Dear Blog Readers,

Except for names and location, here begins quite an accurate account of what it was like back when I was married.  This is in the form of a story which I had originally written long long ago when everything was fresh in my mind, or I would not have begun to remember all these details. Please understand that my consciousness was different then, and I accept responsibility for all events.  There are more installments of the story to come. Again, this will be for the book called The Little Things which reveals  so clearly that anyone can become a Godwriter:

Oleander Court

Beverly chooses by default both Hal, the man she marries, and the house they buy before Callie is born.  Beverly gives in and settles for what, in the final instant, cannot bring happiness.  What is she doing living in a tract home on a cul-de-dac in Vacaville, California, playing neighborhood bridge every Saturday night, pretending she is like everyone else and that her heart is where it is not?

She does love Callie and being a mother.

Beverly strolls Callie, first a baby and then a toddler, around the two little cul-de-sacs curving out like Mickey Mouse ears from a stub of a street in the California suburbs.  Beverly’s semi-circle is Oleander Court.  Lily who lives on the other cul-de-sac, Wild Lilac Court, is her only real friend in the neighborhood. Helene, on the short straight street, Olive Street, is someone Beverly admires, mostly from a distance.  Lily, she admires close up.

The developer of this tract planted bunches of oleander in the front of the houses on Oleander Count. On Wild Lilac Court, there are wild lilacs planted. On Olive Street, a single neat olive tree grows on each front lawn.

Beverly likes the builder for his imagination.  She wonders how much the name of the street you live on affects your life. Helene is indeed a an olive tree, sparse and competent, bearing fruit. Lily is a wild lilac, delicate, dainty, yet rambling. Now, oleanders, they’re supposed to be hardy and full of lasting bloom. They’re supposed to be fragrant, too, but Beverly has never caught any scent from them.  Anyway, she is really so different from everybody else who lives on these streets of houses that are exactly alike except that one model has a family room and the other model does not.  Beverly and Hal’s model does not.

Lily and Helene and Beverly are so very different from each another.

Lily doesn’t go out of the house without make-up. Her fingernails and lips are ruby red, her hair henna. She wears teddies and perfume and gold jewelry. She moves fast. She washes fingermarks on doors and woodwork on her way to the bathroom. She bakes a pie while talking on the telephone in the time Beverly debates moving the hose. Lily styles Beverly’s short hair for her every once in a while, listens to her, talks to her, likes her. And after Hal and Beverly separate, Lily loans Beverly her car easily. Fred, Lily’s husband, doesn’t mind.

On Callie’s first birthday, Lily, rosy with good deed, surprises Beverly with two pink-flowered dresses to match, one for Callie and one for her. Lily made them without  a pattern.

Beverly is happy. “See, Callie.” Beverly holds up the two dresses. “My dress. Your dress. Here, let’s put this pretty dress on Callie.”

Beverly is always glad to be in Lily’s house on Wild Lilac Court even though, all the while, Lily’s two-year old, Matty, runs in and out of the house, calling his mother, “Dummy Mommy. Dummy Mommy.”

When Beverly babysits Matty, and Lily comes home, Matty jiggles around, wanting Lily to pick him up. Lily leaves him down, diverting his attention with a compact or cigarette case from her purse. He grabs his lesser choice and leaves, his thank-you another Dummy Mommy. Beverly wonders why Lily doesn’t hold Matty, and why does Lily accept his rhyme of her?

Also Lily smokes too much. Lily almost shakes as she lights a cigarette.  Her head gives the impression it is about to start trembling, and her hands do tremble.

Helene, Beverly’s other friend, lives on Olive Street. Beverly and Helene are not frequent friends, but there is friendship. Helene and Mitchell are good Catholics and use the rhythm method. Helene is thin and beautiful and certainly does not look like the mother of seven. She looks like a model.

How many loads of laundry does she sort every day, wash, dry, fold, put away? She completes everything in the house before she goes outside to work in the garden even if it takes until three in the afternoon. Gardening is what she likes to do. Beverly would do it garden-first, if she had a garden, she thinks, as she accepts fresh garden tomatoes from Helene’s hands.

Helene is an able mother but not motherly at all. She doesn’t nurse her babies. She takes no nonsense from her children; the oldest is eleven. Twelve years ago she was a newlywed and didn’t know anything about babies.

Who am I, Beverly wonders. She doesn’t know who she is at all these days. She left herself somewhere. She is Hal’s wife, and that has no meaning. She is in limbo. She used to have an identity. She used to have a presence.  She used to be desirable.  Now she is invisible. She used to go to plays. Now she plays bridge. What is she doing here?

In over two years, Beverly has not furnished the subdivision house she and Hal and Callie live in. She doesn’t know how to furnish it.  Oh, there are a couple of mismatched straw chairs here and there.  There’s a table and chairs in the kitchen, and a box spring and mattress in the bedroom and a yard-sale dresser or two. The living-room is a room to walk through.

Callie’s room is furnished beautifully in bright pink.

Also the patio has furniture, ordinary green-and-white webbed chaise lounge and chairs that you find everywhere. Hal picked them up. A wooden telephone reel serves as table out there.

In the middle of the back yard, Beverly has an artichoke plant that she waters.

*

Hal has Beverly cornered in the closet.  “See? See?” he says. His slacks have fallen off their hanger. The slacks are washable, and it is she who hung them up. He has called her in from the kitchen where she was making breakfast before he leaves for work.

“You can’t even hang pants up right.” He shakes the pants in her face.

Beverly takes down an empty wood hanger from the metal rod it hangs on. “Hal, Hal, what is so important?”

He grabs the hanger from her hands. His angry hands hang the pants on the hanger. Her hands are left empty in the air.

Hal takes a neat pair of slacks off a different hanger and walks out of the closet with them.

Beverly is uncornered and can get out of the closet now and breathe. She walks back to the kitchen where Callie sits happily in her Baby-Tenda. Callie is eating health food granola with her fingers.

Beverly returns to whirling the eggs with a hand egg beater. “It’s the pettiness. It’s the pettiness.” She winds the handle energetically; the beaters twirl. “The pettiness.” Her hands pour the egg mixture from the glass bowl into the sizzling butter in the cast iron pan. She scrambles the eggs in the pan.

“Eggie,” Callie says.

Hal leaves the house without breakfast and without saying goodby. When the door slams, Callie tries to climb out of the Baby-Tenda. Beverly quickly scrubs Callie’s face and around each finger with a tiny damp face cloth and lifts Callie down. Callie races to the window. As she sees the Rambler station wagon with its closed windows pull out of the driveway, she calls out, “Daddy. Bye-bye, Daddy.”