our feet in the creek, but, like I say, strictly when we were alone. The rest of the time she was a sweaty agony of insane to be out of the blare of human eyeprints.

I moved to the next town over after second grade and so didn't take back up with her until we were classmates again in high school. By this time she had developed the most awful case of acne from all that nervous sweating, all that puberty with the curtains of hair. It was truly appalling, and self-reinforcing, but there was no talking her out from behind it. We didn't get to spend that much time together in high school before she moved away. I ran into her ten years later and her hair was finally out of her face. She was dropdead gorgeous and madly in love with her handsome husband. A miracle.

Except, he was her first refuge from alienation since her friendship with me as a little girl. She was that happy because she’d been rescued from the pits of weirdness by this fortunate man, and, shit, I hope he never left her! She had very clearly thrown all her eggs from Pluto right into that basket, and could barely stand to risk it long enough to have lunch with me just that once.

Sometimes I sit here and beat myself up for all the ropes I let this world tie me with and from which it took decades to release myself, but I wasn’t as oppressed by it by half as was poor Nadine. It scared me then, and it scares me now, the kind of refuge she was taking in her man.

Oh, who better for it if it’s that lethal a dose? No one. No one... else. But that was a suicide if he left her. No two ways. I never saw her again, but I still love her and hope she’s a gramma in the loving arms of the happiest family ever made.

As crazy for my lover as I have ever been, and I have credentials a mile long for this available on request, I have my whole life resented the living snot out of women not feeling viable in the world without a man. Clearly, oh, clearly, on its face, that is some kind of apocalyptic mistake... but why are we always in the kitchen when they’re in the living room? Why do I have to talk babies with an ace litigator and a college dean? Or Ferragamo shoes with an author? Or gossip about a woman who left her husband with a bank president?

Nadine! All these crazy women who hassled me to come out on Market Street with them to burn bras, when I did not even wear one, are still sniffing at me for not staying on their side of the auditorium!

And now I find myself in a strange sector of the cosmos, a place populated by prison guards, hostile immigrant labor, oblivious farmers and dotty retired people. There’s a couple down the road who take walks together all the time. She is Chinese, tall and elegantly thin. I was happy to hear she is an artist, but flummoxed to find that she is a mail order bride recently arrived and who barely speaks the language. It is her husband likes the affectation of an artsy fartsy beret on her, and he makes her wear it. He sells her little stylized seabird things at the motel gift shop down the highway. That would pretty much account for the creative population here.

I have newish neighbors. Betty and Elmer. They shop, and they watch tv. Full stop. They’re ten or twelve years older than I am. Elmer spends all his time either installing or washing the mountains of crap patio and yard decoration that can be found at WalMart. All of it. Betty freaks out whenever I’m outdoors with no shoes on, which is most of the time it’s not raining. She also cannot let more than two lines pass between me and her husband without sticking her head out the window to call him in for cornbread or coming out to say something to him, acting surprised as heck to see me in my yard... barefoot... in mixed company. I swear, that woman thinks I’m a hussy who’s out to steal her man!

The seriously nice lady who works at the grocery store, the one who begged me to push a shopping cart home when I was so sick and unsteady, whirling with vertigo a couple years ago, has decided I’m probably the greatest thing since sliced bread for coming up with some good pain pills for her gravely ill husband until they could get back to a doctor for another prescription. I’m not the only one here for whom a trip to the doctor is a major ordeal, and that is the kind of thing everybody does for everybody else, is it not? Well, she seems to think not, and she has been desperate to introduce me to the lady down the road who also gardens... continually mentioning that she really must take me down there to see her... as some part of my lavish recompense for saving her husband a few days’ agony until he could see the doctor.

She didn’t end up having to. We were all at the store at the same time the other day, and the vaunted introduction was made. Denise. Denise is a blowzy bottle blond who wears a couple pounds of smudged makeup, market stalls' worth of jewelry, hooker chic, and is approximately my age. Unlovely. The diamond stud piercing so high on her upper lip it almost touches her nostril immediately started making me queazy, but I could hardly turn tail and run. So I hung around long enough to learn she has two teenaged sons on whom she dotes outrageously. I said, “Kids? I like kids. Boiled.” She thought I said “oiled” and started in on an effusive and squealing with pleasure little giddy set of exclamations about how, yes, it is best to oil them up with the most love it is possible to give them, forcing into my mind the question of... well... you know....

That’s when I turned tail and ran.

More neighbors, Sharon and Tim, also about ten years older than me, have tried to turn me into their friend. Sharon is very dumb, but also very overbearing. It isn’t that you aren’t allowed to talk. It’s just that no matter what you say, her interaction will always be on her subjects. Period. A visit will always entail listening about one of three things: [1] beating her first husband, a drunk indian, with a baseball bat to get away from his battering; [2] how careful she and Tim must be with their diabetes; [3] how insanely they are attached to their miniature schnauzer. The first is ludicrous because she thinks my native blood somehow makes the drunk indian of some import to me. I'm glad she bonked him with the bat. Just so. But there's an end to it, no? It was some thirty years ago, and it was dispositive. No. The second is ludicrous because Tim has a belly that precedes him by some three feet, and I’m not exaggerating. He is a compulsive eater and almost never talks of anything but pastry. And the third is ludicrous because the dog shits and pisses all over their house; they have to be shamed into getting him clipped when his fur is so matted he’s quite visibly completely miserable. He’s so unhealthy from constant ingestion of the same crap they eat that not only is he about to topple over from obesity, but he literally has difficulty walking... a canine replica of Tim. Poor thing is so riddled with fleas, he will sit on his butt and slowly scrunch around in circles on their filthy carpet for minutes at a time. They’re loving him to death.

I dread running into Tim on the street or in town. His pants are usually showing off the crack of his butt because the waistline, of necessity, is so far below his belly. He’s always sweating. He’s missing a bunch of his really gross teeth. And he insists upon referring to me as “Pretty Lady” whenever Sharon’s not around, detaining me for what seems like days while trying to muster a manly condescension toward me out of the subject of pastry. The other night I saw him rooting in the dumpster of the grocery store on my way home from Brookings.

It really is no wonder I’m hanging out here on the edge of the world, being so not cut out for its imperatives, but it is also pretty remorselessly not home, as you may be able to intuit. It might really be worth it to make such an effort to survive in good health here if I had no neighbors. But the pall of them never remits. I feel them even in my house with all my doors and windows closed. Just like I have felt everyone around me my whole life.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

And, so, well, when I go on about finding a wealthy socialist gentleman, I’m not totally kidding.